The part that takes time in UI isn’t wiring up components, it’s the small changes like something is a pixel to the right or that gap is two pixels wide. Changing those in a C++ project means recompiling and that adds up to significant overhead over a day of polishing the UI. If C++ was able to get builds out in less than a second, this wouldn’t be an issue. People value performance in their own tools more than the tools of their customer.
After all expertise is mechanized, we’ll be in their loop instead of them being in ours.
Think of this like going to a doctor with a simple question. It probably won’t be simple to them. At the end though, we usually do whatever they tell us. Because they are the experts, not us.
These AI agents have been such a burden to open source projects that maintainers are beginning to not take patches from anyone. That follows from what you’re saying here because it’s the editing/review part that’s human-centric. Same with the approval gates mentioned here.
Another parallel here is that AI agents will probably end up being poor customers in the sense of repeat business and long-term relationships. Like how some shops won’t advertise on some platforms because the clicks aren’t worth as much, on average, maybe we’ll start to see something similar for agents.
I think we very often confuse engineers with scientists in this field. Think of the old joke: “anyone can build a bridge, it takes an Engineer to build one that barely stands”. Business value and the goal of engineering is to make a bridge that is fast to build, cheap to make, and stays standing exactly as long as it needs to. This is very different from the goals of science which are to test the absolute limits of known performance.
What I read from GP is that they’re looking for engineering innovation, not new science. I don’t see it as contradictory at all.
It can take some people a few years to get over OOP, in the same way that some kids still believe in Santa a bit longer. Keep at it though and you’ll make it there eventually too.
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
I see it as the most important home maintenance tool. Saves hundreds per year on little things that break. Like a wall patch, small o-ring for a toy, drawer slide mount, basement light mount, etc. I will say though that the learning curve is a bit rough if you don’t have CAD experience.
I was a huge fan of the high-framerate Hobbit films. It made the huge battles much easier to follow and I felt like I picked up a lot more of the details. Such a shame it never had a retail release.
It doesn’t look like GOG can afford to pay for that work. I think we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able to invest in Linux.
Social Media fills the same role that Alcohol used to. As far as debilitating addictions go, it does seem to be a small improvement though. Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example.
I slowed myself down to savour this comment for a full 20s. Enough time to linger on each word for a long moment. Just like parent was asking for.
I pictured it spoken with a heavy Californian surfer accent. He wanted elaborate but a huge wave was breaking and he really didn’t want to miss the next one. Was in far too much of a rush to even leave punctuation behind.
So long, dude, I hope the waves keep coming for you.
The usage limits on Claude have been making it too hard to experiment with. Lately, I get about an hour a day before hitting session/weekly limits. With Codex, the limits are higher than my own usage so I never see them.
Because of that, everyone who is new to this will be focused on Codex and write their glowing reviews of the current state of AI tools in that context.
It’s impossible to know if the content itself is worth the extra time and effort. Opportunity Cost is especially high in fiction. I agree that LotR should be on that list though.
I think there’s a chance the people funding this make the returns they hope for but it’ll be a new business model that gets them there, not producing better results. The quality of results have been roughly stable for too long to expect meaningful increases regularly anymore.
I see the sarcasm and agree with but just in case anyone sees this, we were getting exponentially better back in the early days but very much hitting diminishing returns now. We’re probably not seeing any large improvements again now with this tech.
The tools have been very stable for the past year or so. The biggest change I can think of is how much MCP servers have fallen off. I think they’re generally considered not worth the cost in context tokens now. The scope of changes needed to unlearn now with model changes or whatever else is on par with normal language/library updates we’ve been doing for decades. We’ve plateaued and it’s worth jumping now if you’re still in the fence.
The new tools have sets of problems they are very good at, sets they are very bad at and they are generally mediocre at everything else. Learning those lessons isn’t easy, takes time, and will produce bugs. If you aren’t making those mistakes now with everyone else, you’ll be doing them later when you do decide to start catching up and it will be more noticeable then.
This helped me understand what I was getting at so I’ll try explaining again now with that.
The words are typically used in two different contexts, one more professional (utilize) and one more casual (use). The words can be chosen to hint at which context we’re in or shift the context locally if needed.
For example, a story about a group of drunk guys could say that one of them utilized a flat stone to dig, to add humour since we’re clearly not in that professional context.
I think they have slightly different meanings where “use” is more direct like a tool and “utilize” is more indirect like a system but that could be more about context than meaning. The words “usage” and “utilization” show this more where I would expect “usage” to be binary or integer and “utilization” to be fractional or percentage. That context and expectation is important for clear writing.
Physical fatigue is lack of ATP and happens through the day as oxidation builds up. Cognitive fatigue is a build-up of used neurotransmitters that also build up over the day. These two processes interact with each other though where neurotransmitter reuptake uses a lot of ATP. I see that connection between them as ego depletion. If true, the best solution to it is a nap because that will help clear the junk out.
Something important to keep in mind is that cognitive fatigue is a protective system meant to protect our cells from harm. Pushing through anyways would be unlikely to cause harm in a healthy system. Post-covid is an extremely stressed one though. Would be like going to the gym after tearing a muscle and being surprised it got worse.
It is surprising how many books in these archives are romance novels. Just poking around randomly showed almost all (fiction!) is romance. If the reason for this Chinese dump has to do with LLM training sets, that puts the AI Sycophancy into a new light for me. AI chatbots are essential romance novel partners.
It is a cycle that feeds into the next, constantly strengthening itself. Whether that is positive feedback or negative feedback is really important. It is worth a large disruption to your life to get it working for you. The deadlock is very real.