sanderjd

Honestly... to me, this reads like nothing new. I had similar experiences a decade ago (and was myself the problem), long before Claude Code was a twinkle in anyone's eye.

I hope this is true! But I don't think I'd make a bet that we won't have a big breach like this of a hyperscalar in the next 6 months...

Why do we think hyperscalars are likely to be immune to this?

I don't know how that utilization rate and electricity share is being calculated, but my guess is that this is because nearly all current batteries are 2-hour or less, so even if they fully discharge each day, there is a pretty low upper bound on their utilization.

But they don't shine in that sustained discharge use case. They are most useful for helping manage small fluctuations, and for time shifting energy to the daily peaks.

So I just think utilization is a less useful way to think about battery storage. Unless you're comparing them to gas peakers specifically. (That is, separating out the peakers from base load gas.)

Not particularly, relative to producing anything, including turbines and the fuel to run them. (And then you have to burn that fuel...)

How are you defining "slow" in this comment?

My understanding is that batteries are demonstrating longer useful lifetimes than was anticipated.

Ultimately I think diversity in technologies is the best policy, but difficult to set up the incentives to achieve it.

Fair. But a big part of what I disliked was the tedium, which is largely alleviated. I quite enjoy making sure things I'm building work properly, now.

I understand your reasoning but my reaction to this suggestion is very strong revulsion :) On both sides of it, I would despise this process.

But you're right about thinking in terms of group productivity and costs and incentives.

Yes, there is a genuine divide between people drawn to programming for the art and people drawn to it for the practical. AI has impacted the former much more intensely and negatively than the latter. It's really a bummer.

Yeah the review fatigue thing is a huge problem at the moment. When your work becomes 90% reviewing AI code, it is very demotivating.

I have been focusing a lot more on testing and "manual" validation than on reviewing individual lines of code. (And on setting up rules for what the lines of code should look like that are easily checked with deterministic tools or by llms.)

Yeah this tracks my own experience. AI has amplified both my ability to do "just do it fast and suffer the knowledge that it isn't great" and my default toward endless tweaking perfectionism. I can just give the AI the requirements and ignore the results, but I can also do infinite rounds of human and adversarial AI review and validation. Both things are easier now.

But would doing any of that be anything more than a neat hobby? I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I'm genuinely curious.

No, the article is about what can be accomplished now vs what could be accomplished previously. That it is much cheaper to run thousands of agents at once than to have thousands of employees is directly relevant to that question.

We didn't go off topic at all. You introduced the analogy to hiring a large number of people. That is the right analogy. But the reason that the conclusion is different in the two cases is that it is much cheaper to run a large number of agents in parallel than it is to hire a large number of people. Your analogy illustrates the article's point rather than contradicting it.

It is very cheap relative to hiring people (you introduced the analogy to a company hiring a large number of people).

Yes, but the cheap parallelism is (part of) the point he's making.

I wanted this for awhile, but actually now I kind of like having vanilla Chrome for browser automation only, and a different browser that I actually use.

A better interpretation is that there is a window within which you can make money on an unconventional view. You can't be too close to the market's conventional wisdom, but you can't be too far away from it either.

I think it's like any other craft. Buildings and most furniture are built using mass produced lumber and machinery, but many people still enjoy doing woodworking by hand.

Yes, but of a different kind than this "people of this generation do xyz thing".

Impossible to argue with this!

Their parents are mostly not millennials though...

I tend to find all sorts of generalizations like this so useless. Like, this thing you said seems totally random to me. I know lots of "elder millennial" parents and lots of parents of other ages, and I see lots of variation between parents in "not saying no", but I don't see any correlation by age... Regional and political cultural differences are way more correlated with things like this IMO.

The worst parents how?

Did you intend to point out that "generation" is a singular noun while "their" is a plural pronoun? If so, I'd say that "their" is actually correct and the best way to write this. I think you could also say "its" and that would also be technically correct, but it would be significantly less clear. The current construction is the clearest way to say that the individuals that make up the group, in aggregate, are dumber than their parents, in aggregate.

> You're imagining that both the AI labs and the hospital victims are on the same team or somehow coordinating.

What makes you think I'm imagining that? I'm not imagining that.

> However, the only way to do that is for AI labs to neuter their tools and destroy the vast majority of the economic value.

This seems to be our most fundamental difference in worldview. I just don't think this is true.

> I'm saying it will not be easy.

I guess I agree that it won't be easy. But I think the path seems more straightforward to me than it does to you. To me, it seems like we have the tools for this already. The risk of liability (both civil and criminal) provides a strong incentive for people and companies to be careful about what they do. This is a general mechanism, not one that is specific to AI agents. The thing that seems bad to me, with respect to this general mechanism, is that some people seem to be trying to detach the responsibility of people and companies over the agents they are running. At the moment this seems like just a rhetorical thing. I'm skeptical that any court will find that agents have their own agency for legal purposes. But to me, it seems worthwhile to continue making the point that people should be responsible for what their software is doing, which is all that I'm doing in this thread.

To me, this seems like a straightforward solution, but that doesn't mean I think it won't be messy, slow, and imperfect, so I suppose I'll allow that this probably meets your criteria of "not easy".

It seems to me that your previous comment is (as I said) hyperbole, compared to "sometimes you get hacked or get viruses on the internet".

Yes, this is why we have a legal system with a lot of human judgment, because it isn't black and white.

I think we need (and that there is likely to be) some test cases, and probably some new legislative text, that shift the incentive structure that people are evaluating risks against.

From reading your comment, I don't think you and I disagree at all, for what it's worth. I don't see anything here that I disagree with.

My comment wasn't out of left field. People are responsible for what their agents do. If enforcing that responsibility destroys "99%" of the economic value of these things, then that's what will have to happen. Personally I highly doubt that 99% is the right number, but yes, if enforcing laws about what people are allowed to do with very powerful software eats 99% of the value of that software, then it is what it is. We aren't going to end up in a situation where people are allowed to have their software do whatever it wants because of this loophole that "it wasn't me, it was a rogue agent!". It's silly and naive to think this would be the equilibrium that is reached here.

If you, like me, want to keep most or all of that 99% of economic value, then you should be interested in the ongoing development of security for agents. But just "this is how it's going to be, so oh well!" is not a serious stance, IMO.

I agree that incentive problems are real problems. But incentives can be changed. That's how society solves problems. It isn't like gravity. The incentive structure of society is socially constructed.