One of the big problems with this is that it effectively changes the job description of programmers to managers.

You're not just responsible for your own code, you're responsible for telling someone/something else what to do, and then reviewing their work, and then integrating that work and making sure it's correct, because if it gets checked in and it's wrong, you're on the hook for it. But you didn't even write it, so it's harder to understand. Most programmers I know are better at understanding the code they wrote rather than the code they read.

Management is not a job for everyone. I've been a senior programmer and a lead programmer, and it is easier to be a senior programmer that writes complicated, essential systems than it is to be a lead programmer that REVIEWS those systems. If you don't want to do that kind of management work and you just enjoy writing code, you should stay a senior programmer, or move up to some other non-management job. But if you're forced to babysit an LLM, you get ALL THE WORST PARTS of being a lead programmer. You only get the code reviews and none of the intellectual stimulation and enjoyment of creating that thing on your own.

At least a couple comments have pointed out that solo devs use LLMs to great effect, and I'm sure this is true. But if you're not a solo dev, the task is so much different. You're trying to integrate with a bunch of other people and other systems and you're on the hook for something you didn't even write, so you'd best spend the time learning what the code says. It completely defeats the point. When I get an LLM to write my powershell scripts for me, it's because I have no interest at all in learning that scripting language. It takes 2 minutes, usually does a good job, and I can forget about it forever. The development model of asking an LLM to write code that you're responsible for that has to intermingle with the code of dozens of other people and agents sounds like a straight-up nightmare.

Solo development is a different job. The tasks you give to AI are based on what you need, and your own mental model of they code they need to spit out.

Large-scale development is different, because people are different. I've worked on 5 or 6 different game engines over the years, and Unreal is the current one that I'm on. Unreal has its quirks. The rest of our game engine has historical baggage that I need to account for. The interactions between systems are more organic, because not everything can be planned in advance. I worked on Assassin's Creed for 3 games (about 7-8 years?) and we carry over the mistakes of the previous games to the next one, because that engine shipped a game, so it's a known quantity. Sometimes if you're lucky, you get to fix some of those bugs, but then the next games get YOUR bugs, etc.

Solo devs ARE doing amazing work with AI, but solo devs *by definition* don't need to understand the code of 1 or 4 or 50 other people. You can't just check shit in on a big team.

Perfectly reasonable study, because small-scale development is not the same. I have to understand the code of 10+ programmers on a regular basis. Our game engine is involved. The only way for me to learn the code is to use it and step through it.

If you're writing apps yourself, AI is great. It's a teammate that follows your instructions and implements the things that you want. You've already got a mental model of what you need, and it gives that to you. Of course it works for you.

Big codebases are just different. Systems are interdepedent in weird ways for historical reasons, or vendor reasons or weird coworker reasons or whatever. It's not the same task.

There's quite a lot of nuance here, I guess, which isn't unexpected. It's quite a useful anecdote. At the very least, we can't just wave it away like it's not useful. It may generate sub-standard paintings or completely miss the point of art, but if it makes your proofs better, it seems insane to not have it help.

Well, wait, I don't think that actually disproves the claim. I'm not saying it's not impressive, I just don't think it's as novel as you say.

When I ask an LLM to write me code that does something 'novel', it usually does quite a good job. I'm just using the freely available models, but they quite competently write code that is not truly derivative of any other code. If I give them some code of my own that has a bug in it, they'll find the bug and patch it, and that bug is, for all intents and purposes, unique.

You're still seeing a bunch of old patterns rehashed--I presume that other proofs introduce infinity families, and they can iterate through inside a clear logical structure to test whether or not something works. Again, this is impressive work, but I'm not personally convinced that this is 'novel' in terms of the broader corpus of mathematical knowledge. It didn't invent a new field of mathematics to solve your problem.

Even if you didn't prompt it, take a look sometimes at the contemplations of the models, if that's available to you. Before the model even arrives in your hands, it's got stacks of prompts giving it meta instructions, and it then generates prompts for itself to check your work. I think it would be interesting if you ran your experiment again on a new account that's fresh and see if you can watch the chain of reasoning. You might be right, it MAY be doing something TRULY novel, but as I've said, I've got my doubts.

Obviously, you're a mathematician and I'm not; I can't tell you that you're wrong about it if you insist that it is doing something new.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.photoncrystal.com%2F... gives a 10 year warranty on workmanship defects, and a 25 year warranty on the rated output (no lower than 85% of the initial output after 25 years). They give less warranty about how the curve looks than e.g. this company for traditional panels, but other than that it seems pretty comparable.

the former Anthropic executive performing a marketing stunt for his inevitable start-up said.

Seriously, practically everything that comes out of these guys' mouths that can be construed as a criticism of AI turns out to be a marketing stunt, either saying "Wow, our AI is so good that we can't even control it (if we do things to make it 'go rogue' exactly the way we want it to)!" or "We'll do AI way better than those other irresponsible techbros!"

I saw a video by a photographer and he points out that the quality of photos is not the reason to buy a dedicated camera. After all, you can buy a $2000 Ricoh that only takes black and white photos now; the iPhone will, in most circumstances, take 'better' photos, or at least more true-to-life photos.

But a dedicated camera focuses your attention. If you carry your camera, you're concerned with photography. You're not distracted by texts or whatever. And so your photography is likely to be better--you're paying attention to the task in a way that you rarely will with your phone.

I think you're misunderstanding the point: there's a lot of FUD about BE vehicles in north america, not least of which is that battery fires are common, and they may burst into flames at any point. There have been some high-profile examples of badly designed or built cars killing people or lighting on fire, etc. As one would expect, the number of ICE vehicles that this happens to is greater because they're still a larger proportion of all vehicles. But also, as a proportion of their type, more ICE vehicles spontaneously combust than EVs.

The point is that this is not an issue with BEV technology.

Indeed, the intro to the vehicle even says as much:

Emphasis mine.

Y'gotta stop cutting education and vaccine funding.

Freedom of speech exists exactly BECAUSE speech is dangerous, particularly to entrenched powers.

The reason why it's enshrined in constitutions is because the people that wrote those constitutions wanted the citizens to be in charge, for them to push back and reform governments when they went astray. Protesting and reporting are usually especially enshrined because we know that without those rights, the people are oppressed. The first thing that goes when authoritarians come in is an abrogation of those rights, SPECIFICALLY because authoritarians know that free speech is inherently dangerous to their grasp on power. Only by keeping people in the dark and spreading propaganda can they retain their hold on power.

We saw it happen with Trump and Fox News and all of his toadies buying up TV stations and news networks. If speech isn't powerful and dangerous, then why are so many people concerned with the ability to control it?

And yet, even in these societies with free speech, there have also been limits put on it, because there's no way to run a society with unfettered free speech. We've long since decided that libel and slander are illegal, you can't make threats of physical violence to other people, conspiracy to commit [some crime] is itself a crime.

So I dunno man, how is it that you think that there's no such thing as hate speech? A violent threat can send someone into hiding very nearly as effectively as actually attempting the violence. It was just speech, but it still had an effect. Can you really possibly believe that words have no weight? That speech has no consequence? Have you never read any history, particularly of charismatic cult leaders or politicians?

People are spurred to action by words all the time, and you can't just dust your hands of it and say, "hey, I was just saying words over here that made them believe that that guy was coming to kill their kids in the night and poison their water and salt the earth. Of COURSE I was as convincing as possible and they believed me and attacked him, but that has NOTHING to do with the things I said!"

Your claim is absurd on its face. There's literal millennia of evidence.

My company instituted it because it was too hard to compete on salary alone. I make a bit less per year, but my hourly rate is now higher.

It's been an amazing experience. 4 days a week is more than 20% better than 5 days a week. I'm excited to work on monday, I don't feel like I've been through the wringer on thursday. I would guess that averaged over a whole year, I get at least as much work done on the 4DWW, though for shorter periods of time, 5 days WILL generate more work (much like crunch will also generate a lot of work in a short amount of time, but as it goes on, productivity drops).

But 4DWWs have nothing to do with AI. We mostly don't use it (I work in games; the discussion is fraught, so we mostly just don't use it at all, and most of us at the company want very little to do with it) and our productivity is just fine.

Something that I think a lot of people miss, particularly with programming, is that when you use agents, you effectively make programmers into managers whether they want to be or are good at it or not. Making programmers outline broad tasks and review the results and iterate without writing code themselves is manager work. It's all the worst parts of programming and none of the stuff that we actually like. And not everyone wants to be a manager! I'm a programming lead, and I enjoy it, but it's hard and it uses my brain in a completely different way that I would not have been interested in when I was 25. I may not have even been ABLE when I was 25.

AI doesn't relieve you of any work, it just changes the nature of the work away from the actual job description. Of course nobody's switching to the 4DWW--you just made everyone's job harder and worse, so everyone is always behind.

I work a 4 day work week. My pay is slightly lower than at my last job, but my hourly rate is higher. My company started offering it years ago because they couldn't compete on salary, but they realized that some of us would really just like a better life, and that was something they could manage.

The 4DWW isn't as transformative to me as remote work, but it's been so good for me. I'm excited to get back to work on Monday, and I don't ever feel like any part of the week is a slog. I'm happy to occasionally sit down and fix something on the weekend quickly because my brain happened on the answer while I was relaxing.

If we all must work in this capitalist hellscape, 4 days a week is much more than 20% better than 5.

There's a reason the aphorism, "the Pen is mightier than the Sword," exists. You cannot simultaneously hold that the only power is physical power but also believe ideas or ideologies are powerful. Of course they are. It's the basis of religion and politics writ large.

People can be convinced that an ideology is correct, and then do terrible things in the service of that ideology. It's not that complicated.

The reason why wealth itself is important is because wealth begets wealth. You're right that to some extent it's an under-consumption problem, but fundamentally, wealthy people use their wealth to accumulate more wealth.

And that sounds a bit tautological, but what I mean is: if you have a huge amount of wealth, the things you buy are things like property, stocks in other companies, natural resources, etc. Wealth accumulation accelerates over time. But there isn't an infinite amount of wealth to be had. There's a limit to how many homes there are, how many farms and oil wells and all those things. Governments are in debt and can't help their citizens because they no longer own big blocks of apartments, they no longer own productive land or natural resource companies. (Actually, some do, and you'll note that they're the ones that provide ongoing support to their citizens.)

Even with a little bit of wealth, you can anchor your whole life. Owning your own home is huge. Put enough money into investments, and there's a time at which contributions to your portfolio are less than the money the portfolio generates on its own. And of course, this wealth is both real and illusory; stocks have no value until you sell them, but they can serve as collateral for loans at lower interest rates, and you don't pay taxes on loans.

The rich DO compete with folks for real estate, they become landlords, which is an inherently parasitic position. Consider: a landlord buys a home and rents it out. They pay the mortgage and for upkeep, and they charge a tenant for their own costs, plus some amount of profit (or, occasionally, no profit, on the basis that land value goes up over time). If the tenant can pay this rent, that means they could own the property themselves, but there's an intermediary skimming profit off the top.

So more and more people are locked out of ownership, because the initial cost of ownership is too high, but we know factually that they could actually pay for and maintain that property themselves, because that's what the rent covers. Where does that extra money go? And what is it paying for? It's paying for nothing; the landlord is a parasite, plain and simple.

But anywhere that someone with tremendous wealth goes, the same story is allowed to play out. We've all seen the stories of these private investment firms buying up good businesses, saddling them with debt, taking all the good stuff, and then leaving the business to go bankrupt. It's wealth extraction that only rich people can do, and it destroys businesses big and small.

Ultimately, the accumulation of wealth is a de facto accumulation of power. Our politics is not SUPPOSED to be influenced by money, but it definitely is. Elon Musk doesn't need to be able to vote multiple times to influence the outcome of elections, he can just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at it--an amount he makes back in a trivial amount of time--and get the outcome that he wants.

You're right that the extremely rich use the same phones as I do, eat the same food as I do. What that tells us--what we all already know--is that they don't NEED to be that rich. They can live a life of extraordinary luxury with so much less. So my concern with wealth is that it is not created out of thin air, and there's a finite amount of it to go around. The billionaire class growing in number as well as their fortunes growing by huge amounts happening at the same time as governments running huge deficits and the middle class shrinking is not a random coincidence. One is the cause of the other. That's why when many of us talk about wealth, it's as a *transfer*, from one class to another. Billionaires are literally impoverishing the rest of us.