frumplestlatz

Do you want to rely on a phone that’s missing a random moving selection of critical features and bricks itself on every update?

Or, you know, man-in-the-middle because that was already a correct, perfectly clear use of English.

I can't see why; it's a goofy 20th-century colloquialism popularized by Bugs Bunny cartoons as a substitute "damn". I sincerely doubt the original author meant anything else.

I work in formal verification at a company whose products you've definitely interacted with today. On an average day, I throw thousands of dollars worth of tokens at the SOTA models and have them produce tens of thousands of lines of both proofs and code (alongside proofs of correctness).

We're solving problems now that we never even would have attempted previously. We couldn't have even staffed them if we wanted to. Even if we had the people, it would be years of development before we saw usable results.

If you can't understand how this kind of work would take a human with a few decades of experience 3-6 months, you're the 0.05 developer in my world.

What’s the bad news, exactly?

It's an objective fact.

I'm sitting here watching astra do in a day what would have taken me at least 3-6 months. The code is verified correct. The model finds, reads, understands, and then integrates the latest literature into its designs and plans. It implements the code, proves it correct, and has come up with its own novel solutions on top of the state of the art. It then refines its implementation to hit the performance goals I give it. This is the reality today.

"If it works, ship it" is very different from "If it works, and I understand it because I wrote it, ship it".

Does the LLM understand it, in detail? Can you trust its interpretation of the information and instructions you provided? Did it independently make an adverse decision you haven't noticed, because you didn't read the code? Was the model missing any information it required -- and would you know if it was?

LLMs depend on humans and human oversight to ensure they have the information required to make the right decisions, to catch when they don't, and to steer them based on your much more complete understanding of the broader context and requirements. You can't rely on them to do that thinking for you (yet?).

The CVEs are going to be epic.

It is, but an already niche operating system that refuses to leverage the advantages of LLMs is only going to fall further and further behind. I say that as someone who has actively contributed to the BSDs since the 90s and would hate to see that happen.

The slop problem is very real. People are spewing reams of bad code that generates entropy faster than humans or LLMs can clean it up. LLM best practices are not yet obvious, and we're still figuring out how best to leverage them while maintaining code quality and human understanding.

... but LLMs are coming whether we want them or not. Models keep consistently improving, the slop keeps getting better, and human-only development is going to struggle to keep up.

In my day job, I'm driving an enormous number of tokens at Astra+Ultramax solving problems in Lean 4 that previously we never would have attempted simply due to the incredible human engineering cost; we review the high-level lemmas and let it prove the rest.

LLMs are the only solution I've seen over these decades that could finally close the feature/usability gap between mainstream and more niche operating systems -- software support, features, drivers, and other broad usability barriers. All of that has historically been far too much work for a much smaller developer community to reasonably undertake.

Hating AI isn't going to make it go away.

If you stick to POSIX, things generally work everywhere. It's not really a question of what is better, just what is portable.

> The dog also briefly went in the house (which I think is poor form, to be clear).

Extremely poor form. Dog people seem to struggle with accepting these kinds of boundaries around their dogs for reasons I’ve never understood.

Although I don’t think the dog should have been in the yard, either. No dogs means no dogs. There can be liability/insurance reasons on top of just not wanting dog shit in your yard.

> My friend counter-complained to Airbnb that the host was surveilling us.

I can’t imagine being an Airbnb host with issues like this.

I’ve stayed in plenty of airbnbs where the owners lived nearby, and noticing a tenant breaking the rules when you drive by doesn’t sound like surveillance.

In your imagined future, how do you imagine the AI would build, grow, improve, and operate its physical substrate independently of human intervention?

We’re talking about far-left (in this case) radicalization that needs to be stamped out, and which directly feeds the reactionary right.

I don’t give a shit about their cause. They lost me and anyone else that’s moderately sane when they firebombed someone’s home.

You should research the violent political environment of the Weimar Republic and how it directly paved the road for the NSDAP’s ascension to power.

The solution to violent radicalization is to shut it down, not to normalize political violence that undermines law and democracy.

No, terrorism is defined by their methods and targets.

I wish I could say I was shocked by the dangerous radicalization you’re exhibiting, but it’s increasingly the norm.

We’re talking about a petrol bomb hurled at someone’s home.

More accurate would be “rioter”, “terrorist”, or “insurrectionist”, depending on the specifics.

It’s fantastic way to engender popular support for AI. People hate those groups’ protestors — and for good reason.

> only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men

I’d prefer that Anthropic and the EA cult types have less thoughts about AI.

Did you have the stickers handmade by a traditional letterpress shop, or did you put printers out of work by relying on digital printing?

… and don’t vandalize other people’s work just because you think it might be “slop”.

Wait till you hear about the rational arguments for eugenics based on metrics of moral worth.

We’ve been here before, many, many times.

I grew up in a cult, too. They were very eager and sincere. I'm very familiar with "eager and sincere" hiding incoherent motivated reasoning and savior complexes that give their adherents cover to behave both stupidly and horridly -- with a smile.

I'm not going to ignore the weird sex cults, the arrogance, the bizarre arguments, or the bad actors.

A voice activated gun? Really?

I couldn’t come up with an argument as tortured and ridiculous as yours if I tried.

Okay? That’s a non-sequitur.

Yes, alignment is important. No, alignment is not perfect.

And at the end of the day guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But a model isn’t like a gun.

Do I think it’s likely? No. Do I think AI doomerism is a joke? Yes. Does that change anything I’ve been saying? No.

If I perform inference with an LLM, it has the capacity for independent choice and action, and will use it.

The gun does not. No matter what, I have to choose to pick it up, aim it at someone, and pull the trigger.

Where exactly is the flaw in the analogy?

Except that’s true.

If I leave a gun in my front closet, it won’t independently walk out the door and go shoot people, no matter what I might say to it — unlike an LLM.

The part where they believe they believe they’re either birthing a new conscious species, or may have already done so.

Who or what is liable for what a model chooses to do — or not do?

Everything you listed is a biological entity with a common evolutionary heritage.

All but one of the things that you listed is just a human being.

Tell me, where is the pain center in a GPU? Where are the nerves? Persistent memory? Any evolutionary reason at all to develop a pain response that in any way mimics ours?

Model weights are not a gestalt biological entity. The things that you listed are not in any way remotely similar to a model.

I would suggest you plug your comment into a model and ask it to critique it — it might help you walk through why your comparison makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. One nice thing about models is that they they don’t get annoyed explaining the obvious, because they’re not conscious entities.

Maybe consider the obvious, enormous chasm between everything you just listed and an LLM.