titzer

It all makes sense when you realize that the global fossil fuel industry is going all-in on their hold out market, the USA, with astronomical levels of corruption and propaganda to keep the gas guzzlers guzzlin'.

> These are both signs of a maturing market.

Hmm. 16 million cars sold in the US each year. 1.2 million EVs sold each year. "Maturing" at less than 8% market share is not a good sign.

> Litigation on this is still playing out...these to swing back into force with a change of government

Have you not lived in the US, like ever? It will take anywhere from approximately a decade to never to claw back even a fraction of an progressive legislation or regulation.

> We should expect Tesla sales to fall...when [vague new things come out]

Falling sales is sign of market maturity?

Tell me again how the code quality of the Linux kernel doesn't matter, only its business value.

In my experience, the clankers can write great code when you give it a hole with the right shape in the bigger picture of code that looks how you like. I had the experience of setting a clanker loose on Wizard to go implement a Wasm proposal[1] that had reached stage 4, and it wrote the canonical V3 interpreter implementation, fast assembly interpreter implementation, and JIT support, as well as code validation and fitting the rest into the system, in just 40 minutes, complete with tests. The VM code was canonical. There wasn't a line I would have written otherwise. In the end it was only 144 lines. But it was the right 144 lines.

Clankers can do things right when they are given clear instructions and good context. They go bad when they are given agency and no oversight. What I have seen repeatedly is that even small amounts of correction to turn a refactoring this way or that way or make a better modularity decision, or to enforce a boundary that wasn't written down, helps a lot. Clankers don't know about your implicit information hiding going on. They don't know you've been working for years to get rid of a bad code smell that spread faster than you could stamp it out, or that you've been working on the same codebase for 10+ years and only now understand how you'd like to structure it.

Some people use the clanker to get something out of nothing. As engineers, we should be using them to engineer the heck out of things that we didn't have human effort available for. Things like refactoring, testing, cleaning up documentation, doing optimizations, simplifying, introducing proper interfaces, removing improper interfaces, etc.

[1] The wide-arithmetic proposal, which added 4 instructions with very well-specified behavior.

This is what we are not supposed to talk about. The people outnumber the ruling class, and, operating all the means of production, could wield power by simply going on strike, bringing them to heel long before revolution is necessary.

People won't do it today because they are both comfortable and too chained to their current jobs. They are increasingly divided by culture war bullshit that is not at all relevant to the important parts of society, like accountability for leadership.

> But as an counterexample, do we need to hold machine code or assembly, generated from our C or Golang programs, in our heads?

No, the source is enough, because the low-level assembly is translated from the high-level source descriptions (a sound programming language with a complete and consistent specification) via a deterministic algorithmic translation process (a compiler) to a low-level executable that can run on a machine. Today, compilers are complex, but still human understandable. The programs are equivalent, and we're getting better able to actually prove this.

This is why I bristle when people say "post your prompts". Your prompts are not a program and the magic box is not a compiler.

Too many people abandoning everything, either due to laziness, mental overload, or..."skill issues".

I still want to see code. I want write code, check code, optimize and refactor code. I don't want to spend a lot of time debugging, but maybe a little.

The clankers should be accelerating the parts of the process we are bad at, and that takes time we won't spend: long, time-consuming refactors, debugging deep issues, writing crap tons of tests, investigating performance issues, digesting other people's code.

AI should be more like a bicycle than a cruise ship. And I mean the "bicycle for the mind" that Jobs wanted.

Accountability absolutely starts at the top. If we expect to re-establish accountability for rubes first while turning a blind eye to those in power, then we are just playing into their hands.

So you knew a jerk who liked Star Trek?

Let's start with basic accountability, like swift and just punishment when those in power break the law.

I lived in Australia for a year during COVID. It's surrounded by water and doesn't have thousand-mile long borders to any country. Controlling entry is not the same logistical problem as controlling entry to the US.

That said, a lot of US's immigration problems has been neglect to enforce immigration law, deliberate sabotaging of legislation throughout the years, and multiple broad amnesty decrees that basically broke the system. The system is broken by design and almost tailor-made to foment anti-immigrant sentiment that has sparked this new, ugly phase driven by unaccountable maniacs.

> They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.

Unapologetically, then tried to frame each of these people as radicals who deserved it. And there is no investigation, no punishment, no accountability.

It is the utter shamelessness and craven dodging of responsibility that is criminal.

And the American media and American populace do not hold their feet to the fire.

There is no line they won't eventually cross, and the slide into the abyss is accelerating.

Not a peep from the second amendment types. Curious.

Yeah but they are only targeting bad people, so it's OK.

Basically any time a corrupt regime is hiding something it's either bad or embarrassing--usually both.

In German it's Künstliche Intelligenz, which is another one of those curious English/German correspondences where even parts of words line up--Kunst is "art" and künstlich is "artificial".

I'm saying I wish they did more user studies where they actually asked people what they wanted the software to do, instead of lacing it with creepy telemetry that tells them that less-often-used functionality is...less-often-used, and that they would stop removing said less-often-used functionality.

"I want a steak dinner." Yeah, but based on usage patterns, here's some cigarettes and beer. /s

You're right. Better keep to not asking and just weirdly spy on them, concluding the emergency recovery buttons are never used, and remove them.

Yeah but they keep moving the buttons for no reason and somehow 34GB OS updates only result in rounded corners and less functionality.

> Once your Python warms up

How long does that take?

I'm going to be the cynical one and offer this translation: "Our results are too important to wait for the pesky peer review, so we are dumping a whole ton of money in a fund and giving some elites a breathless first look so our buzz keeps getting jacked up."

The reality that Science is a grind and there are thousands of new results every year discovered by regular humans who use a regular human process to cross-check and review.

Treating every result from the AI like a gift from god is getting tiring.

Yeah I forgot how we collectively decided that those people with money automatically get more money because they have money.

> to those who want to buy the world

Oh, they don't need to buy it, they already inherited from their rich parents. The world is just a set of trading cards to them at this point.

Elon Musk's fake money could buy a new $10 million mansion every single day--every single day--for THREE CENTURIES, and he wants more!

Society is delusional. We can't even collectively agree to tax psychotic money-grubbers who cannot even enjoy the fake wealth they have their names on.

When you're a celebrity, they let you do it.

s/think they//g

> would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them

Hello, black and white thinking.

Personally I just find it soul-crushingly dystopian that a few people have hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of wealth and we laud their mental illnesses while at the very same time, people die because of lack of health care.

I find it morally reprehensible as a society that we constantly cater to the needs of nepo babies instead of taking away just a fraction of their ungodly wealth to actually help people.

So much of the dialog around "capitalism" paints everything that is not Soviet or Mao-style communism as "capitalism", when in reality all economies are mixed. Democratic governments and regulatory bodies shape the economic landscape. The diversity and makeup of the marketplace makes a big difference.

A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.

When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.

But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.

If by this you mean that engineering is about meeting specifications. If by this you mean half assing some janky shit that barely clanks over, then no.

> a competitor to Google search

Fielding a web index takes a massive amount of compute and storage of a very different kind than what Anthropic is using. AI is extremely heavy on GPU, maybe somewhat on storage but (comparatively) light on CPU. They need CPU to train coding agents, obviously, but scaling to a billion user web search is a whole different thing.

> The entire supply chain coordinates using these embedded sensors and control systems to make sure you always have safe food available at the lowest possible cost.

I think the entire supply chain is making sure it has maximum profits extractable by law and any other emergent phenomena you observe is serendipitous and probably temporary, damaged or dropped as soon as the regulatory environment or marketplace changes to allow another dime of profit.