dwoldrich

> But I don't think there is any sort of fundamental barrier that prevents us from building appropriately constrained LLM-based systems.

This iteration of the tech, I agree. In future iterations that use intensive persuasion techniques, who can say?

> Which isn't to say that the US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one.

The US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one, though, because it is codified law. Immoral laws eventually get overturned, but until then it is the rule because the collective we says so right now.

What is the derivative work of an AI response? Who is the creator making its derivative works? The AI is not an entity, it is a software engine operating over an obfuscated index.

Beyond the muddiness of copyright, there is the question of human flourishing. How the heck would you train children and adolescents on the responsible use of AI?

The current UX, the "friend computer"-themed REPL, is chock-a-block with moral hazards. Loss of privacy and profiling, fostering undue trust, emotional dependence and manipulation. Like, I get that you're invested in the industry, but we should condemn this tech.

I've considered there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.

And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.

1619 project is Jacobin-style, revisionist history politics. Defund the Police, Jacobin. To flood drugs, homeless and immigrants into sanctuary cities is intentional Jacobin tactics to cause normal people to become fed up and to overturn the system. Revolutionaries are gonna revolt. Too bad everyone is too tired and distracted to give a crap about their utopian visions.

In rare and extreme circumstances it makes sense to have a revolution because the people are oppressed. For the rest of history, revolutionary fervor always comes from power hungry psychopaths who'd jail and kill everyone that stands in their way and then rule perpetually over everyone that's left if they could.

Thankfully, their time is usually short. They had a good run this time, very sneaky and devilish, but back to the political desert they go.

Somehow "centrist" has taken on a negative connotation in Democratic circles, but I don't understand it. Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation.

Governing in a sustainable way usually means big tent politics with give and take on the small stuff. Bill Clinton epitomized that style.

> I also agree that Democrats are too invested in themselves and the status quo to put forward a candidate who will make the kinds of meaningful changes that Democratic voters actually want.

The old saying "the customer doesn't know what they want" seems true of the average Democratic voter. I look at the Democratic party planks as primarily boomer-era causes increasingly misaligned with technological progress and social evolution.

I see average Democratic voters as wistful and earnest, but ultimately not (yet? ever?) grounded with a cohesive vision for modern/future American society _at scale_. In my opinion, the moment for a legitimate new vision to emerge was Occupy Wall Street. All that movement seemed to yield for the grassroots was an acquaintance with homelessness culture.

And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly.

Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election.

Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices.

Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris?

WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.

> I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building.

Yes, this is it, you understand! The little spark of creation that we all can wield is so clear in software development.

> But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell.

Noooo! This is the narrative. The matrix has you. Don't believe the hype. The problem of existence is choice, and it's a continuous problem.

The top down narrative control is so so powerful now. Your mention of anger at the web is all one and the same. I am seriously yearning for the Lightphone[1] just to disconnect from the web and messaging apps when I'm away from my desk.

[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii

'Hate' and 'fascist' seem to reliably trigger people to stew in anger and give up their power.

Don't fall for the divide and conquer. You have agency, you can do your part to steer the ship if you can resist the learned helplessness of hatred.

AI is a tool. I enjoy using it as a search engine. But just like I don't trust everything on the internet, I don't blindly trust AI. AI's index the same information as search engines with additional retrieval error factored in.

There are deeply unprofitable modes of AI. The chat interfaces are, as I understand it, deeply unprofitable loss leaders whereas the enterprise API's and agentic stuff is profitable.

Maybe try to intensify your use of the unprofitable offerings if you you dislike what the AI companies stand for before the economics come back to earth for them?

Time for a shameless plug for my friend's product: dependencies built from source and served up a la carte. Removes a lot of trust issues with rando tarballs uploaded by bad actors. There's nothing quite like it.

https://www.activestate.com/curated-catalog/

They sound like very important people no matter what the circumstances are, haha.

Having "house rules" on a team that new members must agree to follow tends to flush such people out and they usually exit on their own when their shenanigans get repeatedly called out as violative. Gotta introduce the rules in the interview process and get agreement after they join. Catching them out early is the key.

We had an intervention on one hard case and he rage quit the next day. I don't know why people do that, it's a small world and people talk.

No offense taken, I see you are wrestling with the idea of faith. The way I look at it, God doesn't just meet you where you are, he pursues. So, if you are meant to surrender, it's a good thing. That just means you were one that didn't get away. Question everything, but don't fight it unnecessarily.

On the other stuff, I will only observe that war is not a human thing. It's too organized, requires inhuman (evil) top down control. Iran is a detestable war just like every other war.

But, there is also the unlimited psychological warfare being waged everywhere now that affects us more directly.

You saw Hegeseth doing a disgusting Deus Vult routine, but I guarantee you the majority of people are tuned out and missed that entirely. (So they get away with it.)

In my opinion, that was another targeted demoralization psyop intended to wound and stun people like us, and for different reasons. It is so far outside the acceptable narrative frame that it cranks everyone up who is paying attention, makes them bewildered and furious and that drowns out other news stories they want everyone to miss.

It is all "fake and ghey", as the kids like to say. How do I know? They're all actors reading scripts, Hegeseth especially. Right out of central casting as Trump says.

What is really happening is a complete toss up. The greatest casualty in war is the truth.

I have no solutions to offer. Just please don't take your frustrations out on normie Christians, even if you think they're misguided, they have no power.

I worry when the rhetoric gets angry and scared. Fear and disgust can lead to atrocities. Who stands to gain when we fight? Who capitalizes every time a lefty shooter pops off? I'd prefer you challenge the rage bait narrative, roll your eyes at how outlandish it all sounds, and become more cynical than scared.

Other insane/outlandish psyops meant to stun and confuse:

* The Charlie Kirk memorial

* Everything that comes out of Stephen Miller's mouth

* Trump coin, Trump nft, Trump Card (immigration)

* The Whitehouse Twitter account, yikers!

Just philosophically speaking, an accidental entropic universe eventually producing Labubus doesn't work either.

History, law, civilization, anti-slavery and the dignity of man all come from judeo-christian teaching, it's not just comfort/assurance. You just gotta be careful who you follow, there's loads of shysters and crummy humans in religion just like everywhere else as you are probably aware.

Church is supposed to be about community, but it never really was for me. I didn't put in enough effort. I still go for the kids.

What hooked me was Bible Study Fellowship[1] where I got a real education in the Bible. That gave me a community where I have a men's group and they know me and we meet weekly and they give good advice and support when things turn sour.

If you want to understand the architecture of the world, check it out. Next year they're doing Romans, holy shit, that one goes deep. Maybe you're searching, and that's a safe place to simply learn.

[1] https://www.bsfinternational.org/

Very cool, sweet baby chose you two and you saw it happen, maybe.

I think we're experiencing the world like seeing through a pinhole. It's all too much to take in and process, so we've got most of it filtered out just to keep it manageable. But, that mental filter doesn't stop all of reality from interacting with us, and it's possible to remove or tweak the filter, clearly.

The voices sounded human, like hushed. I can't say in my case.

In Christianity, Satan and demons are recognized as a reality. God allows them access to humanity. That doesn't make God evil, and in fact God uses evil forces to drive people to Him. And we are given the choice to go with whatever party we choose, so the whole experiment hinges on choice. I know that the prince of Earth, Satan, isn't sporting; of course he preys on the vulnerable and the weak first. That was one of the low points in life for me when I heard the voices and when I had no faith.

Actually, I do remember one episode in my late 30's. My wife had twins. They were born extremely premature and there was a good chance they'd both die as we were at the extreme end of the survivability chart at that time - like by a single day of gestation and with one less day we were in the "recommend do not resuscitate" zone. Most compressed time of anguish I've ever experienced, stunned me for years. Both boys' bodies are growing good now, veeery quirky minds though.

Anyhow, studies had shown that preemies could benefit from just laying with the parents skin to skin, called "kangaroo care". So, I got to experience that with both boys one or two times! Wow, that was really something. I couldn't hold them or touch with my hands, just have them be laid on my bare chest. Very special to just love on them and feel them squirm around there a bit.

I thought, ok, I'm going to give them a little well wishing because the kid I was given was in the worst shape healthwise between the two. I closed my eyes, and concentrated on baby. I said mentally, "heal". "If you can take away anything from me that helps, do it! You have to grow and take food!" And I probed mentally.

Suddenly, I had a visual hallucination. It was a projected 3D scene of reverse images to the color of light coming through my eyelids. I could see some sort of movement of blobs rotating out, coming back. If they got too far outside my field of view they would fade and disappear. There was something like 3 visible blobs, a stationary one and two smaller moving ones. It was like I was seeing autonomic or mental processes in baby, visualized.

So I just loved on him for a bit and sat with that experience. And then I thought, maybe I can see my own processes if this is really happening to me? So, I said in my mind, "Show me what I look like". And the view changed!

What I saw was mostly out of my field of view, so many things were faded, but the blobs I could see were cycling in all different directions including away and back towards me and at different speeds. It was like a factory scene compared to my son's machine shop. I told him to take from that scene whatever would help, and the session ended soon after.

When I kangaroo cared with my other son I tried to repeat this experience and well wish him and communicate mentally, but I could not connect. That made me sad and secretly a little worried about this one's health, but I could not tell anyone my feelings because it was so odd what I had experienced with baby A. And was it just nerves and all my own imagination? Maybe, but it felt real.

Fascinating, thank you for wisdom and references!

I view our existence as something like a fractal.

World history is a scrambled mess of lies and amnesia (from repeated collective concussions, heh) Who knows what is truth and what is the Victor writing the history books?

One's life is untraceable - how did we get here? Literally too much went into that story, majority unseen, and none of us can fully say.

And so at the personal level, are thoughts borne out of a chain (or DAG??) of memories that cannot ever be fully traced?

Was my homunculus voice who gave me detailed clues/answers just returning the highest probable solution gleaned from thousands of simulations in the problem space I presented? Of course I should not be privy to such musings, I wouldn't have the patience for it - so it seems to me to be "out of nowhere".

I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture.

I like to think of us as complicated, not crazy. Don't want to ever close myself off to advantages my quirks might bring.

Sounds like you are a good sleeper!

Nothing I recall from my 30's, but in my 20's I worked in videogames and that was a brutal industry at that time in terms of work-life balance. (Or, at least it sounds better nowadays.)

Bad sleep habits at that time ultimately led me to do a lot of daytime napping.

During those sessions I occasionally experienced sleep paralysis, one out of body waking dream, and disturbing stuff like hearing head-splitting trumpet sounds upon waking up.

One time, I awoke and heard an attenuated trumpet sound, and through the rush I heard two voices nearby. Just as I finished struggling to get control of my body, I distinctly remember hearing one of them say, "I can see it!"

I was living alone at the time, and that was so alarming and made me question my life choices. Looking back now I view that episode as a probable spiritual attack on a vulnerable young man.

In my 40's I could go to bed with a complex software design or implementation problem I was wrestling with. Consciously word a cogent and succinct question that I needed answered, sleep on it, and then in the morning, I would be still and mentally ask, "well?" Not meditating or anything, just be quiet then and listen.

And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.

"Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.

Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.

There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?

The whole rest of the industry seems blind to the possibility of excellent personal/private agentic coding. There is a chance Intel could capitalize on that and steal a ton of mindshare in a flash.

Maybe a slim chance based on past performance, but it's there.

Hi Intel, I'm itching to buy an Xe3P! Or, Nova Lake? Crescent Island? Celestial? Jaguar Shores?

Whatever the hell you name it doesn't matter to me, I just want a workstation with one of them bad boys attached to 160GB of RAM for legit inference power!

I've been saving my money not paying for Claude Code so I can run my own agentic coding setup at home on yours. Please don't charge too much for the workstation class card if you can at all manage it. Maybe give us a discount to preorder? Please don't price a regular consumer like me out of the market!

Also, I am speculating integer based models will become hot due to lower memory and power requirements. Will the Xe3P be able to do integer-based math inference to use all that RAM to even greater effect?

Your timing for this effort is good because there is going to be a lot of thought leaders who are going to stop putting in the effort given the deafening avalanche of slop and devaluing of reusable code units in the wake of AI. So, less competition to novel/original efforts in the "operating environment" space like yours.

Your timing is also good because preeminent OS designs are becoming less relevant to the hardware of today and so a new operating environment could include holistic designs with abstractions that could reach all the way back to the system layer. Perhaps a good approach could be to bootstrap off of existing operating systems and containers and work your way back to the metal. We really need a modern Java VM-like effort that includes a memory model with the ambition to include I/O buses and sidecar computing devices like GPU/TPU/NPU.

Your message is a noble "boil the ocean" one, and looking at past efforts like BeOS/BeBox or modern things like Oxide Computer Company, I feel like shipping a boil the ocean project is possible for the pros, especially with enough runway. Perhaps boiling one sea at a time is possible? ;) Just don't paint yourselves into any corners.

In my personal experience, microservices development has been a successful way to develop software while addressing some of the versioning challenges you mentioned. I managed the impedance mismatch between API versions through JSON schema validations and allowing deprecation periods for old versions by hosting multiple version endpoints to the same backend to allow callers grace time to upgrade. Requests payloads are validated against their JSON schema at runtime, and response JSON payloads are tested against their JSON schema during integration testing. Runtime is "too late" to know when things are wrongly connected as you said, but at least I know loudly and don't accept crummy data.

Your discussion made me think of Alan Kay's discussion of how objects in a perfect world should be able to pass messages between one another: as a negotiation to come to an understanding rather than as rigidly defined payloads. I think it was a fanciful idea, but in the age of AI, such a loosey goose negotiation process seems attainable if it weren't for hallucinations. Active interrogation and negotiation is the key to combating impedance mismatches prior to runtime.

Finally, consider software supply chain trust issues. If you're going to boil the ocean, you gotta do much better than we've done. The internet was designed in the age of peace and love. We've reached the "we're cooked" age, please send help!

In any case, I hope you take my message here as encouragement, best wishes and I hope you succeed beyond measure.

Delta Force's programmer was really boss (Daniele Gaetano), a physics guy turned coder if I remember correctly. He rewrote Voxel Space to be true'ish 3D and not fakey 2.5D. He explained the innovative backtracking he had to do on the ray caster to make that work, implemented mipmaps in the voxels, very very clever guy. One of the friendlier guys I've known in videogames.

I did the first version of the matchmaking for the network play in Delta Force but didn't make it into the credits because I quit before it shipped. My psycho coworker built a custom web browser(!) that integrated directly with my from-scratch matchmaking server. At least they let me work in C for that project; most everything else I had to do for them was assembler because that was not a "sissy" programming language. That server code was by-far the coolest thing I wrote for many years afterward.

Unfortunately, my server code couldn't handle more than like 32 concurrents because the Windows NT 3.0 kernel would BSOD with more. My (extremely grumpy) manager and the Sega Saturn coder called me a few days after I had quit to ask how the code worked. I suspect I left data in the socket buffers too long (was trying to batch up my message broadcasting work at regular intervals) and the kernel panicked over that.

I recall learning later the TCP/IP stack was homegrown in NT by Microsoft at that time and they licensed a good one for later versions, so I can't be blamed, it wasn't me! :D

I was just the lowly build-master/installer/utility developer, but I got tapped for testing and debugging and performance because I was just a sponge for coding knowledge because I wanted to be a game developer so baaaad at the time. I didn't get to do any of the game coding, and my experiments were just fruits of conversations with benevolent sages.

The reason facing east-west (or was it north-south, now I'm unsure) made such a difference in framerate was the color and height maps were ray marched in straight lines up from the bottom of the screen to the horizon. This meant you were zipping through the color map in straight lines, wrapping around to the other side if the ray went far enough.

When those straight lines lined up with the color and height map (north-south), life was good (and when a ray marched up a sheer canyon wall, life was VERY good.) But, when those straight lines went perpendicular (east-west) to the color and height map, you were blowing through the L2 cache constantly and going to main memory very often. I imagine on modern hardware these cache misses wouldn't amount to much measurable time, but on a 386dx with 8megs of RAM, the impact was very clear.

Novalogic was the only programming job I ever had where I got my own office with a door. ;) When I was with them, they had a policy of one game developer per game which I never saw again. Maximum cowboy coder energy, good times.

There does seem to be a lot of jaded pessimism this morning (buck up, fellas!)

I watched a bit of the gitbutler video and I liked the ideas, multiple/stacked branches. It felt like a genuine/natural extension of git concepts.

Sortof like Typescript vs JavaScript, I worry that the payoff of adopting something like Gitbutler would require navigating a lot of janky integrations with the rest of my tooling and training of the team.

I myself have always resisted mastering the git command line because JetBrains' git tooling is so nice, and abstracts just the right bits that I haven't had the need. I'm not opposed to switching to command line, but that 3-way git merge tool that JetBrains has is so good and I'd hate to lose it.

Honestly, I predict the world and its networks and developers are going to start cloistering and close themselves off as the AI training panopticon is getting nasty.

It would be great for Gitbutler to abstract true decentralized version control by offering decentralized/self-hosted feature parity with GitHub and remove vendors like them from the picture. I'd pay recurring seat licenses for something turnkey that I could run privately and securely.

Voxel Space[1] could have used this, would that multicore had been prevalent at the time. I recall being fascinated that simply facing the camera north or south would knock off 2fps from an already slow frame rate.

Many of our maps' routes would be laid out in a predominately east or west-facing track to max out our staying within cache lines as we marched our rays up the screen.

So, we needed as much main memory bandwidth as we could get. I remember experimenting with cache line warming to try to keep the memory controllers saturated with work with measurable success. But it would have been difficult in Voxel Space to predict which lines to warm (and when), so nothing came of it.

Tailslayer would have given us an edge by just splitting up the scene with multiprocessing and with a lot more RAM usage and without any other code. Alas, hardware like that was like 15 years in the future. Le sigh.

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

How will you deal with it? I successfully convinced $big_important_group at $day_job to not implement a policy of failing their builds when code coverage dips below their target threshold > 90%. (Insane target, but that's a different conversation.)

I convinced them that if they wanted to treat uncovered lines of code as tech debt, they needed to add an epic stories to their backlog to write tests. And their artificially setting some high target coverage threshold will produce garbage because developers will write do-nothing tests in order to get their work done and not trip the alarms. I argued that failing the builds on code coverage would be unfair because the tech debt created by past developers would unfairly hinder random current-day devs getting their work done.

Instead, I recommended they pick their current coverage percentage (it was < 10% at the time) and set the threshold to that simply to prevent backsliding as new code was added. Then, as their backlogged, legit tests were implemented, ratchet up the coverage threshold to the new high water mark. This meant all new code would get tests written for them.

And, instead of failing builds, I recommended email blasts to the whole team to indicate there was some recent backsliding in the testing regime and the codebase had grown without accompanying tests. It was not a huge shame event, but good a motivator to the team to keep up the quality. SonarQube was great for long-term tracking of coverage stats.

Finally, I argued the coverage tool needed to have very liberal "ignore" rules that were agreed to by all members of the team (including managers). Anything that did not represent testable logic written by the team: generated code, configurations, tests themselves, should not count against their code coverage percentages.