jebarker

> Its seems the post is part of a coordinated pump on the movie here by Amazon Studios

Is there any evidence for this?

I work in an R&D team as research scientist/engineer.

Cursor and Claude Code have undoubtedly accelerated certain aspects of my technical execution. In particular, root causing difficult bugs in a complicated codebase has been accelerated through the ability to generate throwaway targeted logging code and just generally having an assistant that can help me navigate and understand complex code.

However, overall I would say that AI coding tools have made my job harder in two other ways:

1. There’s an increased volume of code that requires more thorough review and/or testing or is just generally not in keeping with the overall repo design.

2. The cost is lowered for prototyping ideas so the competitive aspect of deciding what to build or which experiment to run has ramped up. I basically need to think faster and with more clarity to perform the same as I did before because the friction of implementation time has been drastically reduced.

I agree with you. I try to remember though that this is just the same situation that artists, musicians and (more recently) writers have been in for a long time. Unless you’re one of a very lucky few you’ll only get fulfillment in those pursuits if you enjoy the process rather than the output since it’s hard to get money or recognition for output anymore. Pure coding and lots of areas of code problem solving are going to end up in the same position.

You made me order The Cuckoo's Egg. Luis Alvarez is my scientific hero since I read his memoir last year. Truly underappreciated in the pop-sci community.

I have a background in mathematics, I believe in mathematics, but I don't believe in blind faith. Physics gave us statistical mechanics precisely because it's impossible to measure, model and predict the behavior of every individual particle in real-world systems. My gut feeling is that a mathematical theory of LLMs is more likely to look like statistical mechanics than something that tames chaos. That certainly doesn't mean that theory wont't open new doors though that we haven't currently thought of.

I’m not convinced that useful mathematical foundations will be found anytime soon. Neural nets exist because we want to make decisions in a world that is so noisy, complex and chaotic that we can’t satisfy the requirements of more rigorous analytical frameworks. It seems to me that the irreducible complexity is in the real world, not the neural networks.

I still rock one of these running Linux and it’s plenty capable for my hobby workloads. Just had to replace the inflating battery!

> How will it be useful?

Does it need to be?

It’s very common phrasing in the U.K.

That might be true for this particular thing, but there’ll still be some other perceived barrier of complexity, e.g. maybe it’s hardware, maybe it’s math, maybe it’s some higher level application like graphics. My point was that I was reminded to not just assume something would be hard without looking into it.

Reading this was a good reminder not to be intimidated by assumptions about complexity. (Without giving it much thought) I would have assumed that it would be hard to replace malloc for such fundamental applications as ls, but it's surprisingly simple.

The killer feature of DTs is how fast they can be. I worked very hard on a project to try and replace DT based classifiers with small NNs in a low latency application. NNs could achieve non-trivial gains in classification accuracy but remained two orders of magnitude higher latency at inference time.

> It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act

This is a strawman position in my opinion. I don't think there's that many people who think they're carrying out some selfless act by having children. It's simply biologically true that the children you'll probably have the easiest time raising are your own and, assuming we want to continue as a species, we do need people to have children. It's fine to have them, fine to not, neither side has some moral high ground.

> Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard.

I love my kids and they're pretty great (and seem easy by comparison to others), but it's definitely burdensome and hard.

Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.

> a tool is a tool

> author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space

I’ve stopped saying that “AI is just a tool” to justify/defend its use precisely because of this loss of thought you highlight. I now believe the appropriate analogy is “AI is delegation”.

So talking to the vibe coder that’s used AI is like talking to a high level manager rather than the engineer for human written code

AIUI this might not be as bigger problem as you’d imagine. Aerodynamics dominate most of the resistance at medium to highway speeds. This was discussed in the recent Rivian R1T cannonball run conversion videos where they doubled the battery capacity (and therefore drastically increased the weight of the vehicle) without substantially affecting efficiency.

I currently have a landscape designer planning our yard landscaping. When I see the impressive renderings they produced I immediately thought that it’s some idealized version of how it will look on a sunny day after 10 years of bedding in. I asked them to also produce renders of how it’ll look on a gloomy winter day 6 months after planting everything. Seems they don’t have the tools to produce those images really though

Well that’s not what I wanted to hear! I think you’re right though, you get to choose your challenge: do you want your problem to be possibly working on things that don’t really matter or be responsible (and empowered) to figure out what really matters.

I get stuck on asking “why am I solving this problem” too much. I am surrounded by technical problems that it would give a dopamine hit to solve and I’d feel the pleasure of helping my fellow man, but 99% of them feel like they shouldn’t even exist and solving them doesn’t really lead to any meaningful progress beyond providing me job security and money. (How) do people deal with this?

Thanks for sharing this detail. I've been interested in taking some form of flight training for a long time and finally have the financial means to do it, but I haven't decided whether to go with glider or powered flight. Your comments makes me realize that the time commitment might be larger than I can manage at this stage (two kids 1 and 5) and so may need to wait until a little later in life.

I wonder how much of the activity on prediction markets these days is competing LLM scripts? I would guess the overlap in prediction market punters and AI boomers is high.

I don't really buy into the setup here. Bash is Turing complete. How is calling os.walk in Python more "code-only" than calling find in bash? Would it be more authentically "code only" if you only let the LLM use C?

No, it doesn't. For example, you could use an AI agent just to aid you in code search and understanding or for filling out well specified functions which you then do QA on.

This is kind of brilliant. Both the blog post and the idea of managing CBT as a debugging process. There’s some great insights here, e.g.

> As you fix your poverty, you discover the ennui of abundance.

and the idea that the software is running as intended but it was written for urgent needs that are no longer appropriate.

I’m find nutritional guidelines for pasta too sad to live by. It’s just not enough to satisfy me and overall detracts from my enjoyment of the meal.

I'm definitely not a classicist, but I think it's unfair to criticize his writing abilities too much. He wasn't writing a book for others as I understand it, it was his personal diaries. EDIT: also most people are reading a translation, so there's another layer of editorial in there.

You know Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome right? It's not startup founder successful, but it's definitely moderately successful.

The ones I used for the first couple of years of my math PhD had solutions. That's a sufficient level of "advanced" to be applicable in this analogy. It doesn't really matter though - the point still stands that _if_ solutions are available you don't have to use them and doing so will hurt your learning of foundational knowledge.