The history of AI is all about modeling human intelligence, just like the models we have in natural sciences. If the model happens to be a very good match with reality, we may sometimes mistake one for the other. OTOH, they may be the same thing for all practical purposes.

I'm not sure if I have any deeper intelligence than a fancy language model. When we say that LLMs don't really understand things, then what exactly do we mean by understanding? In my personal definition, the meaning of something is simply the graph of its associated things. I consider something very meaningful if the graph has a lot of nodes and edges, and this also explains why simple things gain more meaning as we age.

Well, if it's OK for a business to freely use copyrighted material for their commercial, for-profit purposes, then it throws out all arguments against non-commercial, non-profit "piracy". In other words, the court cases make a great test for the whole idea of copyright — they can't have their cake and eat it too.

How would an AI mine Bitcoin? Two extremes come to mind:

(a) It uses a language model to compute SHA2-256 hashes "by hand", and starts demanding more data centers to make a decent buck.

(b) It figures out a vulnerability in SHA2-256 and takes over the network.

you were told not to (a) copy that floppy and (b) waste precious energy on cryptocurrency mining. But when big companies are building data centers for industrial-scale copyright infringement, it's suddenly OK. Because it's "busyness" done by white men in uncomfortable suits, not by idealistic young hobbyists.

Charter subscriber to Byte Magazine here. I built my Altair 8800 from the Popular Science article. Article left out the First Annual World Altair Computer Convention, March 1976 in Albuquerque, New Mexico,

It is Claude 4 Opus the top model publicly available.

Without credit card you can get 50 prompts.
With credit card you can get 14 day free trial of the $50 600 prompt account.

Now get the judge in the Google anti-trust trial to order Google to create this are you're done. I don't think the proposal is unreasonable, someone just needs to get it in front of the right people. Google would certainly prefer doing this instead of selling off Chrome.

The non-profit controlling the pool can negotiate the user fees based on usage. As for people who bypass the pooled crawler -- every web site should let them make requests and then never respond to those request effectively keeping them in infinite timeouts. Public embarrassment of the bypassing entities will also help control this.

There is a good solution to prevent gaming this. The crawler can use AI to assess whether it wants to pay the price the page is asking or not. It can always decide the price is to high and not add the page to the index. In that case it doesn't pay. The payment is not for crawling, it is for giving permission to be added to the global index.

Another option would be to let each page set a micro payment amount in it's headers. Then the crawler could crawl until they run out of money. This works as a double-edged sword. If you set your micro payment amount too high you are not going to get crawled and then you'll drop out of every search index. So it's your choice. The single crawler would crawl free pages first and then crawl from cheapest to most expensive until it runs out of money. Obviously if you set your micro payment at $100 you're never going to get crawled and you'll never appear in another search engine either.

I would like to see the Google anti-trust trial solve this. A good solution is to have a single crawler for the web (can be Google's via anti-trust settlement) and then everyone pays into a pool to get access to the feeds from that single crawler. Payment into that pool can then be used to make the equivalent of statutory royalty payments to the sites crawled. If you don't want to be crawled put your stuff behind a login. Of course you are going to be sorely disappointed in the amount you get from those statutory payments simply because of the sheer number of web pages (around 47B). Optimistically you might be looking at $0.10 a page/yr.

Claude 4 Opus is far better than previous models for code generation. But none of this can be used without considerable code review.

It is not at all deterministic. That's because all of the tools I am using are under constant development. If everything in my environment stopped changing I suspect it would be deterministic, but that's never going to happen.

Hallucination is somewhat under your control there are three main sources 1) you exceed the context window of the AI model. For that one you just need to learn the limits of your model and not exceed them. Don't ask it to do a refactor which is going to touch two million lines of code. Two million lines of code won't fit into the context window so it's going to hallucinate substitutions for what doesn't fit. 2) It will hallucinate when your prompt is not specific enough and it fills in the blanks on its own. You can also control that by making very specific prompts. 3) Sometimes it just goes off the rails. For that one you have to closely monitor the terminal tracking what the agent is doing and if it goes off into the weeds, stop it and explain how to get back on track. That's similar to what you need to do with junior programmers.

I would say I am not ending up with any hallucinations (that I am aware of) in the code I am generating, but.. that's because I am very closely watching everything it is doing and I test and review everything manually before committing. If you're a vibe coder who gives a prompt and then goes off to lunch while it works, you're going to have problems and end up throwing away massive amounts of generated code. The second you stop reviewing what it is doing, you are doomed because you will accumulate piles of code you don't understand and can't fix.