munksbeer

I am also so grateful to hear this in response to my comment.

As far as I see it, I use the term "online fathers" in a rather cynical manner. In real life, I interact with parents who are struggling, I know some who are suffering from depression (I'm lucky to belong to a sports club where some dads unload). This is real life.

But go online and you'd think you're some sort of freak for not being completely transformed and having unconditional daily joy from being a dad.

By the way. The last week has been a good week. I've had a lot of work stress, but my children seem to have somehow sensed it and they're being extra kind to me, giving me lots of hugs and just wanting to be with me. It feels WONDERFUL. Like you, I love them more than I would have ever known, would literally die for them. But it is also ok to admit it is very hard, and there is a big loss of self and other aspects.

Keep going!

You may not have sat around twirling your moustache but you have actively been involved in an industry where the goal is to automate stuff that people would previously do manually. That is the entire point. Which, if you believe the message on many threads/posts here, puts people out of jobs.

I don't believe it is that black and white. Yes, automation eliminates some jobs, but overall moves everyone (on average) further up the productivity line, which improves lives, again, on average.

That is why we live like kings now compared to people of the past.

But circling back to the point, if AI does the same thing, eliminates expensive manual coding and other similar work, that is essentially the same thing we've been doing to other people for decades.

I agree. I'm a father of two, and my existence didn't suddenly get meaningful when I had children. I always found it meaningful, only in the sense that I get one life and want to experience as much as I can while I have it. That is a big part of why I chose to have children, it seemed like basically *the* fundamental life experience. But for me, I didn't experience this sudden big gain in meaning that a lot of online fathers seem to have.

I also wasn't prepared for a bit of a curve ball and I have experienced a loss of self that hasn't recovered or been compensated for yet.

I often wish I felt like a lot of other online fathers, but I take comfort in knowing there are a lot of others out there like me who struggle with parenthood. I hope I figure it all out in time!

A big part of this will be in-group signalling. Humans always do this, starting at the school playground. They adopt the habits of what they consider to be their in-group. It is why so much of the material (blogs, essays, comments on blogs, etc) come across as infuriating to the average reader.

In my opinion, verbosity is often used to swamp an argument, so brute forcing correctness. Just so I can swipe the ~~insult~~ critique more broadly, you often find the same on philosophy forums. You won't get engagement if you try to distil their arguments down to more concise points that are easier to debate or refute. You need to use the in-group signalling of lengthy posts, complicated language and appeal to authority.

(Just so you're aware, I'm aware, this is going to really annoy some people, nevertheless, I believe it is true).

How can you measure this? It's a cli where I type text in, and the tool fires it off to the model and runs commands locally. The model might be slow, but how would I notice if the cli was slow? Serious question.

Claude code works well enough. I don't encounter many bugs, and I use it for 6-12 hours a day.

What actual bugs do people have with it, and why do we think it is worse than a human coded tool?

I completely disagree with these assertions, but boy do I wish you would get your wish.

I'd love for the government to print a bunch of money eroding the value of my mortgage debt. I feel sorry for everyone who don't already own houses, because it'll push them even further out of their reach.

> And, yes, this is (capitalist) economic orthodoxy, the part of capitalism that rich people hate

No it most certainly is not, despite what MMT subscribers claim.

Don't use analogies to argue on the internet. Analogies can never be perfect, and this just gives people the chance to focus the argument on those imperfections in the analogy, rather than stick to the main point.

I wonder...

If I had inside information, and didn't want to make it obvious, I'd just take the opposite side of any bet for candidates I knew wouldn't win.

For a number of years I lived near "Mole House" in Hackney, London. The tunnels the guy dug there were ultimately illegal (no consent) and filled in. I wonder what the story for this house is, how he obtained permission to do this.

They are absolutely not to express disagreement? You want to hide opinions that you disagree with so other people don't see them? Christ, infantile.

> LLMs have been much more helpful for learning about mathematics topics than Wikipedia for a while now.

I can't imagine anyone but someone extremely gifted at first parse understanding learning mathematics from wikipedia. No effort is made to make it understandable for the average reader.

Do you remember Steorn? Orbo?

>In a post-AI world there’s a mountain of high quality work being published by people who actually know what’s going on. You can probably make a discovery with chatgpt right now, but why should someone who’s got a ton of things to do already read your article? You’re free to put it online, but why should you be free to force someone to read something?

But aren't you literally just proving what I'm saying? The original argument was that everyone should have to post through peer reviewed journals, I said that is probably gatekeeping too far, and your response above just confirms my suspicions.

> Second of all, it’s extremely aggravating to read all these software people criticizing mathematicians, who almost universally have low salaries and who chose to go into this profession because they care about contributing to human knowledge.

I probably agree with you, except I have never and am not criticising mathematicians. I am only saying that there are quite a lot of reports around that the academic world is fierce and that sometimes there are high barriers to getting something recognised.

No idea if it is true or not, but my personal opinion is that it isn't going to matter much in the future. If it exists, then people will work around any gatekeeping.

I freely admit I am not an academic. I just note that there is a lot of negative sentiment about people trying to get stuff published, and a lot of it looks from an external perspective to be elitist gatekeeping.

Please read that again, I am not on the inside here, so anything I say is just based on reading stuff from aspiring academics and articles in that mode. To my amateur eyes, there seems to be a problem in the academic world, of some sort, but how big it is, or isn't, I don't know.

Is that ok?

So, assume I, a complete amateur, no PhD, no connections or academic record to speak of (I have an MSc only, from the 90s, in a third world country) thinks I've discovered something, how do I go about "publishing"?

To me, I could easily see value where I self publish somewhere, where other similar non-connected people can see, crowd source the verification (basically peer review) and if it turns out to be useful, it'll be used.

Maybe it would be easy for me to get it formally published, but I doubt it.

Way too short sighted. You're still operating under the (mistaken) beliefs that

  1. The write terrible unmaintainable code
  2. They can't just improve any code retrospectively
  3. You're going to be maintaining it

I am now writing home projects where I am actually "vibe coding", to an extent. In my job, I can't do this because other people still review my work and will complain about things that don't match our human invented patterns for software development, and more importantly, I am actually responsible for this code and if it goes wrong our firm goes bust.

But, I genuinely mean it when I say that we are not far away from the point where verifications (functional, non-functional), as long as they're comprehensive enough, will be all that is required, and I don't expect to be reading the nitty gritty details of PRs in a few years time.

It is only a mess if it doesn't work correctly in a functional and non-functional sense. All other coding conventions are invented to make it easier for humans to maintain code. Agents don't care, they will happily chug away pressing the virtual keys endlessly, changing whatever the previous agent left.

Sort of. Hopefully the trend continues and we continue to get advances in the cheaper and open source models, but by all accounts, inside the frontier labs, they get to use much better models that they haven't released.

My main worry is that we get to a point where they have something much, much smarter than anything public and access is gated by extraordinarily high costs.

That probably can't happen though right? Inference is surprisingly cheap compared to the training.

Those seem reasonable apart from this one:

> - releasing papers using the normal process to allow peer review

I'm not an academic but I've heard enough stories about how this can very much act as gatekeeping that I don't think it is a good request.

I use a combination of prompting and hand crafting my code. Sometimes I'll sketch out the design in code, without details, other times I'll delete and change what the LLM has done. I'm still reviewing everything it does, because:

1. Other humans also review my code and I know they won't approve until they're ok with it anyway.

2. I don't trust that the verifications we have at the moment are good enough to catch the errors LLMs still make.

So trust me, I'm not a "vibe coder"

But I can see the writing on the wall. We're not really maximising the potential of these things by doing it this way. In my particular industry, we're in an arms race for clients who can easily move to a competitor. So we need to be continually improving. How I predict this unfolding is that we'll need to get much better at verification of correctness (functional and non-functional) and once that is satisfied, humans will stop manually writing and reviewing code, otherwise you'll just lose to your competitors. At least in my industry, maybe not all.

Visit /r/science

Their own rules forbid low effort posts:

  "No off-topic comments, memes, low-effort comments or jokes"

And yet every single topic is filled with exactly that any time I go to read anything. It can't be beyond their wit to get rid of that stuff.

Ok. I completely disagree.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying? To keep it simple, how much code do you expect will be written by humans in say, two years time?

> I agree, I think this false dichotomy between using LLMs and caring about quality/reliability needs to stop

You're not going to get people to stop doing that by arguing on the internet, but in the end it won't matter, because it will stop, naturally.

In the future, you'll just get left behind and not hired if you're building code by hand, it's that simple. Even traditional code reviews are going to go away. It'll be more about the scope and then verifying correctness.

Look up Constraint-Driven Design or Declarative Engineering

It is inevitable. We (coders) already did it to other engineering disciplines where machines do most of the work, no human could possibly review or understand the actual details, and only verification ensures it is correct.

Why do you think coding is immune to this?

What part is not true?

You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha? Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.

The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.

You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha?

Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.

The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.

I honestly have no expert knowledge about this stuff. What I say is based only on intuition.

  - China is heavily, heavily incentivised to enhance their own chip making
  - Looking at the rate Chinas has expanded into just about every single other
    space, and from quantity to quality, I just think it is impossible that they
    don't compete on equal grounds pretty soon.
  - I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC