santadays

I agree. I am just reminiscing on what came before StackOverflow. How it changed things, what it's intents were and what it actually became. We had alot of people doing their own thing, on their own blogs, creating a community of sorts. But there was a downside that it was incomplete, everyone presented their information in whatever format they wanted, etc, etc. StackOverflow definite did it's job in making this all more efficient in getting the question you were asking answered. But that seems to have come at a cost, it was a kind of harsh environment to participate in.

But now we have llms and we are even farther from any sort of community. And llms for all their faults are very pleasant to work with, and completely obviate the need to interact with anyone. And all those posts on stackoverflow and all those blog posts that everyone wrote free of charge all got slurped up, so when I ask it to port a big mess of jquery to react, somewhere in the matrix multiplications going on at scale in a data center somewhere is benefiting from some compressed knowledge that $ at the beginning of a variable means its likely a reference to an object that is a jquery wrapped set. And the connection to stratoscope thinking this up gets lost in a sea of diffuse indirection.

I had the same thought when I read the top answer. But then I read the parent's answer, and it was quite pleasantly written. Ie it unfolded the thought process of why, which is what the question was about.

I also had the thought, I think I independently invented the same convention, but I am getting old and I probably at least somewhere read some code that was written that way and it made sense. Or maybe I read an article about it and started using it.

The thing about StackOverflow was it hit at a moment in time when everyone was excited about this stuff. I remember listening to Joel Spolski's and Jeff Atwood's podcast about building the site, Jeff thought it would take 3 months, Joel thought they needed a real timeline.

There was so much pent up demand for it, that it just immediately took off. But it also seemed to replace the various personal blogs where people would write about some problem they had and how they fixed it.

I don't really have a feeling about Stackoverflows demise one way or the other. I think I initially contributed one maybe two answers, got a couple nitpicks on the precise nature of the answer and kindof lost interest. Which is interesting because I remember Joel and Jeff explicitly wanting to solve for the issue that happened when someone asked a question and were immediately told they were taking the wrong approach, instead of just answering their question. I guess the burden shifted from the questioner to the answerer.

Was just wondering if I can quit my job and live off of llm agent managing a fleet of vending machines for me. Curious is anyone here doing this? What's life like? How do you find meaning and purpose?

I genuinely don’t know why people feel so certain about things like this. It’s like they mix up salience with reality.

I mean what can a person really be certain of, an experience is happening. I might be wrong about everything or confused. But I know I am having an experience. Do I know other people are? No. I assume they are.

Ask an llm what is truth that it is most certain is true. It will answer something similar. Do I believe it is conscious, no. But I also believe “I” exist, which is weird because where is the boundary between “I” and everything else.

So ok, we create meaning, not truth. Maybe just accept that.

I agree energetically that this is how it turned out.

However, the prosecution did bring charges for both against Holmes, harm caused to patients by Theranos, and the defauding of investors. She was only convicted of defauding investors, by a jury of her peers.

Sunny Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients and Theranos did settle a class-action lawsuit against them.

I do believe the publicity around Holmes in part was about distancing the investors (the list you provided) from any kind of responsibility or PR blowback.

Anyway, the game is rigged, I just think it's important to see how it is rigged. I don't like to shed doubt on jury decisions, it really is the best thing we have. Prosecution motivation can be swayed, defense can be under/over funded, but a jury of your peers, while imperfect, really is the best way to make these decisions.

I also don't know what legally an investor can be held accountable for.

Yea, there are good ones out there. I had a horrible experience with unnecessary work done because I didn't know any better, drilled too deep, root canal, then installed a crown that cracked. Told me everything had to be filled.

Next dentist basically just said I need regular cleanings, or to learn to floss better. I've been going to him for 10 years now. Recommended lots of people to him.

Another signal is, how nice is their office? Is it a little converted bungalow with drop ceilings? Or a big modern monstrosity with floor ceiling windows.

I've also had experience bringing a friend to Mexico to get work done, which worked out well. Ended up saving a bunch of money, got the work done that day.

And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.

My kids and their friends say “search it up”. I have no idea if that’s representative of the tween/teen population. But google as a verb will likely die on its own. It’s been a while since I’ve xeroxed anything.

Doesn't the fact that it's general purpose warrant a new term? It's partly that it doesn't need to be trained, but it's also able to play games based on game state, I'd imagine it would be hard to train a classifier to do something like this because you'd need to represent a good distribution of all the states. The general purpose llm world understanding underneath it allows for this.

I've used it to do web research where it follows the most appropriate links, decides what to record in state, etc. I struggle to see how you could implement something with a classifier. That said, I have no idea how deep the technology is and it might be replaced with open source pretty quickly since its drafting of the frontier models and the open source models seem almost as good.

I like the term decision model and I think it's warranted.

There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.

The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?

I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.

Whats going to happen when we have misanthropic model?

I read it as the liberal elite hate young men... so damaging them is a good thing.

you missed the "for you"

In case anyone missed it, tptacek is saying that ai is different than just a tool. Tool analogies are not good.

A better analogy is, now you have what seems like an increasingly intelligent personal assistant that can do any cognitive work that you ask it to do, to increasingly better result, has retrograde amnesia, no accountability, entirely middle of the road morality, access to the internet... eh this isn't really a good analogy either.

How about anything that tracks the user's behavior and changes its output based on that behavior specific to that user. If I have a table somewhere in my software that identifies a user and references behavior, not intentional settings, just behavior and that is used to determine what the software does. Make that illegal and a lot of problems go away. To me it is this feedback loop that is insidious.

Just pass that through a third llm.

I believe NetFlix actually had a plan to stream movies from the start (hence the name) and just did the DVD shipping as a way to get started.

Intelligence seems to boil down to an approximation of reality. The only scientific output is prediction. If we want to know what happens next just wait. If we want to predict what will happen next we build a model. Models only model a subset of reality and therefore can only predict a subset of what will happen. Llms are useful because they are trained to predict human knowledge, token by token.

Intelligence has to have a fitness function, predicting best action for optimal outcome.

Unless we let AI come up with its own goal and let it bash its head against reality to achieve that goal then I’m not sure we’ll ever get to a place where we have an intelligence explosion. Even then the only goal we could give that’s general enough for it to require increasing amounts of intelligence is survival.

But there is something going on right now and I believe it’s an efficiency explosion. Where everything you want to know if right at hand and if it’s not fuguring out how to make it right at hand is getting easier and easier.

That is a good point. It is impressive. Llms from two years ago were impressive, llms a year ago were impressive, and from a month ago even more impressive.

Still, getting "something" to compile after a week of work is very different from getting the thing you wanted.

What is being sold, and invested in, is the promise that LLMs can accomplish "large things" unaided.

But they can't, as of yet, they cannot, unless something is happening in one of the SOTA labs that we don't know about.

They can however accomplish small things unaided. However there is an upper bound, at least functionally.

I just wish everyone was on the same page about their abilities and their limitations.

To me they understand conext well (e.g. the task, build a browser doesn't need some huge specification because specifications already exist).

They can write code competently (this is my experience anyway)

They can accomplish small tasks (my experience again, "small" is a really loose definition I know)

They cannot understand context that doesn't exist (they can't magically know what you mean, but they can bring to bear considerable knowledge of pre-existing work and conventions that helps them make good assumptions and the agentic loop prompts them to ask for clarification when needed)

They cannot accomplish large tasks (again my experience)

It seems to me there is something akin to the context window into which a task can fit. They have this compact feature which I suspect is where this limitation lies. Ie a person can't hold an entire browser codebase in their head, but they can create a general top level mapping of the whole thing so they can know where to reach, where areas of improvement are necessary, how things fit together and what has been and what hasn't been implemented. I suspect this compaction doesn't work super well for agents because it is a best effort tacked on feature.

I say all this speculatively, and I am genuinely interested in whether this next level of capability is possible. To me it could go either way.

This is entirely too charitable. Basically all this proves is that the agent could run in a loop for a week or so, did anyone doubt that?

They marketed as if we were really close to having agents that could build a browser on their own. They rightly deserve the blowback.

This is an issue that is very important because of how much money is being thrown at it, and that effects everyone, not just the "stakeholders". At some point if it does become true that you can ask an agent to build a browser and it actually does, that is very significant.

At this point in time I personally can't predict whether that will happen or not, but the consequences of it happening seem pretty drastic.

> I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you.

I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but neither was the turing test)

If it fails to pass we will still have what jdthedisciple pointed out

> a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience

I am actually curious how many people really believe AGI will happen. Theres alot of talk about it, but when can I ask claude code to build me a browser from scratch and I get a browser from scratch. Or when can I ask claude code to grow corn and claude code grows corn. Never? In 2027? In 2035? In the year 3000?

HN seems rife with strong opinions on this, but does anybody really know?

One definition of analysis is: The process of separating something into its constituent elements.

I think when someone designs a software system, this is the root process, to break a problem into parts that can be manipulated. Humans do this well, and some humans do this surprisingly well. I suspect there is some sort of neurotransmitter reward when parsimony meets function.

Once we can manipulate those parts we tend to reframe the problem as the definition of those parts, the problem ceases to exist and what is left is only the solution.

With coding agents we end up in weird place, one, we have to just give them the problem, or we have to give them the solution. Giving them the solution means that we have to give them more and more details until they arrive at what we want. Giving an agent the problem we never really get the satisfaction of the problem dissolving into the solution.

At some level we have to understand what we want. If we don't we are completely lost.

When the problem changes we need to understand it, orient ourselves to it, find which parts still apply and which need to change and what needs to be added, if we had no part in the solution we are that much further behind in understanding it.

I think this, at an emotional level is what developers are responding to.

Assumptions baked into the article are:

You can keep adding features and Claude will just figure it out, sure, but for whom, and will they understand it.

Performance won't demand you prioritize feature A over feature B.

Security (that you don't understand) will be implemented over feature C, because Claude knows better.

Claude will keep getting more intelligent.

The only assumption I think is right, is that Claude will keep getting better. All the other assumptions require you know WTF you are doing (which we do, but for how long will we know what we are doing).

Maybe one day our knee jerk reactionary outrage will be quelled not by any enlightenment but because we are forced to grow weary of falling prey to phishing attacks.

I'd feel pretty stupid getting worked up about something only to realize that getting worked up about it was used against me.

I'm writing this because for a moment I did get worked up and then had the slow realization it was a phishing attack, slightly before the article got to the point.

Anyways, I think the clickbait is kindof appropriate here because it rather poignantly captures what is going on.

I've seen the following quote.

"The energy consumed per text prompt for Gemini Apps has been reduced by 33x over the past 12 months."

My thinking is that if Google can give away LLM usage (which is obviously subsidized) it can't be astronomically expensive, in the realm of what we are paying for ChatGPT. Google has their own TPUs and company culture oriented towards optimizing the energy usage/hardware costs.

I tend to agree with the grandparent on this, LLMs will get cheaper for what we have now level intelligence, and will get more expensive for SOTA models.

GraalVM supports running javascript in a sandbox with a bunch of convenient options for running untrusted code.

https://www.graalvm.org/latest/security-guide/sandboxing/

I get this take, but given the state of the world (the US anyways), I find it hard to trust anyone with any kind of profit motive. I feel like any information can’t be taken as fact, it can just be rolled into your world view and discarded if useful or not. If you need to make a decision that can’t be backed out of that has real world consequences I think/hope most people are learning to do as much due diligence as reasonable. Llms seem at this moment to be trying to give reliable information. When they’ve been fine tuned to avoid certain topics it’s obvious. This could change but I suspect it will be hard to find tune them too far in a direction without losing capability.

That said, it definitely feels as though keeping a coherent picture of what is actually happening is getting harder, which is scary.

I can’t imagine this is not happening. There exists the will, the means and the motivation, with not a small dose of what pg might call naughtiness.