falcor84

Well, that is what's in the ellipsis in the parent's quote:

"Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times" G. Michael Hopf

While we're doing historical quotes:

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg

If the bar is that people will continue reading their books in 200 years, than which fiction writers of the last few decades would go into your list of "good"?

That's an extremely high bar. But to the extent that critics and awards are the metric we have, he is an objectively good writer.

I think you just need to define "Consciousness" and "Divine", and the answer will pop right out.

Seeing how annoying their website interfaces are, I'd actually be open to paying for API/CLI access to porn.

I like his reasoning about feedback, but found his rejection of this funny:

> I was afraid then that I had consigned myself to writing stories about children in jeopardy. But in fact I was writing character stories rather than idea stories. And THAT was how I built a career, not by self-imitation ...

From my perspective, having read about a dozen of his books and enjoyed his writing, I couldn't help but feel that the protagonists and the adversity facing them get really repetitive - almost all of them really are about unusually smart children in various forms of jeopardy, all achieving almost impossible to believe control over their situation. They're great power fantasies for a kid, but when trying to revisit his writing when I was older, I found myself really disappointed with the lack of range.

Interesting - do you have a link about the financial accounting around this?

> Nothing can stop us now that we’re in charge of a website.

I love that. Like a familiar smell, it triggered in me a long lost memory of the old hacker ethos.

"No Such Agency"

Indeed, and if we accept the argument of this tech approaching AGI, we should expect that within x years, the subscription cost may exceed the salary cost of a junior dev.

To be clear, I'm not saying that it's a good thing, but it does seem to be going in this direction.

I don't think that sama was arguing that ChatGPT actually passed a PhD thesis defense. But arguably, it could make for an interesting benchmark.

What of it?

For me too, it was around that time last year, with GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and then Gemini 3 that I started feeling that these models are clearly becoming great at reasoning. I'm not at all opposed to saying that they are around PhD-level on at least some domains.

> We want to make these capabilities available to the scientists and research organizations best positioned to advance human health, while maintaining strong safeguards against biological misuse. The Life Sciences model is launching through a trusted-access deployment structure for qualified Enterprise customers in the U.S. to start, with controls around eligibility, access management, and organizational governance.

I'm absolutely ok with a legitimate lab scientist conducting biochemical research getting suggestions about substances that are generally considered dangerous but might be appropriate for their study, and it'll be up to the scientist to discern whether it is indeed appropriate to use.

Any particular evidence for this other than the conjecture that it might be related?

To me it seems like just a natural evolution of Codex and a direct response to Claude Cowork, rather than something fully claw-like.

I don't think that this is about being "dumb", but rather about being able to support oneself.

Becoming a parent and taking on the responsibility to support a child financially and emotionally for 18 years as you gradually prepare them for independent life is already a massively difficult decision, particularly when looking at the worldwide decline in birth rates. Expecting people to knowingly and ahead of time take on responsibility for a child who most likely will never be able to support themselves and a raise their own family seems really unreasonable to me.

Candycrush? I suppose you mean Crunchyroll, right?

> you randomly sample letters from the alphabet and those letters make up actual words, then actual sentences

That sounds like a decently apt description of how I (a human) communicate. The only thing is that I suppose you implied a uniform distribution, while my sampling approach is significantly more complicated and path-dependent.

But yes, to the extent that I have some introspective visibility into my cognitive processes, it does seem like I'm asking myself "which of the possible next letters/words I could choose would be appropriate grammatically, fit with my previous words, and help advance my goals" and then I sample from these with some non-zero temperature, to avoid being too boring/predictable.

Yes, what's your point? That is literally what it does - it adds relevant knowledge to the prompt before generating a response, in order to ground it me effectively.

I'm in absolute agreement that the AI coordination problem exists today when the AI is at junior level. I'm just saying that the mathematical argument is silly to apply to arbitrary future AIs, if and when they reach human capability. Because while coordination problems have not been mathematically solved, the world economy is a case in point that it is possible to coordinate human-level agents to achieve large scale projects at generally sufficient quality levels.

So to be clear, I'm not advising anyone to change their current token consumption habit. I'm just saying that it's silly to apply math to prove the impossibility of something we can literally see around us. It's like a mathematical proof that water isn't really wet.

The thing that TFA doesn't seem to go into is that these mathematical results apply to human agents in exactly the same way as they do to AI agents, and nevertheless we have massive codebases like Linux. If people can figure out how to do it, then there's no math that can help you prove that AIs can't.

Well, yes, agreed - that is the essential domain complexity.

But my argument is that we can work to minimize the time we spend on verifying the code-level accidental complexity.

I somewhat agree, but even then would argue that the proper level at which this understanding should reside is at the architecture and data flow invariants levels, rather than the code itself. And these can actually be enforced quite well as tests against human-authored diagrammatical specs.

As I see it, the focus should not be about the coding, but about the testing, and particularly the security evaluation. Particularly for critical infrastructure, I would want us to have a testing approach that is so reliable that it wouldn't matter who/what wrote the code.

Maybe it's my memory issues, but I personally could never remember basic boilerplate. 30 years ago I would spend half of my time in Borland's help menu coupled with grepping through man pages. These days I use LLMs, including ollama when on a plane. I don't feel worse off.

s/Linux/Unix/

What lower turtles were there? My impression was that teletypes were the first proper keyboard-based interfaces.

Well, yes, the number of entrepreneurs in America (~30M) is a different "few" than the number of frontier labs (~3).

> But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses?

I do not. I grew up on post-scarcity utopias like Star Trek, coupled with social capitalism, and believe that when there is a market need, people with the interest to tackle it will do so, even in the face of personal financial risk, but I absolutely don't think that it should be the default for everyone. Where there's no strong economic benefit for others to work, I would hope that we could offer everyone UBI, so that a comfortable basic level of life is available for everyone, without having to invent bullshit jobs that aren't needed.

I know I sound naive, but I truly believe that we can move into a future where human value is decoupled from their job, without going into communism.