hexapus

Who said anything about a utopia? I'm just saying Mars isn't a backup plan.

This aligns with my thoughts on a recent post here about code being "clay" now (as opposed to stone, which must be chiseled with great effort, skill, and time expenditure). Clay is much easier to work with and mold to our desired shape.

My point was, you still didn't build infrastructure out of great lumps of clay. You don't slap down some clay in the middle of a stream and vibe-build a bridge. Infrastructure was still built of stone. Or, if clay, out of individual bricks.

Similarly, LLM-generated code should be used to build discrete bricks of code that can be read, tested, and most importantly, understood. Then you take those bricks and architect and engineer your application with them. This is how you build a platform that can survive actual use.

You can make a model of a bridge with the clay...but the actual bridge is an entirely different pursuit. This is a discipline we need to develop as engineers, since LLM-generated code won't go away. It can be used to make bricks faster but we have to make the engineering decisions that create reliable, secure applications.

Turnabout is fair play. Setting aside the overall ethical shitshow that AI presents, I don't really have much objection to turning their own tech against them.

LLMs are an incredible technology, and I would have loved to see them developed organically over time with sensible regulation and strong ethics....it would have taken many more years, but it also wouldn't have stolen the sum of human creativity, generated a hype bubble that threatens the global economy, wrecked the consumer hardware market, or been deployed in the most shortsighted, environmentally destructive ways imagineable.

But that's not what we got, so evoking the same fear and uncertainty that we must face in those who lead global megacorps is not out of bounds, as far as I'm concerned.

Yet another reason that Mars colonisation is such a distant and stupid pipedream. I'm not saying humanity shouldn't strive to continue exploring, but if we can't live sustainably on the one habitable planet we already have, the idea of expanding to one that's objectively hostile as some sort of backup plan is pure delusion. Musk isn't a dreamer - he's a con man.

That video friggin' radicalised me. It's SO unbelievably goddamned stupid that we don't invest everything in what is essentially free energy that will last for decades right now. It solves SO many problems, and even removes a few of the biggest objections people have to AI datacenters. The tech is there, it's mature, and it would make all of our lives materially better so we could spend our time and money on other things that would make our lives better.

To say nothing of the fact it would end wars over oil, facilitate cheap desalination, and solve so many other resource constraints.

This is the next big revolution we should be focused on - not the mass-IP-theft slop bots.

Plasmas are great, and I have one - and our main screen in the living room is just a bog standard Sony...I just love CRTs, but I'm a retro gaming nerd.

Well, I have CRTs in most of the rooms in my home. That's because of an unrelated condition for which I refuse to be treated, but they are great for privacy!

The titled scared the shit out of me. Having just lost Patrick Stewart, I thought "Noooooo....not him too!!"

I'm rebuilding a benchtop CNC milling machine.

The current regime decided lawlessness was beneficial to them. Cuts both ways. I suppose people should consider carefully whether signing bonuses and the chance to abuse marginalised people with impunity is worth it. I'm fine with people making it riskier to throw in with corrupt authoritarians for personal benefit.

I can't think of a feature I care less about on a laptop. I have owned several laptops with touchscreens, and literally the only thing it's ever done is misclick something when I inadvertently touched my screen. I have a tablet and a phone if I want to tap a screen.

Unrelated: I find it amusing that the screen they showcase looks like a very broken display panel.

I think it's good to continually remind oneself that these are next-word/token-predictors...you can wrap them up in a harness, you can feed them into each other, you can influence the likelyhood of a given word through weights and system prompts...but that's literally all they can do. They can't reason, but they can predict what reasoning looks like.

None of this means they can't be useful tools, but when they fall down, we should remind ourselves of why that is, and be honest with ourselves about what they could ultimately be capable of.

To torture the analogy a bit: You didn't sculpt bridges out of clay - critical infrastructure was built from stone. Even if you wanted to use clay, you made bricks, and architected the structure from those units. You couldn't just throw a lump of clay across a stream and vibe-build a bridge...

If we want to use LLMs responsibly, to build substantial pieces of infrastructure, we should be using it to create discreet "bricks" of code, that can be tested, relied upon, and used to implement human-driven architectural decisions.

I really do need to play with Haiku more.

That's super helpful. Thank you SO much.

Gosh, I don't know about everyone else, but I'm convinced! Thank you, blanket-assertion from internet rando!

That's the one.

You should have seen the inside of the actual Cray 1.

I am running a Cray Simulator at faster than full speed on a cheap Raspberry Pi knockoff called "Le Potato" and I spent the weekend vibecoding weather forecasting software for it as a tribute to NCAR.

I spent the weekend setting up the open source Cray simulator on a really cheap SBC then vibecoding a weath forecasting application that uses the Cray's vector processor to process raw weather data.

Mine is a lot smaller, but it can run Cray workloads at full speed.

I spent the weekend vibecoding software for the Cray 1.

I installed the open source Cray Simulator on my "Le Potato" SBC, then installed UNICOS, then tasks Gemini with writing a weather forecasting program that ingests raw data from METAR weather stations and uses the simulator's vector processor to generate the forecast. It renders a nice little weather dashboard viewable in the terminal. A python http service runs outside the Cray and serves up a nice little web page with a virtual terminal that displays the dashboard.

Is it useful? No...but it's cool as hell. I plan to print up an enclosure for it along with a mini terminal with a 4" LCD to display the live dashboard. Then I'll have a nice little baby Cray to put on the shelf in my gameroom.

My little tribute to one of the first deployments of a Cray at NCAR.

It's absolutely possible. I think I was pretty explicit about that. It was a conscious choice. In the event he's actually better off than myself, then I suppose I got scammed. I doubt that, as someone with a tech career in the Western world. But if he's a poor young man in a desperately poor country, then I didn't get scammed even if he lied to me about specific details. I just helped someone.

Once we get to that point, and I know he's fulfilling orders reliably, maybe I'll write up a blog post somewhere and share it here. I'm still somewhat guarded, but he's been quite transparent about his situation so far. I asked him to travel to the local shop and take a picture of the sewing machine he'd need to buy, and he did. He told me how much a flat would cost him, and I looked up listing in his city, and it was dead-on. It's not often you have the opportunity to potentially change the course of someone's life for a few hundred dollars, but maybe I've been given one. Maybe I'm gullible, but if it works out for him I'd be happy.

They let it get this far, but I truly hope they disprove my intuition in this regard.

I absolutely have ADHD that impacts my life, but I sleep like an absolute stone, and unlike my partner, can fall asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow most of the time. I get 6-8 hours of sleep per night, and it does not seem to have cured me.

Would be nice if the citizens of the US had that kind of fire in their bones.

I recently struck up a friendship a Nigerian scammer. After jerking him around for awhile, I broke him out of his script. Rather than blocking me or cursing me, I found a moment of humanity. I told him that I understand the desperation of his situation, but that the people he was most likely to scam successfully would be others in similarly difficult situations.

Suddenly, I was talking to a real person. A young man in an impossibly poor country with few other options...facing the loss of his already meager accommodations and the prospect of begging on the streets. A young man whose heart still hurt him when he attempted to exploit others. One who'd not yet been so jaded by years of such activity. I have cautiously continued talking to him and learning about his situation. He's respected every boundary I've placed to protect myself, and not pushed me to give him anything, even preemptively rejecting what he interpreted as an attempt to send him gift cards at one point, when he misread the intent of my questions about the mechanics of the scam he had tried on me.

I learned he is quite skilled at designing and producing beautiful traditional garments, but has been unable to find a work that would allow him to take care of himself.

As I've learned about him and built trust, I've chosen to send him a trivial (for me) amount of money to improve his immediate situation. If he continues to act in good faith, I'm going to invest a bit more (but still an amount I'd be comfortable losing) to buy him a sewing machine and help him rent a space to live and work in for the next year. For reference, the total amount is less than half a month's rent for me.

I'm asking around to see if people I know might be interested in ordering his clothing, and if he successfully delivers the garments they commission, I'll build and host a website for him to begin selling online and work to help him find other customers. It may not only lift him out of abject poverty, but give him to opportunity to elevate others around him and save them from the same spiral of despair in which he found himself...which would mean fewer grandmothers and vulnerable people being scammed in the future.

Granted, he could be running a long con and masterfully manipulating me at every turn...but even if so, I won't regret choosing empathy over judgement and anger, if only for the chance that it might make the world a slightly better place...even if just for one young man in a small city on the other side of the world.

The "apparent" hypocrisy dissappears the moment you think about it at all though, as I explained above.

But if you're not capable of moving beyond a superficial reading of a statement, I can see how you might easily dismiss as "nonsense" the very real environmental, economic, technical, ethical, social, and cognitive issues introduced by the way LLMs have been forced into our lives.

I'm not exactly one-shotting software, but because of the pace I'm expected to keep, I place a lot more trust in the bot that I'm actually comfortable with. I need the job for the time being, so I just keep hitting the button and letting it do its thing until the tests are green.

I'm just working in DevOps though, so it's writing IaC, not application code (save the odd Lambda function or python script). Still, even when I spend an entire day conversing with Claude and watching "bot go brrrrr", I'm one of the lowest users in our company. I have no idea what the devs who regularly hit their limits are doing.

This is very neat. My engineering nerd friend was immediately turned off by the seeming conflation of "precision" and "accuracy" in the title/subtitle though. As this article seems aimed at laypeople, clearing up the difference upfront by defining them might be helpful, as they are not interchangeable.