rl3

Correct. The advisor portraits are real, though.

I lasted about a week before giving up on 4.7 and reverting to 4.6 myself. It introduced so many regressions it was nuts, then failed to troubleshoot the very regressions it introduced, leading to a vicious cycle that tended to compound itself.

SC3K had a masterfully executed advisor system that felt both classy and warm. Ditto its music and art.

Unfortunately for SC4, they proceeded to make all the advisors 3D-rendered Sims. For SC2K, well:

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/simcity-advisors/4/

(that was the least offensive page to link; for the canonical experience start at page 1)

That feeling when you're on the cusp of cracking AGI but your fake-OnlyFans bot army can't quite keep up even basic appearances.

It occurred to me recently that AI's degradation of the human factor via way of increased pressure on the remaining ranks of humans might actually be far more damaging than the AI's output itself.

In other words it's not the car and its energy use, but rather its occupants.

A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Always_Sunny_in_Philade...

^ Educational resources for the ignorant that instead prefer to discuss the merits of the term "bro", at length.

Dennis is the best, but the book did him a disservice by painting an unrealistically sunny picture of him as some kind of visionary figure.

Wait, 'unrealistically sunny'? You better not be talking about Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, because we're all screwed if so.

Then again, the western AI landscape has become somewhat stale recently. Claude and Gemini may have cute names, but they all pale in comparison to The Golden God.

I cannot see any reason, over than oversight and a lack of imagination, why something useful in Ukraine in 2022 was not feasible or useful in 2017 by the USA.

Perhaps it had to do with optics? It's not like there was a lack of capability in 2017. [0]

The war in Ukraine provided a way for the US to assist in rapid iteration of the technology without having to shoulder the negative sentiment or grapple with the morality of it.

Also worth noting that the two conflicts were wildly different: Afghanistan was more of an occupation across a much larger area with air superiority. There's not really much impetus to field killer drone swarms when you already have the 24/7 ability to instantly delete most enemy combatants off the map to begin with.

Whereas Ukraine with neither side having air superiority and it resembling something closer to modern trench warfare. In most cases with literal trenches.

We already used drones quite handily well before that time frame but in a much more limited manner in a different form factor.

The picture below is from 1995. [1]

By approximately 2001 it received the MQ-1A designation indicating it was capable of employing AGM-114 (hellfire) payloads. Kind of crazy to think about.

[0] https://www.twz.com/6866/60-minutes-does-an-infomercial-on-d...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator#...

Having written more sed invocations by hand than I care to remember, please bin me in the mediocre camp.

Aside: The speed at which AI can spit out complex diagnostics is nuts. Par is usually half a second for a dozen complex shell commands tailored to the exact problem at hand.

... Does it have any waste products? ...

There's now commercially-available computers that operate using human neurons.

I figure before too long we'll be feeding our computers Pepto-Bismol and Tums.

... but as there's no complete feedback loop, it still would require a lot of human effort.

Not for long. Picture this: a robot receives instructions on what to physically solder in order to complete the desired modification task.

However, before it can send an image back to the vision-aware LLM guiding it, the PCB lights on fire along with the robot because said LLM confidently gave the wrong instructions.

Then, the robotic fire brigade shows up and mostly walks into walls unable to navigate anywhere useful.

The future is bright.

I wasn't judging nor disputing that, just think it's a sad commentary on the current state of the world when outsourcing is considered as dirty as scam and cam girl operations.

That won't work for long.

I'm putting my money on miniature RC Incom T-47s complete with tow cables.

It should be required that as soon as firmware detects that its bipedal host has, in fact—had its legs tied up by a snow speeder—that it must proceed with a claymation-style display of panic before falling onto its face.

... it is a mixed (live women and AI) porn webcam app.

... various scam niches ...

... and much more ethical line of business than outsourcing.

Wild.

..."This is the problem - no wait, we already proved it can't be this - but actually ..."

Ditto. Has me wondering why there isn't a reconciliation pass somewhere on the final output.

At least it's a decent signal for when model confidence is low.

Be prepared for an eye-watering invoice if you have a bug or get hacked.

Speaking of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787042

I really hope that person gets a resolution from Cloudflare that doesn't financially ruin them.

I'm a pre-launch sole proprietor who put all my personal savings into this startup. This bill would financially destroy me for usage that generated zero business value.

That's terrifying.

If I'm not mistaken even AWS tends to forgive instances like this, so here's hoping Cloudflare has a similar disposition.

Good luck!

1. Is the user productive or distracted?

Pomodoro and todo list apps are so yesterday. Now I can have my graphics card observe me as an ever-vigilant guardian of productivity.

That might sound sarcastic, but moving context between prompts and just keeping the gears turning often isn't really that cognitively engaging these days. Thus, attention suffers.

So, that's actually pretty useful.

sudo humanctl status

Using Claude 4.6 [Extended thinking] exclusively via the web interface: No, not really.

My use case is having Claude tear through an extremely complex Kubernetes setup, reviewing code and drafting plans.

Despite the near-instant answers, it still manages to do this effectively at a speed I can't even hope to keep up with as a human. It's reconciling concerns that easily span dozens of dimensions with each problem I give it.

The trade-off here is that you sometimes see the model make subtle errors in thinking, but they're easily recognized and corrected for when called out. I've also noticed the model will make a statement and then correct itself mid-stream, which sometimes muddles my job of reviewing its output.

Compared to competing top-tier models taking anywhere from 5-40 minutes for a sometimes impeccably-reasoned answer, there's no comparison velocity-wise. The real win is the speed at which Claude troubleshoots, though. Near-instant turns really wins here.

It's tempting to directly assume speed is proportional to quality, but we really don't know what's going on at any given provider's back-end serving configuration, nor the internal model routing configuration.

... but I found out they were planning to mount teleoperated weapons on the robotic platforms for a demo. I’m not willing to go there, so I resigned without another offer.

There's a ton of anti-drone defense startups currently, but how does one defend against armed bipedal robots? They're a lot heavier than most drones, so presumably they can be decked out with various types of shielding.

As far as I'm aware, phased plasma rifles in the 40-watt range don't yet exist.

I think they've taken the integration difficulty into account.

Besides, full redesign isn't so expensive these days (depending).

It seems like a solution in source of a problem.

Agreed, but it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Fair enough. I respect the commitment to purity.

In the not so distant future you'll probably be one of the few who haven't had their actual coding skills atrophy, and that's a good thing.

Now you've got me curious about what the Bible has to say about crustaceans, and if anyone's already created a religion around Rust [the programming language].

It might when an individual function has 50 different models reviewing it, potentially multiple times each.

Perhaps part of a complex review chain for said function that's a few hundred LLM invocations total.

So long as there's a human reviewing it at the end and it gets locked, I'd argue it ultimately doesn't matter how the code was initially created.

There's a lot of reasons it would matter before it gets to that point, just more to do with system design concerns. Of course, you could also argue safety is an ongoing process that partially derives from system design and you wouldn't be wrong.

It occurred to me there's some recent prior art here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721953

It's probably fair to say the Linux kernel is critical infra, or at least a component piece in a lot of it.

Sure, but what replaces it?

You're talking a catastrophic level of pain and suffering if there's nothing to take its place.

> ...give him unlimited model access

We do not need vibe-coded critical infrastructure.

I think when you have virtually unlimited compute, it affords the ability to really lock down test writing and code review to a degree that isn't possible with normal vibe code setups and budgets.

That said for truly critical things, I could see a final human review step for a given piece of generated code, followed by a hard lock. That workflow is going to be popular if it already isn't.

That was my attempt at rephrasing a sentence to be more clear in response to an accusation of waffling, I think.

Suffice it to say, point-by-point rebuttal exchanges/slap fights tend to not lead anywhere good, let alone in a comment section that's emotionally charged and personal from the outset.

In retrospect, I should've just left my original comment stand by itself rather than panic and dive into a detailed follow-on explanation which snowballed from there.

I was genuinely trying to post in good faith for positive effect while taking a middle tack that still condemned violence while perhaps humanizing some of the anger.

It didn't quite work out, but I do very much understand where the opposing positions were coming from now.

And, my apologies for swearing.

---

You brought up a dynamic in the second incident's discussion touching on essentially redundant condemnation, where normal people don't bother because it's universally assumed that violence is bad.

Having closely watched the comment section unfold there, I see what you meant by that: it ends up being negative space for what you termed countervailing sentiment to expand within.

I think that was actually the first time I was happy to see a thread taken off the main page early, for everyone's sake.

>Rather, only stating that such indifference does logically follow in those circumstances.

This is exactly what I’m talking about.

In other words: There's a lot of people angry about AI right now, and it isn't much of a surprise that indifference and insensitivity follows.

When you say things like "it's easy to understand how someone arrives at that position", you're laying the groundwork to justify why what you class as "callous indifference" is just a logical and natural state that we should accept.

I didn't say it should be accepted nor was I laying groundwork for justification, be it implicit or explicit.

Rather, only stating that such indifference does logically follow in those circumstances.

Quoting my prior comment:

>Most people's perception of Sam was shaped in recent years, by press coverage that tends to treat him as the face of AI, with sentiment that usually goes something like: "hey, this guy's stealing all your water so he can take your job too, and by the way he lies a lot."

People's reaction here isn't exactly shocking when taken in that context.

To borrow your language: fuck them, too.

Yeah, agreed.