> The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems: some of its statistical methods needed more work, some of its approaches were not optimal, some of its theorizing went too far given the evidence, and so on. Again, we have moved past hallucinations and errors to more subtle, and often human-like, concerns.

Couple it with the tendency to please the user by all means and it ends up lieing to you but you won’t ever realise, unless you double check.

Why aren't foundational model companies training separate enterprise and consumer models from the get go?

The sane conclusion would be to invest in education, not to dump hundreds of billions of llms, but ok

Start with the easiest thing to control? Of giving more money and see what it does?

We seem to believe in every other industry that to get the best talent pay a high salary salary, but for some reason we expect teachers to do it out of compassion for the children while they struggle to pay bills. It's absurd.

Probably one of the single most important responsibilities of a society is to prepare the next generation, and it pays enormous return. But because we can't measure it with quarterly profits we just ignore it.

The rate of return on providing society with as good education is insane.

Lastly its entirely impossible to attract better candidates without more money its just not how the world works.

For reference the median household income in san ramon is about 200k so 2 teachers would be below average. A cop with her experience in the same town makes 158k

There is no reason to expect to find more qualified people for less money when you are starting at 45% of median household income for the area.

Highly qualified individuals in other career tracks are often paid more while also lacking the relevant skills and education.

Industries that are lower paid are going to be even less qualified.

You attract superior talent by either paying more full stop.

Why don't you ask actual teachers.

Maybe take a look at reading and math proficiency rates... And then add in the fact that many kids propping up those stats are basically part time home schooled by parents after school and on the weekend to makeup for the lacking teachers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ramon,_California#2020_cen...

As in what people generally earn on this site will crash way down and be outsourced to these models. I'm already seeing it personally from a social perspective - as a SWE most people I know (inc teachers in my circle) look at me like my days are numbered "cause of AI".

Should a city landscape truck driver make $250k because his truck drives around a rich town? No, he should make what other people in this kind of industry make.

The reason teaching became largely a women's profession when they used to be exclusively men is because we wanted to make education universal and free so we did that by paying less, and women who needed to work also had to take what they could get. The reason it has become a moron's profession is because we have made it uniquely undesirable. If you think that teachers should be amazing and imminently qualified and infinitely safe to have around children, pay them like programmers.

Instead, the middle-class meme is to pay them nothing, put them in horrible conditions, and resent them too. Typical "woman's work" model.

Do you have any source on the assertion that being a teacher used to pay more? Because to my knowledge it has never been a high paying profession.

We need different models and then to invest in the successes, over and over again…forever.

Even if the current model was working, just continuing to invest money in it while ignoring other issues like early childhood nutrition, a good and healthy home environment, environmental impacts, etc. will just continue to fail people.

Schooling alone isn't going to help the kid with a crappy home life, with poor parents who can't afford proper nutrition, and without the proper tools to develop the mindset needed to learn (because these tools were never taught by the parents, and/or they are too focused on simply surviving).

We, as a society, need to stop allowing people to be in a situation where they can't focus on education because they are too focused on working and surviving.

Incredible.

It’s not a funding problem.

But you're right after a certain point other factors matter more than simple $ per student. Unfortunately one of those factors is teacher pay <=> teacher quality.

Disruptive students in particular who negatively impact everyone around them but for whatever reason, are frequently not removed from the environment.

US is 5th globally in spending per student. I actually thought it was #1 and initially said that but then corrected it after double checking.

Further, the statement is about as nuanced as "the universe is just atoms". For example, I come from New Orleans where since Katrina they have effectively been 100% Charter schools (that's privatized). It has been a total disaster as not only did it not change literally any statistic for the better, it totally wrecked the local policy atmosphere. Now that shit is in 30 other states. Those "schools" get the same amount of funding (sometimes more!) and are worse in literally every meaningful measurement for society.

That's the lie.

Locals demand charter schools when the existing schools are already failing but the politics of a larger district make it impossible to meaningfully change anything.

It’s been a couple of years since I looked into Louisiana’s charters. When I last looked most of what I saw was political propaganda (from both proponents and opponents).

EDIT: I looked into it. Charters appear to experience the same performance spread (approximately) as district schools where negative performance is primarily associated with poverty.

And that makes the point…school funding is not the problem. The environment outside of school for the child is the problem. Pumping money into the schools isn’t going to get the benefit because it can’t affect outside factors. Money is better allocated elsewhere.

Relevant excerpt:

> Older studies align with this nuance: A 2013 analysis found 86% of Louisiana charters outperforming peers in reading/math, with spillover benefits. But a 2023 legislative audit linked poor results to poverty—71% of students are economically disadvantaged statewide, and concentrations above 80% predict lower scores. Notably, 85 of 138 rated charters earned D’s or F’s, and some high performers enrolled fewer low-income students than legally required.

I don't think it's a money issue at this point.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

We spend far more than most countries per pupil, for much poorer results

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...

It's pretty clear that while spending is a factor, it's probably not the biggest one. The countries that seem to do best are those that combine adequate funding with real rigor in instruction.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/teacher-s...

We're higher paying than a number of countries with higher cost of living that (whether fairly or unfairly) pay lower than us.

I stand by my assertion. I don't think our per pupil spending is the major bottleneck in our performance. I think our educational system needs fundamental reform (just like everything else in this country)

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/te...

Or this:

> While U.S. teachers make 58% of their counterparts’ salaries, Finnish teachers make 92% of the salaries of similarly educated professions. This trend follows with other countries ranked highly in the World Happiness Report. Teachers in Denmark (ranked #2 in World Happiness) make 81% of their counterparts’ salaries and teachers in Sweden (ranked #4) make 74% of their counterparts’ salaries.

https://www.ednc.org/perspective-how-the-worlds-happiest-cou...

I'm not from the US and I think that attitude is fucked up. You'll get your wish -- the US has been steadily dropping on the lists of "World's Happiest Countries"[1]. But luckily I don't need to do anything. Nature will teach you what a simple text box cannot. Eventually you guys will ruin all your important institutions & hit rock bottom & start meditating or something.

[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart -- Fit a line and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far away. That attitude is not "universal".

>Whether that's truly just is an entirely different question

I save myself a lot of heartache and consternation by 'accepting the things I cannot change' to crib the serenity prayer

And there's plenty I can do. Studying the issue & preparing a move, to name two. You want to roll over cause that's your lack of ethics.

It won't work out for you. Set a reminder for 2030.

Mississipi is doing better on reading, the biggest difference being that they use phonics approach to teaching how to read, which is proven to work, whereas WA uses whole language theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language), which is a terrible idea I don't know how it got traction.

So the gist of it, yes, spend on education, but ensure that you are using the right tools, otherwise it's a waste of money.

Hire smart motivated people, pay them well, leave them alone, they’ll figure this one out. It’s not hard, anyone can google what Finland does.

WA teachers are among the best salaries in the country for being a teacher (within top 5). You start at around 84k$ I think, 90k$+ if you have a masters degree, at least in Seattle, and it can scale up to 150k$ with enough seniority, as well as pension plan.

> Hire smart motivated people, pay them well, leave them alone, they’ll figure this one out. It’s not hard, anyone can google what Finland does.

The problem is not the teachers themselves, it's what the system tells them to teach. You can have the best teacher in the world, but if they use BS curricula students will unfortunately learn BS.

Think about it, you can have brilliant engineers, but an idiot ceo, and the company will fail despite the engineers.

Seattle rents are very high in specific hip neighborhoods.

Professional or artisanal work are petit bourgeois positions, so are flexible in their outlook regardless of income.

In USA K-12 education costs about $300k

350 million people, want to get 175 million of them better educated, but we've already spent $52 trillion dollars on educating them so far

Unfortunately, a lot of these people have either concluded it is too difficult to vote, can't vote, or that their votes don't matter (I don't think they're wrong). Their unions were also destroyed. Some of them vote against their interests, but it's not clear that their interests are ever represented, so they vote for change instead.

By policy changes giving unions less power, enacted by politicians that were mostly voted for by a majority, which is mostly composed of the working class. Was this people voting against their interests? (Almost literally yes, but you could argue that their ideological preference for weaker unions trumps their economic interest in stronger unions.)

We can't educate someone with 80 IQ to be you; we can't educate you (or I) into being Einstein. The same way we can't just train anyone to be an amazing basketball player.

Modern society benefits a lot from specialization. It's like the dumbest kid in France is still better at French than you.

That means there are absolutely still massive benefits to be had in trying to ensure that kids grow up in safe, loving homes, with proper amounts of stimulation and enrichment, and are taught with a growth, not a fixed potential mindset.

Sad to say, but your own fixed mindset probably held you back from what you could truly achieve. You don't have to be Einstein to operate on the cutting edge of a field, I think most nobel prize winners have an iq of ~ 120

The top 10% of households by wage income do receive ~50% of pre-tax wage income, but:

1) our tax system is progressive, so actual net income share is less

2) there's significant post-wage redistribution (social security/medicaid)

3) that high income households consume a smaller percent of their net income is a well established fact.

What use is an LLM in an illiterate society?

Will they possess the skills (or even the vocabulary) to understand the output?

We won't know for another 20 years, perhaps.

The ability to feign literacy such that critical thought and ability to express same is not a prerequisite.

My current preference is Codex 5.1 (Sonnet 4.5 as a close second, though it got really dumb today for "some reason"). It's been good to the point where I shipped multiple projects with it without a problem (with eg https://pine.town being one I made without me writing any code).

We used to joke that "The internet was a mistake.", making fun of the bad parts... but LLMs take the fucking cake. No intelligent beings, no sentient robots, just unlimited amounts of slop.

The tech basically stopped evolving right around the point of it being good enough for spam and slop, but not going any further, there are no cures no new laws of physics or math or anything else being discovered by these things. All AI use in science I can see is based on finding patters in data, not intelligent thought (as in novel ideas). What a bust.

In fact I fear the humans optimize for attention and cater to the feed ranking Algorithm too much, while AI is at least trying to do a decent job. But with AI it is the responsibility of the user to guide it, what AI does depends on what the user does.

It’s clear pro-slavery-minded elitists are happy to sell the speech that people should become "good complement to AI", that is even more disposable as this puppets. But unlike this mindless entities, people have will to survive deeply engraved as primary behavior.

Now anyone mildly capable of using a computer is able to produce many more fictional characters than all that humanity collectively kept in its miscellaneous lores, and drawn them in an ocean of insipid narratives. All that nonetheless mostly passing all the grammatical checkboxes at a level most humans would fail (I definitely would :D).

>Here’s a concise and thoughtful response you could use to engage with ako’s last point:

---

"The scale and speed might be the key difference here. While human-generated narratives—like religions or myths—emerged over centuries through collective belief, debate, and cultural evolution, LLMs enable individuals to produce vast, coherent-seeming narratives almost instantaneously. The challenge isn’t just the volume of ‘bullshit,’ but the potential for it to spread unchecked, without the friction or feedback loops that historically shaped human ideas. It’s less about the number of people involved and more about the pace and context in which these narratives are created and consumed."

And even when only considering the tools used in isolated sessions not exposed by default, the most popular ones are tuned to favor engagement and retention over relevance. That's a different point as LLM definitely can be tuned in different direction, but in practice in does matter in terms of social impact at scale. Even prime time infotainment covered people falling in love or encouraged into suicidal loops by now. You're absolutely right is not always the best

Anecdotally, the people I see the most excited about AI are the people that don't do any fucking work. I can create a lot of value with plain ol' for loop style automation in my niche. We're stil nowhere near the limit of what we can do with automation, that I don't give a fuck about what AI can do. Bruh in windows 10 copy and fuckin paste doesn't work for me anymore, but instead of fixing that they're adding AI

Stuff like that which regular users often do by hand, they can ask an LLM for the command (usually just a few lines of a scripting language if they only know the magic words to use).

I’m not worried about AI taking our jobs, I’m worried about the market crash when the reality of the various failed (… to actually reduce payroll) or would’ve-been-cheaper-and-better-without-AI initiatives the two of us have been working on non-stop since this shit started break through the hype of investment and the music stops.

Ozempic’s FDA approval was in 2017, the same year transformers were invented.

Whatever you can place at LLMs, GLP-1’s aren’t one of them.

Fully agree.

You don't hear that anymore.

Feels like whole generation of skeptics evaporated.

The skeptics haven't evaporated, they just aren't bothering to try to talk to you any more because they don't think there's value in it.

We are yet to have a fully vibe-coded piece of software that actually works. The blog post is actually great because LLMs are very good are regurgitating pieces of code that already exist on a single prompt. Now ask them to make a few changes and suddenly the genie is back in the bottle.

Something doesn't math out. You can't be both a genius and extremely dumb (retarded) at the same time. You can be, however, good at information retrieval and presenting it in a better way. That's what LLMs are and am not discounting the usefulness of that.

That’s actually a classic stereotype, someone being a genius in some area, but failing with the most basic social expectations in other area.

The marketing bullshit that it’s a "thinking" and "hallucinating" is just bringing the intended confusion on the table.

They are great tools for many purpose. But a GPS is not a copilot, and an LLM is not going to replace coworkers where their humanity matters.

For one thing, it’s far more interesting than a rubber duck in many cases. Of course on that matter in the end it’s about framing the representation adequately and enter a fictional dialog.

From perspective of personally using it daily, seeing what my team is using it for it's quite shocking to still see those kind of comments, it's like we're living on different planets - again, gives flat earther like vibe.

The Bitter Lesson is with enough VC subsidised compute those things are useful.

No point in arguing about it though with true believers, they will never change their minds.

Now, that being said, do I think they are as good as a skilled human on most things? No, I don't. My trust issues have increased after the GPT-5 presentation. The very first question was to showcase its "PhD-level" knowledge, and it gave a wrong answer. It just happened to be in a field I know enough about to notice, but most didn't.

So, while I think they can be considered as having some form of intelligence, I believe they have more limits than a lot of people seem to realise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR20FWCCjAs&list=PLd7-bHaQwn...

Ilya Sutskever this week.

how many prompts did it take you to make this?

how did you make sure that each new prompt didn't break some previous functionality?

did you have a precise vision for it when you started or did you just go with whatever was being given to you?

https://i.ibb.co/xSCtRnFJ/Screenshot-2025-11-25-084709.png

https://i.ibb.co/7NTF7YPD/Screenshot-2025-11-25-084944.png

Alas, I did not realize I was being held to the standard of having no bugs under any circumstance, and printing nothing to the console.

I have removed the amateurish log entries, I am pitiably sorry for any offense they may have caused. I will be sure to artisanally hand-write all my code from now on, to atone for the enormity of my sin.

Probably hundreds, I'd say.

> how did you make sure that each new prompt didn't break some previous functionality?

For the backend, I reviewed the code and steered it to better solutions a few times (fewer than I thought I'd need to!). For the frontend, I only tested and steered, because I don't know much about React at all.

This was impossible with previous models, I was really surprised that Codex didn't seem to completely break down after a few iterations!

> did you have a precise vision

I had a fairly precise vision, but the LLM made some good contributions. The UI aesthetic is mostly the LLM, as I'm not very good at that. The UX and functionality is almost entirely me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR20FWCCjAs&list=PLd7-bHaQwn...

this has been my experience purely vibecoding. i am surprised it works well for others.

btw the current production bug. how did you discover that and why it slip out. looks like site wasn't working at all when you posted that comment?

I used to run into a related issue, where fixing a bug would add more bugs, to the point where it would not be able to progress past a given codebase complexity. However, Codex is much better at not doing that. There are some cases where the model kept going back and forth between two bugs, but I discovered that that was because I had misunderstood the constraints and was telling the model to do something impossible.

> how did you discover that and why it slip out.

Sentry alerted me but I thought it was an edge case, and I didn't pay attention until hours later.

I use a spiral allocation algorithm to allocate plots, so new users are clustered around the center. Sometimes plots are emptied (when the user isn't active), so you can have gaps in the spiral, which the algorithm tries to fill, and it's meant to go to the next plot if the current one can't be assigned.

For one specific plot, however, conditions were such that the database was giving an integrity error. The exception handling code that was supposed to handle that didn't take into account that it needed to roll back before resuming, so the entire request failed, instead of resuming gracefully. Just adding an atomic() context manager fixed it.

> looks like site wasn't working at all when you posted that comment?

It was working for a few hundreds (thousands?) of visitors, then the allocation code hit the plot that caused the bug, and signup couldn't proceed after that.

ok looks like you are intimately familiar with the code that is being produced and are AI as code generator rather than pure vibe coding. That makes sense to me.

Btw did AI add that line when you explained what the error was or did you add that in manually.

Specifically here, the AI added that line.

Without knowledge how to use this “PROBALISTIC” slot machine to have better results ypu are only wasting energy those GPUs need to run and answer questions.

Majority of ppl use LLMs incorrectly.

Majority of ppl selling LLMs as a panacea for everyting are lying.

But we need hype or the bubble will burst taking whole market with it, so shuushh me.

Definitely planning to use it more at work. The integrations across Google Workspace are excellent.

Isn't the point of doing the master's thesis that you do the math and research, so that you learn and understand the math and research?

You could trust the expert analysis of people in that field. You can hit personal ideologies or outliers, but asking several people seems to find a degree of consensus.

You could try varying tasks that perform complex things that result in easy to test things.

When I started trying chatbots for coding, one of my test prompts was

    Create a JavaScript function edgeDetect(image) that takes an ImageData object and returns a new ImageData object with all direction Sobel edge detection.  

Recently I found

    Can you create a webgl glow blur shader that takes a 2d canvas as a texture and renders it onscreen with webgl boosting the brightness so that #ffffff is extremely bright white and glowing,

These things are fairly easy to check because if it is performant and visually correct then it's about good enough to go.

It's also worth noting that as they attempt more and more ambitious tasks, they are quite probably testing around the limit of capability. There is both marketing and science in this area. When they say they can do X, it might not mean it can do it every time, but it has done it at least once.

That’s the problem - the experts all promise stuff that can’t be easily replicated. The promises the experts send doesn’t match the model. The same request might succeed and might fail, and might fail in such a way that subsequent prompts might recover or might not.

But it seems lots of folks do.

Nevertheless, style, tweaks, and adjustments are a lot less work than banging out a thousand lines of code by hand. And whether an LLM or a person on the other side of the world did it, I'd still have to review it. So I'm happy to take increasingly common and increasingly sophisticated wins.

For me, personally, I just don't see the point of putting that same effort into a machine. It won't learn or grow from the corrections I make in that PR, so why bother? I might as well have written it myself and saved the merge review headache.

Maybe one day it'll reach perfect parity of what I could've written myself, but today isn't that day.

That does not match my experience. As the codebases I've worked with LLMs on become more opinionated and stylized, it seems to to a better job of following the existing work. And over time the models have absolutely improved in terms of their ability to understand issues and offer solutions. Each new release has solved problems for me that the previous ones have struggled with.

Re: interpersonal interactions, I don't find that the LLM has pushed them out or away. My projects still have groups of interested folk who talk and joke and learn and have fun. What the LLMs have addressed for me in part is the relative scarcity of labor for such work. I'm not hacking on the Linux Kernel with 10,000 contributors. Even with a dozen contributors, the amount of contributed code is relatively low and only in areas they are interested in. The LLM doesn't mind if I ask it to do something super boring. And it's been surprisingly helpful in chasing down bugs.

> Maybe one day it'll reach perfect parity of what I could've written myself, but today isn't that day.

Regardless of whether or not that happens, they've already been useful for me for at least 9 months. Since O3, which is the first one that really started to understand Rust's borrow checker in my experience. My measure isn't whether or not it writes code as well as I do, but how productive I am when working with it compared to not. In my measurements with SLOCCount over the last 9 months, I'm about 8x more productive than the previous 15 years without (as long as I've been measuring). And that's allowed me to get to projects which have been on the shelf for years.

This article by an AI researcher I happen to have worked with neatly sums up feelings I've had about comments like yours: https://medium.com/@ahintze_23208/ai-or-you-who-is-the-one-w...

To me the AI is a very smart tool, not a very dumb co-worker. When I use the tool, my goal is for _me_ to learn from _its_ mistakes, so I can get better at using the tool. Code I produce using an AI tool is my code. I don't produce it by directly writing it, but my techniques guide the tool through the generation process and I am responsible for the fitness and quality of the resulting code.

I accept that the tool doesn't learn like a human, just like I accept that my IDE or a screwdriver doesn't learn like a human. But I myself can improve the performance of the AI coding by developing my own skills through usage and then applying those skills.

Now the tightrope is a whole application or a 14 page paper and the short pieces of code and prose are now professional quality more often than not. That's some serious progress.

It’s like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect applied to AI. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

"So is this a PhD-level intelligence? In some ways, yes, if you define a PhD level intelligence as doing the work of a competent grad student at a research university. But it also had some of the weaknesses of a grad student. The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect