roncesvalles

You don't even need to pay a 5% hit. Just paste Fable output into Gemini Flash and it will rewrite it in more accessible language.

Imagine all the times this has already occurred somewhere in the world.

In a way, new companies like Flock entering such domains are a boon because they probably maintain tight audit logs and alerting mechanisms.

Traditional look-up software is probably being misused by cops all the time (à la the old noir trope of a PI having "a buddy in the department" who can look up anything for him).

Usually, the longer the AI works on something the crappier its output because that means the context is getting filled up.

If my AI prompt takes more than 5 minutes to execute, I'm almost certain to stop it and break up the task or be more specific about what files it should look at or what subtask it should tackle first. The people who let it run for hours are absolutely not getting anything worth keeping in the end.

Your comment has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. I almost suspect it's satire.

There is no inherent value in having reports or the title of "CTO". Compensation (broadly considered) is the only objective marker of where your career stands*. We primarily work in exchange for money, not for titles or responsibilities that tickle our ego.

If you're earning $300k at some company as a "Ninja Grandmaster (World Wide) Director CTO with 50 Reports", and a "Super Stinky Junior IC" at OpenAI is earning $400k, the IC is doing better than you.

*more precisely, the cumulative compensation at the end of your career, to account for gambits. it is not relevant that you "climbed the ranks" and were bestowed the title of "CEO" at your company or that you were "entrusted" with 5000 people in the org under you - these are strictly elements of some company's internal gamification and person-role-optimization system.

Those are killer salaries for the ones not in the US. Imagine earning $160k USD in Morocco, Nigeria or Panama. 99.9th percentile.

This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way.

Only a minority of jobs require the person to wrack their brains very hard. Most jobs just involve learning a routine and performing it on repeat.

The fear is that AI is also turning the jobs that required thinking into routine-on-repeat jobs (where the routine becomes I/O-ing things to an LLM).

I can totally see the job of a doctor (or more likely, NPs and PAs) devolving into just interviewing and visually examining a patient, feeding everything into an LLM, and doing what the LLM tells them. The next step is they wouldn't even be allowed to do anything else, for liability reasons. A world like this is right around the corner.

I fear more for the future where you're forced to offload your thinking to AI. Everything you say must be cited with LLM, everything you do must be signed off by The LLM. If you're in a meeting and have an idea, but Fable 9 says it's not a good idea, you cannot pursue it or you lose your job. The low-friction path will always be to do what the LLM tells you, and many people will shut off and surrender completely. (this is already how SWEs behave in companies where management forces them to tokenmaxx).

AI will be treated like a God that talks to us, and you can't disagree with it, you can only try to change its mind. The most horrific form of mental oppression. And it's just a few years away.

We’re supposed to let the Tech Bros go on about how cutting corners is some genius productivity hack.

Vibecoding in a nutshell

I just don't think AI is any of those things. I understand that my argument is anecdotal and qualitative, but I just don't see AI (LLMs) materially increasing net productivity in the economy.

It's unusable only because I can't set 5.6 to Extra thinking in the "Chat" tab, and the "Work" feature that does let me use Extra is totally gimped for coding tasks. I'd rather use Opus 4.8 Extra/Max instead of Sol High (look up the benchmarks, thinking level is everything).

It is quite literally unusable to me.

5.6 Sol, competitive with Fable (or close enough), and it's available via subscription (even the $20 subscription!)

It's not comparable because OpenAI caps thinking to High in the ChatGPT "Chat" interface (and the "Work" thing where it actually does let us use Extra or Max is fucking shit).

GPT 5.6 Sol (High) is almost certainly worse than Opus 4.8 (Extra), and nowhere close to Fable (Extra).

I literally got a refund for my $20 OpenAI subscription after playing around with 5.6 Sol for a couple of hours (yes even on Codex) because it's so unusable and I'd rather just use Fable today and 4.8 Extra starting tomorrow, still within my $20 Anthropic plan. And I'm not even poor.

I still think the best way to build software using LLMs is to copy-paste snippets/files into the chat and manually guide the work. Humans are still the best orchestrators. Yes the human has to now be hyper-focused and juggle various workflows, but the end result (quality of work and throughput of usable code) becomes very good.

Wails is another cross-platform GUI framework in Go: https://wails.io/

Not to forget the whole thing with Free Basics. Zuck is smart enough to know why trying to subvert net neutrality in developing countries is a bad thing, and he did it anyway.

Of all the vilified tech billionaires, Zuck is the only one that I actually suspect of being "evil" -- he knows exactly how his business decisions are bad for society, he just doesn't care. He does business pure minimax style, unwavering focus to fiduciary duty, and that's likely why he was able to build Facebook/Meta into what it is.

I'm guessing if you can "see" Wifi through a wall, you can also infer some things about what's behind the wall, because the signal will have certain obstruction patterns. It becomes an xray.

It seems in mathematics that the utility of a problem is directly correlated with how difficult it is to solve, for some odd reason. If I defined some pointless construction and it turned out to be very difficult to prove, it would automatically over time become considered a "high utility" mathematics problem (again, for some odd reason).

Mathematics is largely just smart people working on pointless puzzles, and only by coincidence do these puzzles turn out to have practical applications (it cannot be predicted). Or I guess all the obviously practical problems in mathematics have already been solved -- we're now in a world where math is rarely the limiting factor for human progress (like it was, say, pre-calculus; was FFT the last significant unblock from math?).

It's such a waste of the best human minds. Or maybe the best human minds are actually doing something else, maybe we only notice the handful of Terence Taos, not the hundreds of people of equal brilliance who realized pure math is pointless and decided to pursue physics, rocketry, or quantitative finance.

I think it is widely known by now that instructions to alter the LLM's "tone", things like asking it to adopt a persona ("you are the world's best programmer"), and overly broad directives ("make no mistakes") always gives poor results. Just state directly what you want. If you want something very specific, add more information. "Prompt engineering" is pseudoscience.

To put it another way, you will only get the benchmarked performance if you let it talk the way it talks by default. Trying to modify this neuters the model's IQ.

Also consider that Fable launched on June 9. Many people including myself bought a 1-month Anthropic subscription just to use Fable.

By extending it to July 12, they're gonna get a second month out of a lot of such people. If it really expired today, I wasn't going to renew my month.

On this note, (from a web dev perspective) I think we've overdone making the static build as lean as possible and pushing everything into the backend. E.g., if a 2MB dataset will make a search/select bar return results instantly instead of having to roundtrip an API, just send up the whole dataset with your initial load. After gzip it's nowhere close to 2MB anyway.

Also, I think suspense is an anti-pattern now. We've all been conditioned to groan every time we see suspense animations because it means the website must be slow. It's better to just have a little circling loader or just freeze.

There is a pop theory that aging is just scurvy in slow motion and Vitamin C hypersupplementation actually goes a long way in staving it off.

To be pedantic, master-master implies the same row can be committed to at the same time at different master nodes (without an immediate causal connection between the two). Very few databases allow this.

You need replication for HA. Otherwise the only HA you have is the RAID setup on the one machine. The reason people go horizontal is rarely scale. And if you're doing that you might as well use the passive replica as a read replica.

It is a search engine in the sense that it's returning to you a subset of knowledge from a large body of knowledge stored within it. Natural language is simply the interface by which you make the query and by which it can return its results.

And true, it's not deterministic in our experience, but this is an optimization. You could make it so that one particular prompt always returns the same response every single time; the random jitter is "added in" because it happens to produce better results overall.

They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have.

But they're echoing these things from people who really have.

The key is to not forget that LLMs are just next-generation search engines, instead of anthropomorphizing them to be "speaking agents". The natural language IO interface is just a side effect.

The causality might not be what you think. You're happy with what you have because you don't see a path to getting substantially more.

I would say Europe in general. And I get the sense they don't aspire to social mobility either, the way Americans do.

there are only 2 and they don't seem to be AI-written

At many companies (I want to say most), Redis is seen as an actual durable production database and operated that way, not just as a cache that can disappear at any time. It's not unreasonable for a new dev to assume this unless told otherwise.