getnormality

I feel you. We take a risk when we check our work less and we own the consequences. That's not new, and it doesn't make us bad. It's just the human condition from time immemorial. The solution is not obsessively combing through every detail of our work, it's better monitoring and control on the places where mistakes can have an impact.

Congratulations. You are one of those leading the way, showing how we will adapt and how the world will get better from AI.

I gotta hand it to programmers (or whatever we call ourselves now) for sticking to principle on something this trivial.

It was either this or Claude had to become a generic term like sheetrock.

I think upweighting the live components of academia is inevitable in the age of automatically produced writing, but I also find it depressing that people think so little of writing that they imagine it obsolete because of AI.

AI writing is aggressively, aggressively mediocre. It is only good for how cheap it is. If you're indifferent to how much better good human writing is than AI writing, you should not be the one to evaluate human writing.

> the problem may be less about knowing a particular technique and more about the agent’s ability to keep its actual goal as the primary constraint.

I think the limiting factor is often the human's ability to articulate the goal and hold the agent accountable.

The working memory of technical people and the way they communicate often seems to prioritize how they're doing a task and not why they're doing it. So when they talk to you about their problem, they give you the human equivalent of modem noises and stack traces. This is such a common problem on tech support and Q&A forums like StackOverflow that it spawned its own terminology and website: https://xyproblem.info/

The agents don't respond to XY problems any better than a colleague does, and usually much worse.

An effective colleague asks why, and we need a similar relationship between the agent and its human supervisor.

> Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn't really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force.

If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible.

I mean, what's the alternative? AI does everything for me and I play Fortnite all day? Might as well plug yourself into the Matrix.

Strong resonance with the famous essay "The Rise of Worse is Better" [1], which contrasted the (better) "MIT/Stanford style of design" with the (worse) "New Jersey approach".

MIT/Stanford:

> Simplicity -- the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.

New Jersey:

> Simplicity -- the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.

TFA maps "simplicity" to "MIT/Stanford simplicity" (simplicity for the user) and "smallness" to "New Jersey simplicity" (simplicity for the developer).

I wonder if the root of the tension between the two schools comes down to the ambiguity of the user/developer distinction. Developers are also users. Simplicity of implementation is helpful to developers when they are working directly on implementation, while simplicity of interface is helpful to developers when they are using other developers' work.

[1] https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

This is a great technique if your workplace is fussy about what's allowed on GitHub. We have used it for many years.

This is much better than the AI version, just post this next time

System Prompt: "Claude, call yourself Bob"

Why believe it's worth your time? Upfront it reads like:

> Claude, generate a 500 word blog post about how people don't refactor anymore because of AI.

Just send me the prompt!

So, you don't see how someone could both be "credibly earnest" and misrepresenting what they're up to?

Do you think misrepresentation has to be consciously deceptive? That it feels insincere to the person doing it?

Bullshitting is where you don't care about whether what you say is true. Your goal is to influence a certain way of thinking or feeling, and you just say stuff that you think will cause that in other people. Appearing to care about truth is not opposed to that, it's part of it.

Altman and Zitron are like pro wrestlers. Their speech acts aren't for truth, they're for some spectacular effect on your feelings and your imagination that keeps you coming back for more.

I encourage anyone interested in this to read On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, the best popular philosophy work in a long time.

And yet we are only hearing of this now, whereas botulism risk for example is a widely known reason to avoid honey for infants.

It must end up being rare for some other reason.

Doesn't feel realistic. The comic version at least makes sense at some level; the real-world one doesn't.

The real world version is "they're ripping us off by giving us cheap stuff that our producers can't compete with on price." Which is arguably a problem, yes, but the one thing it's not is a "ripping us off" problem.

> Conventional accounting measures portray large health insurers such as UnitedHealth Group (UHG) as earning relatively low profit margins because they treat premium dollars that are subsequently paid out in medical claims as revenue. However, these medical claims are pass-through costs, not income retained by the insurer.

I don't understand this claim. Doesn't every business have costs to make its goods and services, and revenue when those are sold? A grocery store sells food and uses the money to buy more food, pay its employees, reinvest etc, and the profit leftover goes to the owners. An insurance company sells policies and similarly uses the money to pay claims, pay employees, reinvest, and profit. Why is the insurance company's sales revenue pass-through and the grocery store's sales revenue not?

Update (30 minutes in): the replies so far all seem very superficial. Yes, I know that insurance is not exactly the same as grocery stores. This does not explain why they should suddenly be treated differently from an accounting perspective despite what everyone else before this moment has done.

On the other hand, if you let in-house devs own your enterprise software, in many places it's going to be months of meetings to get the smallest change implemented.

Plenty of companies run most of their internal operations on Excel and Access for exactly this reason. And most developers barely know anything about databases anyway.

I would never tell an agent to write "what does the code do" comments. Their default comments are already way too fluffy.

This is a problem that people mostly have to solve themselves. Like, I've been working with Claude for almost a year now and I have never once seen it write "Arrow Anti-Pattern" code. That, and much of the rest, would be fluff in my projects. Agent instructions are best learned from experience project-by-project.

I find that typical human content has about 5% information density, while typical AI content is about 1%. AI is much worse, but the same extreme skimming techniques apply to both. In both cases I'm like "I have no idea why you had to say all those words to make this point, but let's get on with it."

It isn't a person, I know from years of interaction how not-a-person these agents are, so when it says stuff like "I'm so tired, so many people have asked me this" (or a stilted Claudese version of the same) it really doesn't engage me. I know I'm talking to a text completer with no real experiences, emotions or intentions. I can't suspend disbelief at all.

IMO Gemini's is better than all the others, including the original.

This is an important problem, and the response can go in starkly different ways. While many in the West wring hands and call for degrowth, China is scaling up aquaculture to create abundance without overfishing, and solving aquaculture's ecological problems with technology.

I wonder what happens when you give Claude the old version and the logs and ask it to find the bug.

Maybe the real reason that small sample sizes don't tell you anything is because there's tons of small samples in the world, and the particular one you're looking at has almost certainly been selected for unusualness.

It's a multiple comparison problem that you don't know is a multiple comparison problem because you yourself didn't do the comparisons. You just got the result of them.

From a life spent on count statistics, one thing I think is interesting is how definitively you can reject perfect randomness from a very small sample like this.

The expected event count from 17,000 people exposed to a month of constant uniform event risk with an annual hazard rate of 20 per 100,000 per year is 0.28. The p-value for observing a count of 5 from a (Poissonian) mean of 0.28 is 1 in 100,000. So it's pretty unlikely by perfect random chance.

The other thing you see in a life spent in count statistics is a lot of statistically extreme events that turn out to have no deep or predictive significance.

One could say the same about the train.

This is a strong benchmark! None of these could be remotely mistaken for human art. Opus 5 comes closest.

Germany trading nuclear for coal in 2022, and the role of the Greens supporting it, was widely reported by credible outlets; see for example [1]:

> With little natural gas supplies of the country’s own, and its heavily supported renewable sector unable to fully make up the shortfall, German leaders faced a dilemma. To maintain enough gas reserves to get the country through the winter, they could try to put off the closure of Germany’s last three remaining nuclear reactors, which were scheduled to shutter by the end of 2022 as part of Germany’s post-Fukushima turn against nuclear power, and even restart already closed reactors.

> Or they could try to reactivate mothballed coal-fired power plants, and make up some of the electricity deficit with Germany’s still-ample coal reserves.

[...]

> Last week, the country’s parliament, with the backing of members of the Green Party in the coalition government, passed emergency legislation to reopen coal-powered plants, as well as further measures to boost the production of renewable energy.

I acknowledge that the politics and history of the nuclear decommission is more complicated than I understood - [2] seems to be a useful walkthrough. But it all happened with Green support and is the fruits of decades of Green ideological advocacy.

[1] https://archive.ph/v3iLS

[2] https://www.cjfp.org/for-germanys-green-party-the-50-year-dr...