twitchard

although I'm unwilling to hook it ip to my main google account, I had it make its own. If you're willing to give it the keys to the kingdom maybe you get faster benefits.

I used it to try and buy a gift for my mom and Capital One froze my credit card.

I used it to try and work with my Obsidian and my GitHub but mostly I ran into snags with its permission model, basically there's no way for it to do anything useful here because it gets all weird about credentials.

I did eventually use it to successfully make some purchases but mostly I think it has been more of a time suck than a time saver.

If rule-based highlighting of syntax is meaningfully helpful for reading code then how come nobody uses rule-based syntax highlighting of prose?

Why don't we visually emphasize the verb in a sentence and deemphasize articles and prepositions, for example?

In prose the author can *bold* or italicize text to emphasize ad-hoc, or make ## headings for scanning. Why can't we do such ad-hoc emphases in code?

where's the thesis statement

Fwiw the teaching of the church is that (today's) AI isn't at a human level because human intelligence is something that we experience whereas artificial intelligence seems to be merely a sophistication in performing tasks.

This week's encyclical didn't go into this. Last year's "Doctrinal Note" (less authoritative) did though: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

and I did a write-up on it here: https://twitchard.github.io/posts/2025-06-28-the-catholic-ch...

Lol

404 This page could not be found.

Clearly they did delete it.

Coreutils gets updates regularly! https://gitweb.git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git

Even `ls` gets news flags from time to time.

I think "stopping" is great for software that people want to be stable (like `ls`) but lots of software (web frameworks, SaaS) people start using specifically because they want a stream of updates and they want their software to get better over time.

Not sure DORA is that much of an indictment. For "Change Failure Rate" for instance these are subject to tradeoffs. Organizations likely have a tolerance level for Change Failure Rate. If changes are failing too often they slow down and invest. If changes aren't failing that much they speed up -- and so saying "change failure rate hasn't decreased, obviously AI must not be working" is a little silly.

"Change Lead Time" I would expect to have sped up although I can tell stories for why AI-assisted coding would have an indeterminate effect here too. Right now at a lot of orgs, the bottle neck is the review process because AI is so good at producing complete draft PRs quickly. Because reviews are scarce (not just reviews but also manual testing passes are scarce) this creates an incentive ironically to group changes into larger batches. So the definition of what a "change" is has grown too.

Re: model Supremacy -- I think there's so much cross-pollination between the AI labs that this is unlikely. Everybody at these labs basically know what everybody at the other labs are doing. *data* can be hard to get but I don't think acquiring good data is positive feedback loop-y where whoever wins just skyrockets away from everybody else.

Model stagnation, I thought stagnation was coming last year, then Opus 4.5 came out. I think maybe the models are slowing at getting *smarter* per se, but they are still getting better at coding. And even if they stopped getting better at coding, if they got as good as they have gotten at coding on other fields of inquiry (like, say, writing) so I think we've got a ways to go yet before the progress in terms of economic usefulness slows down.

I don't think 10 minutes of AI experience is enough to be a master? AI-assisted software engineering is a skill that I want to get better at, just like traditional software engineering is.

Twice as fast, half as costly, too!

Why do you think that the human mind can contain semantics but a machine cannot? This argument needs some sort of dualism, or what Turing called "the objection from continuity" to account for this.

FWIW I don't think that the "triangularity" in my head is the true mathematical concept of "triangularity". When my son e.g. learned about triangles, at first the concept was just a particular triangle in his set of toy shapes. Then eventually I pointed at more things and said "triangle" and now his concept of triangle is larger and includes multiple things he has seen and sentences that people have said about triangles. I don't see any difficulty with semantics being "a matter of image", really.

Why do we believe that semantics can exist in the human mind but cannot exist in the internals of a machine?

Really "semantics"

I had come across this Catholic philosopher: https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig... who seems to make a similar argument to this; i.e. that it's the humans who give meaning to things, "logical symbols on a piece of paper are just a bunch of meaningless ink marks"

> What Turing was trying to do, is to isolate this "hard problem of consciousness" and separate it from easier problems we can actually answer.

Yes exactly. As a computer scientist this is a great thing to do, science is all about taking mushy concepts like "intelligence" and extracting simplified versions of them that are more tractable in technical settings. The trouble is, Turing doesn't seem to want to stop at merely arguing that forgetting about interior consciousness is useful for technical discussions -- he seems to think that interior consciousness shouldn't be important for philosophical or popular notions of thinking and intelligence, either, and that they should update to use something like his test.

So even if you updated the Turing Test for 2025 the church would probably still be writing "Antiqua et Nova" to remind people that -- yes, interior consciousness exists and is important and robot intelligence really isn't the same as human intelligence without it.

Crazy how many voice AI related updates there were this week. Grok voice mode, Alexa+, Hume OCTAVE, Elevenlabs Scribe SST... big day for Voice AI!

Crazy how many Voice AI announcements there were today: - Octave - Alexa+ - Elevenlabs "Scribe" speech-to-text

This is all coming on the heels of Grok 3's voice mode last week.

A paragraph like

> ...I am clearly worse than almost everyone that emails me along all of these dimensions. I only have a dim understanding of how my 3-4 years of experience coming from a strong background in psychology has rounded to "senior engineer", I've only ever written tests for personal projects because no employer I've ever seen actually had any working tests or interest in getting them, and I wrote the entirety of my Master's thesis code without version control because one of the best universities in the country doesn't teach it. In short, I've never solved a truly hard problem, I'm just out here clicking the "save half a million dollar" button that no one else noticed. I'm a fucking moron.

comes off to me as false modesty in the context of an essay that characterizes the majority of industry colleagues as "drowning sleepwalkers." Take it as a criticism of your writing persona, not a personal insult. You are right that I can't read minds, only the text in front of me.

I am glad you are mentioning specific books about software here in the comments. The essay had a very thoughtful and detailed discussion of books about drawing. If it had kept that energy when it turned to discussing software, instead of retreating into taking potshots at "the average developer", consultants, etc., it would come off to me like a persuasive essay rather than a self-congratulatory smugpiece.

Let me get this straight: you can be better than 90% of people if you just read a book, but wait, not just any book, it has to be the right book -- and also it doesn't have to be a book, it can also just be "lived experience" or technical documentation, that counts too.

At this point, the thesis is more qualification than statement. Mostly what I drew from the article is that the author feels smugly superior to many of his peers, and wants an excuse ("they didn't even read a book") to morally blame them for their (perceived) shortcomings, while serving up a generous helping of false modesty on the side.