bbor

Sure, it’s not a spreadsheet application. But were talking about prose here, not spreadsheets. A lot of that is covered by editor commands and auto formatting, though definitely not the final example.

I think you might just be used to trying to edit markdown without any syntax highlighting…? The Bactic thing is particularly worrying. I don’t really understand how a changed inline fence could reflow whole paragraphs (i.e. effect multiple blocks) in the first place, but even if it were to, it should be obvious as soon as you type it due to changed highlighting.

And search and replace… I definitely don’t relate to that. Regex handles that pretty trivially, but I’ve also never run into the need to replace a phrase that is sometimes partially marked up — seems niche?

I love any appreciation of markdown, but I think this particular essay attacks the very basis of my sphinxian soul in two ways:

1. There’s no acknowledgement of the rich ecosystem of markdown dialects, which add all sorts of incredible features as simple as inline citations and as complex as full roles and directives. They all need highlighting.

2. There’s author claims to like markdown, but then it becomes clear that they don’t like markdown itself, they just like it being behind a rendered WYSIWYG editor. Which… :( headers should look like headers and tables should look like tables, yes, but not at the cost of removing any of the syntax characters! If you do, you’re sacrificing the whole point of the format: ease of modification.

Clearly their heart is in the right place, though. I absolutely loathe sites that don’t support markdown; there is *zero* reason not to do something _this_ important! ~~I dare say it would be something that the three mods and their uninvolved monarch should go to bed every night feeling ashamed of…~~

Yes, many posts in this technology and business forum are about the ongoing singularity. Wouldn't the alternative be very strange?

Ok so first off I haven't done this in the agential era myself. In fact, I've made multiple (small/toy-ish) TUIs in the meantime! So I'm something of a hypocrite off the bat lol -- my only excuse is that I'm pretty darn webpilled, AKA the ultimate cross-platform system ;)

That said: I indeed was referring to rust in particular[1], based on some vague recollections that I finally took some time to confirm:

1. There is indeed a host of relatively mature options for the mapping to the boring ol' native route(s): Qt through `cxx-qt`, FLTK via `fltk-rs`, wxWidgets via `wxdragon`, and Tk via... itself, I guess? GTK also has `gtk4-rs` and `relm` and is supposedly cross platform, but with some confusing caveats. See the very end for the other "just build three apps" options, on that note.

2. The most practical option for time-crunched, not-huge projects (IMHO) is anything that lets you still use web languages for styling; obviously this stretches the sense of "GUI", but it's also wildly popular and is still far better than a full Electron monstrosity. Namely: `tauri`(/`yew`/`leptos`) automatically ties into a separate WebView impl per OS, `dioxus` made their own impl to afford React-like rendering goodies, and `ply` seems like a really promising minimalist option. All actively maintained & growing.

3. It seems the default for not-technically-native-but-feels-native apps (i.e. most apps) is `egui`, which does WASM magic for you across platforms and web (!), or `iced` which seems far too Java-y for my tastes. Neither are at v1.0.0, but I blame the abandonment of semver for that goofiness -- both have sizable teams developing in them full time, with ~30k stars each. `slint` is more mature but seems targeted at IoT/embedded.

4. I'll be honest: I was really just hinting at "whatever Zed uses", since the thread's about text editors! It turns out to be `gpui`, their own custom (yet OSS) engine with a popular external metaframework: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-kit . As above, does WASM wizardry. More niche options that similarly implement their own languages: `xilem`, `freya`, `floem`, and `ribir` are popular growing options with ~beta vibes (i.e. pre-v1.0.0 but, like, for real this time); `vizia` and `cushy` are more alpha vibes.

5. There's a crowd of "GPU-heavy" (?) frameworks that go beyond my capability to really assess in the first place, but `makepad` is the only one that seems definitely cross-platform. `kas`, `blinc`, `tessera`, `azul`, `pax`, `rosin`, and `rui` (nice snag, that) came up too, but are (pre-)alpha vibes. Game-focused ones also exist, somewhat bafflingly (people make games in Rust??): `imgui-rs`, SDL3 via `yakui`, and Bevy via `bevy_egui` all seem mature.

6. As a bonus there's options to just build a Flutter GUI and attach a rust process to its backside via `flutter_rust_bridge` (genius!) and/or (?) `Rinf`. I've never touched Flutter at all, so uhh take that as you will, I suppose.

7. Finally, to your Swift suggestion: I think you're privileging your OSX and/or Swift preference a lot, there. I'm not sure how that even gets to be cross platform based on what I'm seeing right now, but even if it it's possible, all the OSX-specific apps I see these days (RIP Orion...) put fear into the depths of my heart. What Swift would work for is the megacorp strategy: just implementing three separate apps! Via `UniFFI` or `cacao` for Mac, `windows-rs` for DOS, and any of the open ones above for Linux.

Sorry for a long response -- procrastinating my life for sure, though I have been meaning to do this research for a long time. So thanks for the excuse! Shoutout https://blog.wybxc.cc/blog/rust-gui-survey-2026/ and https://areweguiyet.com/

TL;DR: I'd go with `tauri` for something tame, and `gpui` for a text editor in particular; regardless of what you choose, I think it's a lot, lot more tractable than you expect!

______________________________________________________________________

[1]: After the `bun` debacle turned out shockingly well, I don't think there are "language wars" anymore, just the right tool for the job for the center ~95% of the capabilities/adventerousness bellcurve, so-to-speak. Absent some necessary integration planned in another language and/or extensive experience that you don't want to waste, I think it's just straight up incorrect to pick any "general" systems language (so C, C++, Java?) over rust.

Certainly there are specialized languages that rule in their own arenas --Golang for piping data around, Haskell/LISP/Racket for cool people, Zig for Whatever Zig Does, TS for the web and cloud, Python for science, etc.-- but none of those seem necessary to tie into the GUI.

Oh sure the soviets got a bomb, but I'm talking about the other 95% of the world. The article seems to be about India in particular, which is why it's particularly noteworthy -- India had to pull some straight up Looney Toons shit to build nukes without the US noticing via satellite and shutting them down. And AFAIR they were the last state to get them, other than maybe the time Israel blatantly stole the US's tech.

  When confronted with evidence that the atomic and space ‘races’ of the previous century neither stopped new entrants nor conferred decisive advantages

Seems like a very strange thing to say in a world with so few nuclear weapons. I guess they mean "atomic" in the sense of nuclear power, and the truth that the scientific advantage was slim?

Shockingly all the answers so far are subtly incorrect or extremely unclear.

The actual answer is that this is massive loss for Interpretibilty, AKA "telling whether the model is lying to you or not". Which sounds silly when you're thinking about chatbots, but is an incredibly important line in the sand for superheavy, longrunning, self-improving agents. To say the least!

It's based on this philosophy, FWIW: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/

And a good writeup I just found of recent worries regarding Astra's same shift towards intelligence at the cost of safety: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HCRs8btkiamtWSNAL/astra-is-h...

So first off, talking about "LLMs" is kinda a yellow flag that you might be a bit behind the times, here: in ~April of this year[1], "agentic engineering" became truly tractable for serious work. We've all been playing with LLMs for coding and research since ~2023 of course, but they were mostly limited to the chatbot paradigm; even after years of Claude Code "harnesses", most engineers were still not trusting them to perform significant tasks on their own due to inevitable quality issues.

Now, that has changed. This isn't just better models, it's a qualitative improvement in capabilities, a step-change, an inflection point; what the MLrs like to call emergent capabilities, in a loose sense.

To pick just one very tangible example close to my heart: This is why the three.js subreddit[2] has exploded in popularity, showcasing demos by non-engineers that blow any three.js app I saw pre-singularity out of the water, which took hundreds of hours of specialized engineering to make (ask me how I know...). The community is reacting[3] much like the mathematicians, understandably.

---

Ok now to answer your actual question (sorry -- that was the intention, originally!) as concisely as I can. "Software factories" are any system you setup to help you build software in deeply agentic ways. All the major harnesses and "ADEs" like Zed could arguably fit here already, but there's a massive ecosystem of other takes, as this article implies. I don't want to give them too much credit for just snagging the name, but the "Factory" startup does embody the idea pretty well: https://docs.factory.com/

They often (though not necessarily, IMHO) include some services that spawn their own agents after deterministic checks ("latent services", in my lingo) and services that use DL models more subtly to empower otherwise-symbolic services ("semilatent services").

In my biased experience, they often focus on a few central usecases, solving the problems that individual devs run into when trying to run multiple harnesses on multiple projects without friction, longterm decoherence, token wastage, or bottlenecks:

1. Code review. This is the big one and far trickier than it seems (trust me!), so often tried then abandoned. There's a huge startup just for this: https://www.coderabbit.ai

2. Cross-harness syncing of settings, hooks, and/or various flavours of very important markdown -- AGENTS.md files, skills, and subagents personas being the big ones.

3. Cross-agent, harness-agnostic coordination and communication. This just recently reached both the main harnesses, but it seems internal for now; a `BULLETIN.md` helps me a TON.

4. More generally, cross-agent coordination when it comes to worktrees, resource sharing (e.g. OCR queues on my 4090, for me), persisting agent-facing content (e.g. reports, trackers, scratch files, .jsonl blobs) in a convenient place that doesn't clog up the repo, and other technical details that might otherwise have to be figured out again and again by each agent.

5. Enforcing standards, either through hooks (blockers, nudges, or revertable fixes) or the aforementioned services. Think commit messages, prose simplicity, doc conventions, etc., though the sky's the limit, here. Like an intuitively-intelligent, more complexly triggered, agent-only precommit setup, in a way.

6. Finally, there's a whole ecosystem of tooling for agents, which I like to call "ACIs"/"Agent-Computer Interfaces". The sky is both the ground and the limit, here; it's really whatever the dev finds their agents to be oddly inefficient about, or just straight up bad at. I personally some to make edits "self-healing", normalize post-OCR cleaning, and capture quick screenshots w/ optional aesthetic critique[4], if that gives you a sense.

TL;DR: Fun stuff to make that speeds you up because it's tailormade to how you work! I made a bunch because I've been ""self-employed"" and thus had the time to explore myself[5], tho I understand why a more realistic after-work paradigm would make this kind of work wasteful.

On that note, back to writing cover letters -- apologies if the long message bothers anyone. I really should start a blog or get a hobby or something, huh

---

[1]: i.e. Mythos and GPT-6, though obviously access rolled out slower to orgs/people without the special access programs, and even slower to people who prefer open models, where GLM-5.3[-Flash] was the first real contender[9]. For internal agent usage see this graph https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-coding-agent-spending and/or this writeup from June https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-code-expertise

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/threejs/top/?t=month

[3]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielgreenheck_i-think-its-t...

[4]: https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/libs/tact , https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/libs/mend , https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/apps/piq

[5]: Most of it is still private, but I made a subset public at https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/libs/fleet , and my code review & hooks are at https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/apps/gate

[9] https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...

Ok I'd like to bring up something a bit more bold/controversial: why are we building big TUIs at all? Like... ever? Isn't it pretty trivial to make your rust GUI native across the three major operating systems these days, or am I underestimating that?

I prefer a TUI to a heavy Electron app, don't get me wrong. But Helix (& Mitos!) seem like a baffling choice compared to Sublime Text. Not worse: I literally don't understand the appeal.

I'm just a layperson with strong, strong thoughts about this. So... take it with a grain of salt.

  a U.S. push for “deprescribing”

Always fun to remember that the person in charge of the federal health system isn't a fan of drugs based on vibez. Still waiting to be but in a "camp" to get off my prescribed adderal, as he casually mused in 2025...

  Doctors and researchers know antidepressants don’t work for everyone, and some even agree the drugs are overprescribed.

Kinda absurd framing, even if it's followed by a semi-related "But...". Some scientists doctors and researchers agree that climate change isn't real, that ADHD doesn't exist in adults, and that v-cc---s are a scam cooked up by aliens; you wouldn't so casually make those seem like reasonable positions!

  finding the right treatment is often a frustrating matter of trial and error

That is the very intentional shape of modern psychiatric care, and will be forever until we can gradually decompose each psychiatric disorder into one or more neurological diseases with thoroughly-specified physical characteristics. In other words, it will and should be like this until we have a dramatic scientific revolution in neuroscience.

  One method for doing so, based on brain imaging, is already moving toward approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a tool to guide prescribing.

Presumably they mean EEG, here...? We already have tons of neurocognitive tests that "guide prescribing", but adding a new tech couldn't hurt, especially as EEG & fMRI explode in utility thanks to DL. Still, frustrating that this is framed as an alternative or fundamentally new development, rather than just one more (very expensive) tool in a psychiatrist's repetoire.

   a statistical and AI tool called PETRUSHKA, which they trained on the sociodemographic details and health histories

Hoooooly shit. "Sociodemographic details"?! Did they miss every single controversy around ML in the 2010s, and every public health textbook since then? We've been down this road a dozen times in a dozen contexts; absurd that professionals are trying something so resoundingly harmful.

By the way, the study (linked in article) is shocking. The fact that at least two PhDs signed off on a study with such an obvious glaring issue ("lack of a double-blind design and the large amount of missing data limit the validity of these results") to get a paper out and promote their vibe-coded webapp is a massive indictment of our academic system. Or at least Britain's, I guess. In case it's not obvious: of course people who are told their antidepressants were asigned by a super intelligent machine based on a detailed quiz will be more patient with them than people who get the "usual standard of care", which, again, is very intentionally and openly "guess-and-check" and often opaque to the patient.

  He and his team have trained a machine learning model on patient records from a clinical trial and used it to predict who would do better on CBT or one of two antidepressants.

The next study is also frustrating :(. To cut it very very short: A) CBT vs. medication is not a coherent dichotomy, B) it's repeating very basic mistakes around unintentional discrimination as discussed above, C) the "machine learning model" is just linear regression (!!!), and D) their attempt to cross-validate has serious, serious issues.

  Other researchers are looking for clues to treatment response in the brain activity thought to underlie depression. “That’s really what we’re treating,” says Leanne Williams, a psychiatrist at Stanford University. Her research has identified six distinct “biotypes” of depression based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Oh jesus christ. They don't teach philosophy of psychiatry at Stanford?? Does she know that she's departing from the sanctioned, licensed framework for all psychiatry? And why is a psychiatrist doing this instead of a neuroscientist, or ideally a specialist in neuropsych?

  The tool might also identify people who will likely never respond to either psychotherapy or first-line antidepressants, Williams says—potentially allowing them to skip straight to second-line therapies such as transcranial brain stimulation, electroconvulsive therapy, or ketamine.

Well that's fucking terrifying. "Whelp your history and race puts you under the curve in our linear regression model, so let's just skip the boring steps in the middle!" - a statement uttered by the deranged.

Sorry for the spam. Just scary and frustrating. I'm at least the author here is trying to frame this in a way that might redirect some of the unscientific, hateful, ignorant urges of the Health Czar.

1. They’re unable to get enough support to pass more taxes (yet), so “balancing the budget” after republicans lower them on the rich would mean killing people by cutting services.

2. The vast majority of our spending is not discretionary, anyway. You can’t refinance social security.

3. Democrats held the executive for the past two recession recoveries, and spent accordingly at the advice of new school economists. Which worked both times, BTW.

4. The government’s budget is not like a household budget — a deficit isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Obviously the current situation is absurd, but we should also avoid simplifying complex matters of state like libertarians do with ethics just to avoid hard conversations.

Doing the both sides thing here is so, so frustrating… Obama and Biden both spent big to avoid/alleviate recession conditions, that is true. But it’s just not comparable at all:

1. First off: the deficit article were commenting under right now. This is unusual and terrible and 100% due to GOP norm breaking.

2. The BBB raised the debt astronomically, so this will continue well past the end of the war.

3. We’re engaged in a war of choice with a huge country with no end in sight and no stated objective, and the pentagon is getting more money than ever.

4. The corruption and graft is so rank and blatant that it might actually make a dent here, which is absurd. God forbid they carry out their ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and then we pay for Trump City, there. Not to mention all the subordinate graft.

5. Only one party has divorced itself from reason entirely. Democrats are deeply flawed and I disagree with many of them on many things, but none of them dare try the ‘nuh uh shut up’ approach that is central to the GOP in the days of Trump. Imagine if they said anything as absurd as “Haitians are eating our cats and dogs” or “I’ll give everyone $5k” or “I didn’t lose the election that every single watchdog said I did” — they would be lambasted and forgotten within days.

6. Only one party is planning for the other party to ever be in power ever again. That is, assuming you don’t take Miller’s word for it that there are seven bajillion illegal aliens that the democrats ship in to win elections, which just hasn’t happened to work yet because the GOP is just too popular, and hasn’t been uncovered in any actual investigations because they’re just too darn tricky.

Sorry. Presumably this whole thread will be wiped anyway. But this is not a “both parties” thing! We’ve had a balanced budget and a positive treasury balance in my lifetime, and I’m a baby person!

(People said it was impossible then as well, FWIW.)

Ok this fascinating. I happen to have some Heidegger files, and went a-greppin. I'd say he's really talking about "inaminate objectness", as opposed to our human animate subjectness. Reasons:

1. In Science and Reflection, he says that both the 'completely calculated' nature of classical mechanics and the 'statistical character' of quantum mechanics are two representation of an underlying 'objectness of material nature'.

2. In Discourse on Thinking, he's far more concerned with the instrumental, utilitarian nature of machines than literal determinism, a concept he (somewhat confusingly/uniquely) connects to computation/'computational thinking', as opposed to the inherently-human capability for 'meditative thinking'. I personally would say this bit is refuted by LLMs in the end, but because they have intuitive rationality, a capability that seemed impossible to artificially design to the scientists of the time -- not because they involve dice.

3. In What is Thinking?, he gives the closest connection of this dichotomy to one of his better-known main topics, namely [handi]craft as a special subset of work: 'what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.' In this sense machines would be merely manipulating tools, stochastic or otherwise.

4. Overall I get the sense from skimming that lecture that his concern is a little mischaracterized, and in a kind of beautiful way that backs up my "Dune is still about AI" thesis described in a top-level comment somewhere below: his concern is about any society that could build complex machines (a 'technological' one), not the behavioral aspects of the machines themselves. So that concern applies equally to Star Trek (AGI), 1984 (no AGI), and our current post-singularity society (it's complicated/potentially ""just"" guessing).

All of this fits very well into his central thesis, which is continuing the Kantian & Hegelian tradition of examining how humans might be moral, free, and spiritual despite being meat computers of a largely-unknowable nature. In Heideggerland, this is expressed best in dramatic, nigh-unreadable passages like:

  Temporality already maintains itself ecstatically within the horizons of its ecstases; and in temporalizing itself, it comes back to those entities which are encountered in the "there".
  With Dasein's factical existence, entities within-the-world are already encountered too.
  The fact that such entities are discovered along with Dasein's own "there" of existence, is not left to Dasein's discretion.
  Only what it discovers and discloses on occasion, in what direction it does so, how and how far it does so—only these are matters for Dasein's freedom, even if always within the limitations of its thrownness.

TL;DR: He'd probably think they're still just machines, and the question isn't really sound in the first place. IMHO!

WOW it's strange to see my fave rabbit holes on here lol. And props for linking Lexicanum instead of the Wiki That Shall Not Be Named!

Three very quick thoughts:

1. The Votann are remnants of humanity from the time when our Terran super-AIs ('Men of Gold') had built advanced ship-based AIs ('Men of Stone') to enable long-sleep-style interstellar colonization, and the enigmatic "Votann Cores" that guide them(/are them) are strongly hinted to be those same AIs, just degraded over ~19,000 years. They were sidelined later on, after humans discovered FTL through an alternate dimension, 'the immaterium'.

2. The story is very obviously based on Dune, and like everything else in 40k is turned up to 11 and stripped of nuance for effect. Some sentient robots ('Men of Iron') "revolted" after ~three millenia of brutal, Star Wars-style slavery, but the overarching "Age of Strife" was about human wars in an non-unified galaxy, with the robots being a primary weapon; the actual revolt/jihad was a symptom, just like it was in Dune.

3. The 'Adeptus Mechanicus' mentioned above are a parody of cargo cults (religions that worship technology they don't understand) mixed with a dystopian take on the themes of A Canticle for Lebowitz, and are very much depicted with derision. Whatever your thoughts are on AI, dear reader, please never say "abominable intelligence" like it's wisdom rather than the fruit of a dogmatic & ineffective cult!

Of course, 40k lore is notoriously amorphous; some authors have said/hinted otherwise. But I think the above interpretation is the most coherent and interesting and supported overall, IMHO. For example, #2 is supported by the fact that the space elves ('Aeldari'/Eldar) ruled the galaxy at the time and seemed unconcerned by humanity's antics, which wouldn't make sense in light of an actual ASI threat proper.

Interesting to see this on HN! I've been beating the drum for quite a while that the Butlerian Jihad was never about terminator-style robot uprisings, but rather the intentionally-unexamined half of the themes the Dune ~trilogy ended up being about: long term fate of the species, the prospect of human speciation, the role of cold reason (read: aggressive utilitarianism) in leadership, and above all the concentration of power in light of modern technology.

All he mentioned explicitly was the very last clause, but the others are more important & uniquely-Dunean IMHO, and are central to the plot from the jump through the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, and the Guild Navigators, all ostensibly Homo sapiens sapiens despite being completely unnatural. Even "Imperial Conditioning" --which obviously plays the biggest part in the first act of the first book-- is arguably the same topic. By refusing to include computers and robots at all, the reader is naturally guided to consider those more familiar tropes in light of the world-building snippets we get. Which is kinda what makes Dune so genius, I think!

Like, to make it explicit... I think having the aforementioned abhumans drive the plot without significant support from inhuman minds raises more subtle questions than we're used to in far-future tales of robots, like:

1. Can one lose their humanity through experience, be it intentional "conditioning" or just the acquisition of power? (see: Paul vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)

2. Once one has lost their humanity superficially, can it be brought back/up/forward? Is love/greif the most plausible path, and thus the most human cognitive processes? (see: Dr. Yueh vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)

3. If we try to maintain our humanity in the long term --the default goal of non-insane futurists, though debated in the 21st c.[1][2]-- how do we protect against the natural urge to pursue power, which is (arguably) inherently human?[3]

I'll cut it off there cause this threat will likely be deleted anyway and I'm heavily procrastinating. Long story short: the Butlerian Jihad is not a condemnation of artificial minds, and if even it were, the condemnation would apply equally as much if not more so to the humanist empire in which the story is set.

Also, hopefully obvious, but just in case: it likely began as an excuse to write the stories that he wanted to write, just like the shield thing giving an excuse for swords in space. But I think Herbert deserves credit for what was running underneath that and elaborated on as it became a series of novels rather than cute periodical stories. He was pretty smart!

Also also: we do not discuss the son's book about Butler lol. It is verboten.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_We_Became_Posthuman

[3]: This kind of structural conflict could be described as 'internal contradiction' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism or 'endogenous contradiction' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogeneity_(econometrics) depending on your preferred flavor of economics.

1. Scott Alexander is the #3 most popular substack user in the "science" category, and has been following AI closely for many years on an academic level. Yes, he is a commentator; that is how media works. Yes, I think it's weird too, but :shrug:.

2. My point was that you don't understand the basics of their position. Just repeating "they're wrong" does not disabuse me of that notion. Also, anything about a "nanny state" is too far below the standards of this forum to reply to at all, sorry.

3. Superintelligence is not closer to speech than nuclear science, obviously. How often does speech lead to thousands, millions, or billions of deaths all on its own? And "their argument relies on part of their argument" isn't a rebuttal; if you read some of the papers, it is far from a presupposition.

4. I'm not sure what you're getting at here, sorry. Oh maybe this is a continuation of the above, rather than a reply to my #4? If so: yes, that's the core of the danger. You have successfully surmised one of the most serious threats.

5. Ok.

6. This just feels like a "many people are saying" argument. No, the patterns and trends are not clear: that's literally the basic question we're discussing right now.

7. That's still not what regulatory capture looks like, but also: no, they do not. Dario met him for the first time recently, and it was about intimidating him into compliance after they refused to make autonomous weapons for the pentagon. Altman has been there a few times, but A) not "on a regular basis", and B) again, that's not how regulatory capture works. The only AI CEO close to Trump is Musk, and even then it's obviously... complicated.

8. Literally the textbook definition of an ad-hominem lol. Never seen it stated so plainly and baselessly!

9. Great question! This is a large part of what's examined by the relevant literature, and they have many compelling arguments of various kinds. My favorite, layperson-targeted version is the blog post Optimality is the tiger, and agents are its teeth[1]

"Predeterminism" isn't a framework. I think the gist of what you're saying here is just "you never know for certain what's gonna happen so don't worry about it", which doesn't need rebuttal.

Yes, transparency and reproducibility sound great! It should be mandatory to conduct this research safely! We are 100% in agreement, in the end. We're just in disagreement about whether you can pattern-match this discussion to libertarian talking points from the early 2010s.

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpPnReyBC54KESiSn/optimality...

1. Not a “random blog”, not by a long shot.

2. Opening with “these people are batshit” is a pretty undeniable sign that you have no coherent theory of mind for them.

3. 1984 wasn’t about regulation of superintelligence. Governments are the only ones who can say “who can use [fissile material], and for what” — has that created 1984? It started 30 years before that, so it should’ve created 1984 by 1984!

4. No one’s banning “open weights”, they’re banning superintelligence development without any of the protections we find to be obviously essential for far, far less dangerous things. Perhaps they would’ve been open to something more drastic, but post GLM-5.3 that’s kinda moot. The cat’s out of the bag.

5. Investors don’t control Anthropic, and their control over OpenAI is complex and highly unusual to say the least.

6. “Some capitalists have done X therefor all capitalists force all companies they invest in to do X” is just not sound logic.

7. Finally: that isn’t what regulatory capture looks like! It looks like revolving doors and packing boards and shady policies, not publicly campaigning for new statutes.

1. Understanding motives is important. The fact that you’re questioning that should be a red flag in hindsight.

2. It seems your rebuttal to the article is “well maybe it’s a plot but just not one they’ve ever talked to each other about, but just happen to all secretly believe in the efficacy of”. Which, obviously: ???

3. We know who wrote this post, and it’s not from “the top of AI companies”. It’s from someone desperately trying to prevent the catastrophe that you’ll be up in arms about in 3-6 months.

Shoutout to marker-2. By far the best OCR system, IME. The amount of annoying little edge cases they know about and cover for you is dizzying

There's no reason that an agentic workflow has to use the primary agent model for every intuitive computing task; in fact, that would've sounded absurd before the singularity. Maybe an old flash model is the best in class for this, but A) I doubt it and B) it's still gonna be wildly more expensive.

Assuming I'm not just misunderstanding something critical (happens often!) and you haven't explored this already (very possible!), pointing your agent at this link and asking for some prototypes might be illuminating: https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=image-segmentatio...

Ok. Obviously these are cool people trying to do something useful, and my real name is on this site so I definitely don't want to come off as hostile. But I have three problems with their whole... thing, here:

1. Adding bounding boxes only compounds the biggest issue with Jev, which is that it's using a massive model to do what we've been using purpose-built[1] models to do for years(/decades), only a little worse and a lot more expensive. This is fine --great, even-- if presented as a tradeoff.[2] And a product that enables "smart if statements" that are "sci-fi" does not sound like a tradeoff at all. In that light, ending the post with facetiously-labeled graphs that just show it beating a bunch of random names (including models with twenty-seven BILLION parameters) on unknown metrics feels borderline dishonest.

2. "We love the community's desire to help make models better!" feels like Manufacturing Consent but with way lower stakes. I turn on various experimental features and pick nightly builds and all that like many of us do, but this feels... well, at best it's kinda offputting rhetoric for a practice I otherwise condone. IMHO.

3. Their job postings go beyond groan-inducing to vaguely insulting. Take this "Data Demon" posting[3], which is presumably for a data scientist (data engineer...?) but is branded around mocking the Turing-award-winning scientists trying to warn the world about superintelligence. Yes, I had the same reaction: what? Why?? It's giving a corporate culture where A) executives feel entitled to shoot from the hip and inject their personal crusades on a whim, and where B) scientists/science isn't appreciated (or, worse: understood). Criticizing the concept of measurement isn't helping, nor is their choice to label output percentages as confidence scores.

I guess I hope I'm misunderstanding, cause they're gonna make millions regardless, I'm sure. I just know that I can't think of when I'd reach for Jev 1.*[4] for a prod usecase, and this is an awfully big company for a prototyping shortcut.

[1]: https://huggingface.co/models

[2]: of dev speed for cost and accuracy, which is lowkey another way to say efficiency and efficacy. Two pretty massive things to trade!

[3]: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/typesafe-ai/d315d436-e517-4f17-82bb...

[4]: Which, btw, what happened to semver? Did we stop doing semver cause python did? Did I miss a memo/blog? Not a rhetorical question, I swear. Deprecating minor versions just seems unholy, much less minor version thirteen!

I'm not excited for the upcoming catastrophe(s), but it sure is hard not to relish the thought of this mantra dropping from my life.

Though I suppose it is the B in DABDA... not excited for the societal slump into the second D, much less the wave of people who have yet to leave the first D to enter A :(

> because of LLMs, be significantly produced by a human, as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.

...that's not how copyright works. You can't poison an open source project with code that's fully and unreservedly in the public domain, if that precedent stands for much longer and if that precedent is applied to software in a way that's even vaguely analagous to how it's applied to things that judges sorta kinda understand.

This seems believable! And the n=3 of it all seems very wise (though n=3 alone isn't quite enough to speak confidently of "noise" AFAIU).

Two important caveats, though, before we rush to universalize this:

1. It's based on the smartest model ever released to the public in the history of humanity, Opus 5.5. So if this is true for your codebase, it probably only became so ~post-Mythos.

2. It seems like the hard task isn't really hard enough -- the "trick" is something about PHP, and sounds common enough that it would be well baked into each model. Regardless, there are far, far easier to miss gotchas than "fails on reload", especially in a large codebase where a post-mortem are written about correct code that just runs slower all of a sudden or something, much less cases where you have to rely on users (or worse, metrics) to uncover such issues.

When I joined Google, they gave me the baffling instruction to try to write as few comments as possible. I've since learned that's a semi-popular approach, based on the logic that "the code should speak for itself". I'm just a baby engineer (4 more months to make it onto 30-under-30!), but I find that to be more about self-esteem for seniors and feeling like a craftsman than it is about real, measured tradeoffs.

Plus, comments can A) be documentation[1] and B) be beautiful[2] ;)

[1]: https://github.com/doering-ai/my-basis/blob/main/docs/regex....

[2]: https://doering.ai/work/sublime-python-syntax/

I mean... Google!

Shoutout also to Goethe's, the only truly systematic, thorough exploration of color that I know of. I have to read the one's you mention, though!

Ok let's talk about the really important stuff here: that model name is atrociously long for such a game-changing model, and "embedding" is already an awkward phrase. I propose... Embedda?

Until they find bugs in the formal proof program ;)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zHhGa3iQBQcdSifFL/a-critical...

From here, this looks like a pseudoscience manifesto from Reddit or something. The name is no philosopher I’ve heard of, the index concerning, and the lack of adherence to basic academic conventions even more concerning.

Anyone care to take the time to share why it’s interesting?

(Besides, y’know, being written in French!)

Yes, there is an ongoing fascistic coup in the US, I know. I am pointing out that almost all criminal investigation is at the state and local level.