phil917

I would bet to be ready before the Superbowl ads

So many of the writer's issues with students today are things I did myself a good amount when I was in college around 15 years ago at this point. I skipped classes all the time and I was often browsing the web on my phone / laptop even if I did goto class.

If I'm being honest, a lot of my professors (perhaps a big majority even) were just bad teachers and I got much more value out of the textbook, looking up stuff on the internet, or just tinkering with the at home assignments. I can say with 100% certainty that ChatGPT would have been infinitely more helpful in me learning calculus compared to the professor who taught my class in university.

I also don't really align with the issues he has with students asking for the slide decks used in class. If it can help your students learn the material, the whole purpose of the class, then what's the big deal? This point in particular almost made it seem like he's a bit salty over his students not being deferential enough to him.

All in all, despite doing many of the things that this writer takes issue with when I was in college myself years ago, I have a great career and I'm good at my work. So I think the kids are going to be just fine.

Perhaps, but at that point I feel like I'm spending more time feeding the tool the right prompt and context, going back and forth with corrections, etc... when I could just write the code myself with less time and hassle.

I've definitely had far more success with using AI as a fuzzy search or asking it for one-off pieces of functionality. Any time I ask it to interact directly inside my codebase, it usually fails.

I feel like anytime I try these "agentic" programming tools they always fall on their face.

Devin was pretty bad and honestly soaked up more time than it saved. I've tried Cursor Composer before and came away with bad results. I tried Copilot again just now with o3-mini and it just completely hallucinated up some fields into my project when I asked it to do something...

Am I taking crazy pills or do these tools kinda suck?

"Project Padawan" looks fairly similar to Devin, at least from a user experience perspective. From personal experience, Devin was pretty terrible so we'll see if Microsoft does any better...

Honestly, that demo was pretty weak.

If 2025 is really going to be the “year of agents”, then they need to do better than this.

I can't even properly put into words my hatred for AI generated "music"

The AI hype bros on social media are the actual worst and have done more damage than anything else to how I feel about AI these days.

The grift has been at unbearable levels for months now and it actually drove me to delete my X account recently.

Lol I missed that even though it's literally the first sentence of the blog, good catch.

Yeah, that makes this result a lot less impressive for me.

Yeah I agree that wasn't particularly mind blowing to me and seems fairly in line with what existing SOTA models can do. Especially since they did it in steps. Maybe I'm missing something.

Quote from the creators of the AGI-ARC benchmark: "Passing ARC-AGI does not equate achieving AGI, and, as a matter of fact, I don't think o3 is AGI yet. o3 still fails on some very easy tasks, indicating fundamental differences with human intelligence."

Direct quote from the ARC-AGI blog:

“SO IS IT AGI?

ARC-AGI serves as a critical benchmark for detecting such breakthroughs, highlighting generalization power in a way that saturated or less demanding benchmarks cannot. However, it is important to note that ARC-AGI is not an acid test for AGI – as we've repeated dozens of times this year. It's a research tool designed to focus attention on the most challenging unsolved problems in AI, a role it has fulfilled well over the past five years.

Passing ARC-AGI does not equate achieving AGI, and, as a matter of fact, I don't think o3 is AGI yet. o3 still fails on some very easy tasks, indicating fundamental differences with human intelligence.

Furthermore, early data points suggest that the upcoming ARC-AGI-2 benchmark will still pose a significant challenge to o3, potentially reducing its score to under 30% even at high compute (while a smart human would still be able to score over 95% with no training). This demonstrates the continued possibility of creating challenging, unsaturated benchmarks without having to rely on expert domain knowledge. You'll know AGI is here when the exercise of creating tasks that are easy for regular humans but hard for AI becomes simply impossible.”

The high compute variant sounds like it costed around *$350,000* which is kinda wild. Lol the blog post specifically mentioned how OpenAPI asked ARC-AGI to not disclose the exact cost for the high compute version.

Also, 1 odd thing I noticed is that the graph in their blog post shows the top 2 scores as “tuned” (this was not displayed in the live demo graph). This suggest in those cases that the model was trained to better handle these types of questions, so I do wonder about data / answer contamination in those cases…

Don't forget the massive population decline set to literally halve the population in the next 70 years...

The more Sam Altman posts stuff like this, the more he comes across as a grifter hype man to me

Oh my god I don't know why I never made that connection until now. That is exactly what it feels like!

I saw a comment describing this increasing luddite response to new tech developments and it resonated with me.

Essentially, the comment made the point that tech is advancing so fast these days that most people are unable to keep up with the pace of these radical changes. And the natural reaction to that for many is to reject these "advancements" or at least look upon them with cynicism and skepticism.

Please no. Safari is the browser that gives our company the most pain by far in terms of development and user experience.

And when I’ve personally tried using it on my various Macs over the years, I’ve always encountered bugs and glitches on websites that are seemingly not there with other browsers.

To be honest I’m pretty unhappy with a few of Apple’s “core” apps. Music is another dumpster fire...

I say something similar to my friends and colleagues all the time regarding my “professional” software projects. It takes 20% of the time to do 80% of the work. But that last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time.

Essentially the core functionality doesn’t take very long to build out. But the final polishing, details, edge cases, and bug fixes soak up a huge amount of time.

While I agree it's not some irrefutable data point, I think it does at least give some indication as to the current zeitgeist.

I just canceled my Copilot subscription last night. I definitely never saw the productivity boost that I’ve seen so many claim.

I actually feel like the suggestions seemed to get worse during my month of using it for some reason.

Towards the end, it started suggesting these large blocks of code (another issue I had with the interface as well) which were very not relevant to what I was attempting to write.

All in all, I’m very underwhelmed from my first experience with “AI enhanced” coding.

I developed/published mobile games for awhile during and immediately after college. I think my games saw somewhere in the ballpark of 500,000 downloads and I made "OK" income from them for 1 - 2 years (roughly on par with a minimum wage job in the US).

I briefly considered going full-time into solo game dev. But once I got my first "real" job offer after college, I quickly let go of that idea.

Many years later, as a SaaS founder now, I have a strong itch to get back into game development. One of my dream goals is to some day exit my company and then comfortably/leisurely "retire" into a career as a solo game dev.

Yeah that makes sense and it's why I'm forcing myself to try and use these tools. I feel like it can be a boon if I find the right use case in my workflow.

I’ve heard many people say that but I have yet to try it with that particular task. I will give it a shot.

I signed up for a Copilot trial a few weeks ago and so far my feelings on the tool are mixed.

When a code suggestion is correct it’s nice but it honestly feels like a very rare occurrence so far.

What often ends up happening is I will get suggested a snippet that is close to, but not exactly what I need. So if I accept the suggestion, I end up doing a fair amount of editing anyways to correct the suggestion.

Even worse, occasionally I will accept a suggestion and only later notice a subtle mistake.

The place I’ve seen the biggest benefit is with writing comments or user facing text copy.

I see people on Twitter and Hacker News talking about how much their productivity is being boosted by Copilot and ChatGPT…

But I’m just left scratching my head because I’m barely certain I’m seeing ANY boost from either of these tools so far. I feel like I’m missing something?

This has been something that's been bothering me more and more over the years. I often feel like I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants that came before me. Occasionally, I do still get that feeling of satisfaction when I've built something that's *mostly" mine.

But a lot of times, I'm just connecting black boxes and slapping a coat of paint on top (aka our branding). And it leaves me with this sort of guilty feeling that I'm not actually doing anything valuable.

Ultimately I still do it because the money is great and overall it's a very privileged position to have in today's world.

But I think this is where having a hobby project comes into play. I can do things "my way" and not worry about needing to use the most efficient or industry standard components.

I think the System Settings app can be improved but I think the hate is a little overblown. How often are you really in the system settings anyways?

I'm really enjoying Stage Manager so far as well.

This is some of the most beautiful pixel art I've ever seen.

The most frustrating thing about Google for me these days is searching for recipes. Every web page that should have an extremely straightforward, straight to the point list of ingredients and instructions now has to use every fucking SEO trick in the book. Because otherwise, the page won't be considered "high quality" enough by Google and won't rank anywhere close to page 1.

This of course leads to a huge page with someone's life story interspersed with the actual cooking ingredients/instructions. It's so common to see some something like: "My mother used to make me this dish for me when I was a child and it's my favorite thing to cook in the winter time now, blah blah blah."

No one fucking cares! Give me the recipe in one concise, step by step list!