brap

How dare they buy things

This is very interesting. I never thought of myself as a “consumer” in that sense, but I guess it is 100% correct, I’ve always been a consumer and I have in fact taken things for granted.

I don’t see that changing, to be honest, but it’s interesting that this never even occurred to me. It seems so obvious in hindsight. Quite the blindspot.

I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother.

Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.

> won't stop until it achieves or exhausts your prompt

This is overselling it. In all implementations of this that I’ve seen, a more correct phrasing is “won’t stop until it pinky-promises it achieved your goal”.

It usually relies on something like a hook that refuses to let the agent stop unless it includes a “promise sentinel”, which is basically the model having to include “I swear I’m done” in the response (usually as a Markdown comment so the user doesn’t see it). If that sentinel isn’t in the response, the hook rejects the completion and hands it back to the agent (sometimes it also restates the goal to keep it focused). It’s useful for sure, but it fails many times for obvious reasons.

More robust implementations use the hook to spawn another agent that verifies the goal is achieved, but that too isn’t prefect and sometimes performs worse.

Of course if you have a problem that can be deterministically verified, you could have the hook run this verification instead, but this is usually not the case (and even when it is, agents will often cheat the verification e.g. by deleting a test file).

We keep seeing this. If you had to point out the fundamental problem, what would it be?

I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas.

The founder knows how to raise money but doesn’t really understand the customers. The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. The salesperson knows what customers want but doesn’t really understand what’s possible to make. The investor knows the numbers but doesn’t really understand how poorly the business is run.

I suspect if you look at successful startups you’ll often see a very small (1-3) group of founders who are very close, each can do more than one thing really well, and their combined expertise means that together they have very few blindspots.

Just today I was thinking why isn’t there an optional timeout parameter for this tool

I sometimes wonder if at some point we’ll discover that the fundamental laws of the universe are simply far beyond anything we can even remotely comprehend, like explaining a microprocessor to bacteria.

But then what if we end up with ASI that can comprehend and make it useful for us?

The thing I struggle with wrt to taste is that LLMs just don’t get it.

Even if I write down every single thing it did wrong and how I’d do it, and even if I turn those into rules, it will know how to follow these specific rules, but for some reason it can’t seem to generalize beyond that. And the real list of rules seem truly infinite.

Agree, and I also don’t see why government should be involved in book rental. Why books and not say, car rental? What about jetski rental?

(If the argument is that subsidizing books helps the poor, I’m all for it, a nonprofit or a charity would be a much better framework)

This is the public sector M.O, instead of admitting something is obsolete they grab more scope and funding.

My local post office now sells iPhones. And why shouldn’t they? Nobody stopped them when they just sold SIM cards, and then cases and chargers. It’s like a law of nature.

I thought we’re over this collective delusion called MCP

OP after completing this essay https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f...

>So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.

Yeah for sure and that’s great and all but I think what they were really asking is how they’ll feed their kids

This makes a lot of sense, thank you!

>Of course, you have to define what "has the same behavior as" means

And that's really my issue, for example when you define "has no trailing whitespace", you are basically writing a piece of the implementation. Cover all behaviors, and you have basically re-implemented the function, no?

In other words, if I have the full formal spec of f(), isn't that the same thing as having f()?

Whenever I read about formal specs it always seems to me like “write the same tests just in a different way”, or worse, “write the same implementation but in a different way”.

I guess doing things twice can help catch errors, but I fail to see what’s so special about formal specs if they can suffer from the exact same bugs as the tests/implementation.

I guess the root of the problem is if you want to formally prove that a program does something, you have to be very specific (heh) about what that something is, at which point you are basically just writing tests/implementation all over again.

I have been looking into this on and off for years now, and I keep feeling like I’m missing something, but I don’t know what it is.

Can anyone enlighten me?

I gave it a task of scanning 6 markdown files and finding issues in the prose (contradictions etc). It ran for over 2h, exhausted my max plan session limit and crashed. I did not get any issues back.

About 2 years ago, my then girlfriend, who is a medical doctor (read: likely not an idiot), had ChatGPT plan a trip for us in a foreign country (naturally I had to nip it in the bud). And this was 2 years ago, when accuracy was way worse.

You would be surprised what normies are willing to delegate to AI.

It always seemed very natural to me that AI will move “down the stack”, where Open AI and Anthropic don’t really have a foot in the door.

Who makes consumer devices? Google

Who makes operating systems? Google

Who makes browsers? Google

Who makes the world’s most popular websites? Google

By the time 90% of average internet users get to chatgpt.com or whatever, they already went through several Google chokepoints, each layer is one more place Google can answer their questions.

And that’s not even getting into the chips, the data centers, the data, the talent, the consumer apps, the enterprise apps, the cloud platform, the brand, and of course the biggest cash printing machine in human history.

You would honestly have to be insane to bet against G.

It’s all about the incentives.

Unfortunately, companies often measure developers by their own PRs.

An unfortunate outcome of this is that writing docs for other developers isn’t really incentivized properly (and with stack ranking, you might even say it’s disincentivized). Writing docs for Claude, however…

Is our own experience really continuous? Or maybe we just perceive it as such?

This is wonderful news, congratulations to Anthropic, OpenAI and Google!

If I learned anything from unionized companies is that we’re never getting GTA 6

I don’t have much to say except I appreciate the ASCII art.

Things can have value beyond their physical substance. A Pokemon card isn't just paper and ink. I'm not arguing about whether the asset has value, I'm arguing about whether you actually own it.

Not really though, in crypto the thing you own is the ledger entry, the record that says you hold N BTC. You own it because you hold the keys, and only the keys can change it. The token isn't a pointer to some asset sitting elsewhere, the on-chain entry is the asset.

NFTs use the same machinery but the premise is that you own something else, e.g. an image (or real estate!) but nothing on-chain actually grants that ownership. To the extent real ownership exists at all, it lives entirely off-chain, e.g. in a legal contract (that would hold with or without the blockchain).

I am not a fan of crypto either way but NFTs are just ridiculous.

At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess.

Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

Oof, this one is a major blabber.

>Claude dynamically writes orchestration scripts

So, is this like a skill the LLM should follow, or an actual "workflow" in the deterministic sense?

If it's the former, is it even reliable for long running tasks? If it's the latter, can users interact with it?

We really need to find a way to completely separate instructions from the data they operate on.

Also, this is very scummy.

I’m too paranoid to write a diary, even a handwritten one, and I’m literally a nobody.

It’s beyond me how these super important (and controversial) people keep diaries where they lay out their evil plots like a villain from Scooby Doo. And save it on a work computer.