mpalmer

Everyone has blogs. Nobody uses them correctly.

Today, everyone's least favorite aspect of recipe blogs has taken root in the rest of the blogosphere: massive prefaces talking about the history of email, personal experiences, and images which evoke mood while failing to convey information.

And really, the sanctimonious preachiness of this sort of article is such a turn-off. Why put up with this sort of condescension from someone who regurgitates facts about history instead of someone who considers history as the thing people lived through?

    Back then, email was just a way for researchers to leave messages for each other on the same computer network. 

    It wasn't instant. 

Yes it was.

    It wasn't fancy.

You think that email wasn't "fancy" to the first people to use it?

    It was just... useful. And that usefulness is exactly why it survived.

I bet you could find like four or five other examples of things that lasted a long time because they were useful.

Why write an ellipsis here? Is it to simulate your thinking about the next word? Like you want us to "hear" you "saying" this sentence? Who is that for?

Well, I could argue that by inviting a comparison between trusting a single fact from Wikipedia and trusting arbitrary generated output, you are practicing less critical thinking than you otherwise might.

The example's not relevant; the two things are not analogous. Moreover your point only works if one accepts your conclusion that:

    Independent verification is the main way they measured critical thinking

And this isn't especially true. All this information was self-reported to begin with. Maybe what you're describing is a pattern in the responses where participants associated verification activities with critical thinking.

But they also reported assessing things about the content, like style/personality, logical soundness, relevance to a topic, or suitability for a specific purpose.

Studies don't need to justify themselves with concrete conclusions; gathering the data for future use is a fine goal.

I'm going to assume you're being serious.

Critical thinking is actually something that people exercise (or don't) all the time. It is a skill and practice that is inarguably valuable in all situations. This paper is not about the effects of critical thinking on "AI results", but the exact inverse of that.

Do you value the capacity for critical thinking in yourself? In others? If so, the effect reported by this paper is probably of interest to you.

Native already had very specific meaning to technologists. Seems to me the industry is trading on the existing credibility of "things that are native"

Downvote me if you want, I'm flaunting the guidelines in service of the discourse.

If I may posthumously discipline the horse - when did the suffixes "-native" and "-first" merge in unholy matrimony?

Was it when B2B marketing realized that engineers equated "native" with "best/fastest/simplest solution available"? Or is it even more stupid than that?

    You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about (s/the law of physics/US history) that pushes (s/cancer cure/the right to privacy) a long time away.

Don't mind me, just repurposing one of your old comments to save time.

Me personally? I'd feel shame for not spending the half hour it would have taken to put even the flimsiest human stamp on the thing I asked an LLM to make for me.

The latest version of jj supports colocated git worktrees as part of its workspaces feature.

I don't think you can say that making wildly successful games one after the other is "feasible" for anyone who's interested in making games.

Challenge is never gone.

Here's a challenge: see yourself from the outside.

Realize that however effective you are as a programmer now, you were once a hopeless beginner.

Then you must acknowledge that you are still a hopeless beginner, relative to the you that doesn't exist yet.

In the spirit of fellowship, I tell you:

    git gud

---

And as you continue to learn, you'll see this for yourself, but I guarantee to you now that AI opened paths to writing novel software which no one has noticed yet. Software that was possible before but perhaps annoying to build, etc. Software which perhaps will only ever be imagined by someone who learned exactly the things you have, in exactly the order you did.

Never make the mistake that AI knows how to do everything just because it knows how to do everything we've done so far.

And don't think of your work as "mining" engineering problems! Forget engineering problems. Find a human problem and think about it for an entire month.

He had previously built and sold two games, each of which made him millions, funding the next effort. Not infeasible, but building on repeat success.

    My observation is that right now AI coding agents lean towards re-implementing everything from the ground up. This of course will not scale. It will scale beyond what humans writing code would scale to, but we will ask the AI for more, so it will even things out.

Those who cannot do, preach.

There's a funny trick where if you are an experienced software developer, and take time to think about your design and describe what you want in clear terms, it will actually do things your way. Weirdly, this still saves massive amounts of time.

People who don't understand how to build good software LOVE to expound on the things we'll have to design in order to make AI tools "lean toward" building better software.

It seems that these folks are not willing or able to conceive of, you know, actually getting good at this stuff.

For this reason, it never occurs to them that human beings are STILL the source of the best ideas and designs.

The evergreen observation; The most self-promote-y among us are mostly using AI to reinvent solutions and disguise them as new designs. These address solved problems, which are themselves disguised as new agentic problems.

Celebrating and promoting this stuff does not help us get better at discovering and building actually new things; change my mind.

I'm confused. Is this a paper or a blog post? It's basically a play by play of "something we asked an LLM to do". Is this what constitutes research at DeepMind these days?

You should play around more, it's flawed but more than any other tech it rewards exploration.

    But asking for something more nuanced, in the range of regular speech, requires the correct lingo

I like asking models to write things using only the N most common words in a language. It's probably never perfect, but it understands the assignment well enough. from there I notice things I prefer about that constraint, and things I don't.

Note the meaning of the original headline is distorted. this is not an NY state law, but an NY member of Congress putting forward federal legislation.

Sure. But neither should we be impressed with Anthropic for making a big deal out of (let's be perfectly honest) generating an SCM architecture on the backs of other people's ideas.

> My point is simply that if I don't understand these things, many other people also wouldn't.

The implication made explicit! Not to mention you yourself say that only above average people come here.

After the neat animations I was disappointed not to see that leftmost person die because the server fell on them in the last example.

Your subtle implication that you are among the smartest of laypeople somewhats hurts your claim of fellowship with them.

For the layperson who doesn't want to read 20,000 words, many of which are quite redundant due to the way the article was built, this is a version which adds a glossary, preserves the original language (except the added intro and conclusion which I felt was lacking) but removes all repeated material and claims, of which there was a massive amount.

https://pastebin.com/raw/p11vzFnB

Play your scenario out further, not just to the extent it serves your point. What do you think 200 million furious Americans looks like? Even assuming a willing military (besides ICE), how does the US occupy itself? It's a massive territory.

18 U.S.C. § 242: Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law

A DOJ with its ducks in a row would be charging this left and right.

    And it's not just me; that is most people's experience with LLMs

Got a source better than vibes on that one?

Hickey is not leaning on the dictionary. The specific definitions he lays out for tool and automation make up his argument, not the words themselves. Saying "no, tool can be these other things" misses the point by a considerable distance.

Well yeah, it's YOLO-by-default by design. That's not related to upgrade churn.

    By his definition, we could argue that a catapult or bow and arrow are not tools

Uh no, not based on his definition. Catapult and bows are simple. You can evaluate the result of using these tool instantly, and the corresponding adjustment is something you have to make, because you are wielding the tool. This is what he means by "wielding".

Compare and contrast with complaining to an LLM that "the margins look wrong".

I'm trying in vain to find any indication in your comment that you read more than the headline.

    LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent".

Sure. You can stretch the word "tool" to mean anything, but here, Hickey is using the words "tool" and "automation" to describe specific things. He defines each word precisely, for the purpose of the points he's making.

Pi as well? Comparatively it's quite a small surface. I haven't seen issues when I upgrade.

Yes, they even had full-time professional writers - happier times.