jerf
That is, however, the argument at its core. We don't know where RSI would lead. It could produce something roughly human-intelligent. It could produce something slightly smarter than a human. It could produce something radically, radically smarter than a human. We don't know. A lot of people suspect the correct scale would be a logarithmic one, which seems to conform to the pace of improvement being seen, but that's not something we know either.
It could also produce any of the above, but with a reasonably human architecture to the resulting intelligence, or an architecture radically divergent from ours. Although which of those is "better" or "worse" is a rather open question.
Just because it has the power doesn't mean it should be used.
I'm not asking for everything to be some sort of beautiful code whose concision would lead Knuth to tears. I'm just asking that you not slather dozens of existing functions with three new parameters and dozens of lines of code each that basically do nothing, to cover a use case that I accidentally vaguely alluded to, if you read my prompt a certain way, but isn't really what I was interested in.
You can also read about people talking about this in the super-early computer user communities. When you had to be a bit crazy to even be interested in computers you ended up with people who were outliers in a lot of other ways too. As more people came in to the space it would regress to the mean... this is one of the things that "regression to the mean" can be regressing from.
Mmmmm... I think I may have to score this particular point for the CEO. Lovingly handcrafted code has been many things over the past 30 years, but "secure" is not one of the adjectives I'd apply to it. Anyone who thinks that the lovingly handcrafted code has always just been wonderfully secure needs to check the tint on their glasses.
A proper AI setup probably can produce more secure code more quickly than conventional development processes... however one of the keys will be to understand that yes, that will still be slower than writing code that is not rather carefully analyzed for security and a company like Proton had better have a strong commitment to never, ever skipping that step because it's slowing them down or it got expensive. "Proper" in "proper AI setup" is the most important word.
But that's not to say that I'm endorsing everything else he said. Even if it is true that companies will be able to stop hiring engineers, which at the moment I seriously doubt [1], a company like Proton should expect to be one of the last companies who can do that, not be getting publicly excited about it first. Hey we dumped all our engineers because our managers can just prompt our AIs just as well here in October 2026 would definitely be a "instantly cancel any Proton services I had" signal for me.
[1]: One of the things I don't expect to change is that there are plenty of people I would describe my actual day-to-day work to and they would consider it a living hell if they had to do it. I still quite enjoy it overall. And there are plenty of jobs that other people love and I would consider a living hell. Even in 25 years that's going to be the case. There will be people willing to put up with the process of working with the system to create this stuff... but the people who are willing to be professional about this, do the QA, do the work beyond the first fun prompts, is going to be a minority, and an even smaller minority who take the time to get good at it. There will always be people who are better and people who are worse.
It's called a Nintendo emulator.
That's kind of the point here.
Code isn't going anywhere. It can be literally billions or trillions of times more efficient than an AI, and as AIs scale up that number just continues to grow and can completely plausibly hit quadrillions in our lifetime. What relationships humans have with code is a completely different question, but the idea itself isn't going anywhere. Anyone who thinks otherwise has failed to grasp just what producing a single token from an AI actually entails.
What makes this so politically unpalatable is that having constantly bailed out the last few cycles, everyone is now operating on the assumption that they will be bailed out, so many entities who in a more perfect world would know better have done a lot of stupid things, like pensions that have a lot of bonds that will go bad if the AI bubble collapses.
Frankly we're looking at massive problems and upheaval at this point no matter what we do. But the advantage of not socializing the losses is that the signals of what needs to be changed go directly into the economy. Socializing the losses means that the signals get muted, confused, and mangled and people in the future end up doing the wrong things as a result.
Unfortunately, at this point I think the choice is between people clearly and forthrightly losing massive portions of their retirement as visible losses, or people deceptively losing massive portions of their retirement as the bailout creates massive inflation and their retirement is inflated until it has a fairly similar amount of losses. Unfortunately, it is a feature for the rulers that the bailouts obscure the losses and dampen the correct apportionment of blame, even as it destroys the underlying economy. Giving people clear, correct targets for their rage, the same process of correct pain apportionment the economy needs to become healthy again, would point people at the "wrong" clear, correct targets, and the clear, correct targets are the ones deciding whether or not a bailout occurs. Not just the literal lawmakers nominally making the call, but the entire system that makes the decision.
So plan on bailouts.
Careful readers may note the complete lack of the word "China" in the previous paragraph. But, yes, technically it is even that much more dangerous to have a whole bunch of potentially-hackable robots roaming up and down all your transportation corridors that were also created by your major economic and military rival.
But I don't even like it when it isn't created by your rival, though, because there's no guarantee that your rival can't hack anybody's software. I fear the day when some significant fraction of cars on the road are given instructions to floor the pedal and then do a hard turn to the left 10 seconds later. (Or the right for countries where that is the "turn into oncoming traffic" direction.)
19 hours: https://stealmybitcoin.com/
Part of the confusion is that the initial PR for the release made it sound like there was a ready-to-go exploit that was just push button, get shell on any PHP server in the world. That turned out not to be the case, as evidenced by the fact that the number was 19 hours and not 19 minutes.
But the fact that it was 19 hours and not "never" also does provide a data point that everything that was vulnerable really was vulnerable, it just may not have been quite as vulnerable as it was initially presented. Still plenty vulnerable, of course.
My point here being that the initial 24 hours were very confusing and I think it's worth remembering that and giving people grace for it. Even now, I've heard rumors of an exploit that does work on all boxes without making changes for a specific target but I'm not actually sure whether that exists or not. (Any further info welcome.)
Second, no, it isn't. Pypy is really fast compared to Python. "Compared to Python" is just about the lowest bar there is, though. In absolute terms it is still only a medium-fast language runtime, and it comes with a lot of costs and tradeoffs.
That's the problem with Python. Lots of ways to take a very slow language and make it a medium-fast language with substantial tradeoffs, or make it a fast language with enormous tradeoffs. If you can handle the tradeoffs, fine. But if you can't you just need to switch to a language that is fast without anywhere near as many tradeoffs.
I can say you need to be careful. It sounds like you've written in to the definition of a "token" that it is "meaningless", and that is a philosophical overreach, not an accurate statement. As the reply chain correctly tried to point out, nothing stops the same process that turns your abstract, "meaningless" number that represents your shares of stock into a meaningful number from being applied to a block chain token. Our entire economy is made from top to bottom out of "meaningless" things given meaning by convention, law, and other forces. Getting too reductionistic leaves you confused about not just tokens but a lot of things.
And on the flip side, if you actually dig in to what a "share of stock" that "you" "own" is, it is already not "some fractional ownership that carries legal rights and a claim on assets" and is already more complicated, abstract, and partial than you think. Just as the token advocates want you to think of a token as something more than it is, the stock system is not in a hurry for you to understand what it is you actually hold, but it certainly is not simply some fractional ownership in the simple way you probably have in mind, and there are more exceptions and caveats and legal ways you don't really own it as much as you think already in the system. It's already more a mere "token", in the sense you originally meant, then you realize.
The rest of the limitations are regulatory, and if the wrapping token can get access to regulatory approval to do their thing, so can the stocks.
The whole thing feels skeevy as all get out to me. It feels like someone telling me that they'll be happy to hold my mortgage between me and the current holder. There is no good reason for that. Frankly there is already a disturbing amount of indirection in the way you don't actually own the stocks you think you do, but they're held on behalf of you on behalf of your broker at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. Adding another layer of indirection makes me worry about the motives of the people who are very excited about being that layer.
The idealized form of a prediction market doesn't take positions.
This is a long, long, long way from "prediction markets don't take positions".
Plus they don't have to in order to create the effects I'm talking about. We've already seen plenty of what people are calling "insider trading", though it may not legally match the usual meaning of the term. All that is necessary is that it becomes clear over time that making bets is a sucker's game because the events aren't just ambiently happening but being forced by somebody with a lot of money to make. It isn't particularly important whether those bets are made by people who directly work for the prediction market itself.
The problem is that Python just isn't going to go fast. There are some languages that may have had more resources poured into them to make them go faster in absolute terms, like perhaps Java. But I don't think there's a single language that has had so many ways of trying to make it go faster given so much effort over so many decades. It's really time to call it... if you have Python code and it's a performance problem, if one of the many many many different solutions aren't adequate for some reason, Python is not going to get any faster than it is today and you're going to have to move off of it.
If you need high performance code, Python is simply not the right answer and you're going to have to skill up. Or accept what you have, which you'll have to decide if that's a viable option. If it's fast enough I don't advocate switching casually. But if it isn't, there isn't a realistic prospect that you're going to wake up in a year or two to a 30x-faster Python. I wasn't terribly convinced by that claim back in the early 2000s, but it hadn't really been tested yet. It has been tested now.
Who wins in the market?
It's not a uniform answer. There are times and places where the first one wins, as well as a mixed strategy. But I think broadly speaking the majority answer is the second.
And then my wife has a completely different spray of spam. The amusing thing to me is that for both of us, while some of it is clearly a matter of what we're doing, she also has weird random stuff on those occasions I am tasked to find what happened to some email, and it's completely different weird random stuff.
I don't know what I did, but this election I've also been getting hammered by spam texts. I hadn't before. Not only that, it is as the author of this piece mentions, rather widely targeted. Messages that are clearly sent from the presumption that I agree with their politics despite very much not doing so... you know, the scare texts where they send "If you don't donate to us immediately the opponent is going to DO X IMMEDIATELY" and you're all like, my gosh, we should be so lucky that X would actually happen immediately but no, that's not actually going to happen. Clearly completely mistargeted. Which leads me to think even the ones I nominally wouldn't hate could well just be random luck too. And for me at least, this was a single change... from nothing last election to every single side and every shuckster trying to push poll me from every direction at once.
It is true that, abstractly, this is a bad idea in the long run for many reasons. However, it's a good idea in the short term. It's a really good idea in the short term, at least from a superficial analysis. And we can expect that someone is going to do that superficial analysis. It only takes one in the entire industry.
A simple glance at history in this space says that the odds that someone is going to do this are for all practical purposes 1. The only question is whether it is already happening, and with high likelihood the correct question is how much it is already happening. It always starts small and they get bolder and bolder. None of this is subtle. None of this requires some sort of careful read of history carefully parsing out a tiny hint here and a whiff of a suggestion there. It's the completely obvious and repeatable strange attractor for gambling at this scale. As is the fact this will eventually blow up in some sort of scandal, after which it will end up heavily regulated again, until another generation or two goes by and forgets why gambling was fenced off.
Most of the cycle has happened once already within my personal lifetime. Major League Baseball had a pretty bad blowup in the late 1980s. Although as with some other vices, the fact that it is sitting there, in your pocket all the time, hooked up to Skinner-box mechanics in real time, is a new twist.
For bonus points society can also get to rediscover why simply banning it has never been all that successful either. Fencing it off seems to be the stable outcome that minimizes damage.
In the meantime the name of the game is to stay clear of the blast radius, and if you are a pro-social type, to try to figure out how to help the people who will get badly, badly hurt in the meantime until society puts the pieces together again.
This seems like an interesting test case to build up for AI models.
The question is really about the fate of the current build out. For those of us who have extensive experience with AI I think it's not so surprising that it isn't necessarily immediately radically transforming every industry everywhere. Even as it has rewritten the minute-by-minute process of doing my job entirely, it hasn't actually changed my job all that much at the higher level and it's hard to assign much more than a 2x or a 2.5x overall improvement to it once I account for all the Amdahl's Law issues that come up from the parts that have not been so amenable to acceleration.
Assuming you even care about legality, of course.
Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.
And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.
I've also read some summaries of even more papers, but yes, actually read papers, beyond the abstract.
It is by no means impossible for an AI-written code base to be faster than a conventionally-written one, of course. It's just a time to be suspicious. Especially if there's little to no evidence that the human has subjected the code base to any further testing of their own. AIs seen to be able to benchmarkmax even in the presence of a lot of unit tests that would generally speaking have prevented a human from going too far down that road.
There may be a concern going forward with locking things down. One can lament that AIs need to be prompted to "hit the literature" directly or they don't really think about it, prefering random web pages most of the time. But at least at the moment science is more open and accessible than ever before.
I do hold out some hope that in this pendulum swing we can land at least for a while on banning state sponsored gambling, though. It'll come back. Too appealing to keep down forever, unfortunately. I like to say it's a good exercise to sit down and really think about the difference between "organized crime" and a "government" but when a "government" does things like zealous defense of its gambling monopoly it does rather weaken the distinction....
A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.