ithkuil

Which terminal do you embed?

I assume that whatever I type can be also flawed and take precautions like backups etc

> The fact that millions of people are now using them, with varying degrees of success for various reasons, is a testament of this.

I do agree with you that by design this new tool lowers the bar to entry etc.

But I just want to state the obvious: billions of kids are playing with a ball; it's not that hard. Yet far less people are good soccer players.

> The goal is to replace all cognitive work. Just because this is not entirely possible today, doesn't mean that it won't be tomorrow. > [..] > I'm of the opinion that this goal is unachievable with the current tech generatiom > [..] > In the meantime, your own skills will continue to atrophy the more you rely on this tech [..]

Here I don't quite follow.

I agree that if this tech is ready to completely replace you, you won't need to use your brain. But provided it is not there yet (like, at all), your intellect is needed quite a lot to get out of it anything more than toys.

The question is: do you benefit from using it or not? can you build faster or better by applying these tools in the appropriate way or should you just ignore it and keep doing things the way things used to be done up until a few months ago?

This is a legit question.

My point is: in order to anwswer this question I cannot base my intuition only on some vague first principles on what this tech stack ought to be able to do, or what other people say it's able to do, or what I suspect it will never be able to do: I need to touch it, to learn how to use it, just like every other tool. That's the only way I can truly get a sensible answer. And like any other skill, I'm fully aware that I can't devote just a few minutes trying it out and then reaching any conclusion.

EDIT: I do share a general concern about how new generations are going to achieve the full-picture understanding if they get exposed to these tools as the main approach towards software production. I come to this after a long career in system programming, so I don't personally see this as a threat to atrophy my own skills; but I do share a quite undefined sense of concern about where this is going

I personally found out that knowing how to use ai coding assistants productively is a skill like any other and a) it requires a significant investment of time b) can be quite rewarding to learn just as any other skill c) might be useful now or in the future and d) doesn't negate the usefulness of any other skills acquired on the past nor diminishes the usefulness of learning new skills in the future

I responded to a joke with a joke

This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe.

Please die.

Please.

In this case the (communication) termination is working as intended

Pointing out thought terminating cliches is a thought terminating cliche?

And have them serve a cocktail called the quux

cc is the original Unix name for the C compiler binary

Because they would be faster?

It's a complicated journey but we're getting there. It's not like you immediately figure out the diagnosis and understand what's the best way to treat it.

And every child is different because it's often not just ADHD but also other things.

But we're in a much better position now to help him.

My main point is that from my experience "gifted children" very often come with all other sorts of problems that put them in the category of special needs children and it's not just that they are mentally one step ahead of their peers.

I wonder if /slow with 6 times less the price could have some uses

This doesn't match my experience with that term.

My son is diagnosed with ADHD and high IQ and labeled "gifted". He's very immature, has absolutely no method, is very impulsive and can't maintain focus for more than 20 minutes. He seems very much less mature than his peers in anything.

Yet, he just understands and remembers every single thing at school much better and faster than his peers. So I guess technically that makes him "gifted" but it's not a very useful gift. It just creates problems at school because he gets bored quickly but cannot be given more work to do because he gets exhausted quickly too!

I read recently a title of an article that said "gifted children are special needs children" and that marched my experience.

and disseminated to the entire peninsula by broadcast television featuring Mike Buongiorno

The word "seemingly" is doing a lot of work here.

Sometimes things that look very different actually are represented with similar vectors in latent space.

When that happens to us it "feels like" intuition; something you can't really put a finger on and might require work to put into a form that can be transferred to another human that has a different mental model

Innovation budget is a finite resource

I also wonder if CC can be used with k2.5 with the appropriate API adapter

I used to think like you. There is some deeply human in seeking basic justice that even small children have strong reactions even for the minor perceived injustices, let alone for serious stuff.

However when your survival is at stake (and the survival of your own kind and culture) people often stop giving a damn about who was right and who was wrong and they just try to defend themselves.

Many people understand this when the people defending themselves are Palestinians, and somehow are able to forgive senseless violence that they do, all because "they are in the right".

But somehow they cannot imagine that Israeli Jews are living for a long time in a genuine existential threat. Many people just think that all those Jews who live in Israel should just go back where they came from. That's obviously impossible since many fled countries where they didn't feel safe.

It's hard to understand the determination to fight for having just a normal life. We can't understand this because most people in the world have a "nation" a "fatherland" a place where they don't get butchered just because they belong to a given race or speak with an accent or have a long nose.

The situation is not symmetrical at all. Arabs can live in Israel. Arab citizens are not discriminated, there are Arab doctors, Arab justices, Arab members of the parlament. 20% of the Israeli citizens are Arab Muslims.

Israel is the multicultural democratic state that everybody claims to want Palestine to be. Jews need Israel to exist because they need a state that will protect them and not be at the whims of whatever populist government will turn their neighbors against (as it happened many times in many places, not only in Germany)

And yes, Israel did do many crimes directly and indirectly and has mistreated Palestinians in many cases.

But you have to put things in context. Arabs never accepted the Palestinian state and fought with several wars. Which they lost.

These kind of stuff happened many times in history, even recent history. Many borders were redrawen even in Europe and people were displaced. None of that is a good thing for people who suffered it

But Arabs did something that nobody else did for quite a long time: they engaged in a holy war, using suicide bombings and having an utter disregard for their own lives and the lives of their own children, all in the name of martyrdom. This ideology is very hard to fight. Japanese lost and surrendered, Germans lost and surrendered. Palestinian lost and kept blowing up people and making their own women and children dangerous. This increased the tension and created the condition for security checks and a kind of apartheid.

But this can be solved, if only Arabs stopped demanding the destruction of Israel. Of course, Israel cannot accept laying down their arms and letting them be butchered.

There is truth in the quote: if Palestinians laid down their arms there will be peace, if Israelis laid down their arms there would be genocide.

This seems like a crazy statement but this happens every single time Israel lowers their guard.

The only reason Israeli Jews are not dead is because they are efficient at defending themselves.

They are constantly bombed but they blow the rockets out of the air. They have shelters.

That's why there are so few dead Jews. Not for lack of trying on the Arab side.

---

So what is the right thing to do in this case?

Saying "Israel shouldn't have been created in 48 so they are and they always been colonizers so now they just have to go away"?

How can this be reasonable solution? We're talking about millions of people who are born there for a few generations now.

Deciding what to build and catching when things go sideways (and I'd add: engineering things so that you can better deal with things going sideways) was always the limiting factor.

Sure, writing code was slower before the agentic coder era, but as people coded their understanding of what they coded grew with them while coding and that allowed people to make informed decisions on what to do next and how to fix things when they go sideways.

By replacing the human who writes code with an agent that does it but faster doesn't necessarily improve the speed of the overall process by the same amount. Some of the time saved in producing code is simply shifted elsewhere: to reading, validating, and reconstructing the understanding that previously emerged naturally while writing. If the human still needs a sufficiently deep mental model of the system in order to make correct decisions, diagnose failures, and decide what to do next, then that understanding must be acquired one way or another. When it no longer forms incrementally during the act of coding, it has to be rebuilt after the fact, often under worse conditions and with less context. In that sense, the apparent speedup only holds if we ignore the cost of comprehension and review; once those are included, the comparison becomes less about raw code throughput and more about where and how understanding is generated in the process.

Many people understand this tradeoff in general terms. Just like we generally understand the concept of technical debt.

But just as it's very hard to deal with classic technical debt, it will be very hard to counterbalance the short term gains of AI producing endless streams of code

Deportation of illegal immigrants happened in the previous administrations and nothing like the current chaos unfolded.

I grant that some people protesting against the raids are likely doing that because they don't want illegals to be deported,

but I suspect most of the pushback is against the way this whole thing has been set up and the way agents handled the encounters with protesters so far, leading towards a spiral of distrust and a polarization of the issue.

There seems to be an indication that many of the ICE agents have been insufficiently trained to perform police work in a proper and safe way. and instead behave very aggressively. The abuse of racial profiling is making non-white citizens (including native Americans!) feel unsafe too. To make things worse, there is a loud group of people who are cheering the though guys from the sidelines/armchairs.

People who share those concerns are not necessarily pro-illegal immigration. I know things can be done differently because they have been done differently.

But in this case, one political movement is leveraging the deportation rhetoric to rile up their base, providing another political movement the ammonito to call them tyrannical and riling up their base, which in turn causes the first movement to justify their aggressiveness as counterinsurgence.

This doesn't lead to a good place and it has nothing to do with the fact that the country deserves a sane immigration policy.

The current immigration situation is utterly broken, but it has become such over time (and has many complicated facets) but the idea that this can be fixed in a haste by applying lunt force is the product of a new low point in politics.

Don't worry. This will create the demand for even more powerful models that are able to untangle the mess created by previous models.

Once we realize the kind of mess _those_ models created, well, we'll need even more capable models.

It's a variation on the theme of Kernighan insight about the more "clever" you are while coding the harder it will be to debug.

EDIT: Simplicity is a way out but it's hard under normal circumstances, now with this kind of pressure to ship fast because the colleague with the AI chimp can outperform you, aiming at simplicity will require some widespread understanding

I like implementing this standard gRPC interface (of I already have a gRPC based project) because it allows me to reuse a troubleshooting utility I wrote that uses it:

https://github.com/mkmik/byter

Sysadmin Really Expensive

The sentence continued with "that were just wrappers ...".

And yet for whatever reason, jabber actually works for me. I have tried a few apps, some of them I even paid for and I thought voice recognition is not good for me (I'm a L2 speaker).

Whatever the default model was choose for jabber, it just hits my sweet spot: it recognizes my speech faster than typing (I type relatively quickly and speak relatively slowly, so any lag in the recognition can quickly tip the scale).

I honestly don't know what a real production software of this kind would do better (besides the promise that somebody will actually take care of issuing updates for the next time apple breaks backward compat)

My instinct to read about the problem was to open the "problem.py" file, which states "Read the top of perf_takehome.py for more introduction"

So yeah. They _could_ have written it much more clearly in the readme.

It's definitely an area where we'll all learn a lot in the upcoming years.

But we have to use this "innovation budget" in a careful way.

I believe there are more descriptions of it other than rough depictions on coins

6 days to write a prompt. One day to unleash the agents in yolo mode