Orthogonal in the business area. But in agreement with the fact that they should hire more people instead of automating every process with non-deterministic tools. You can demand accountability from people, not from agents.
That's the thing about naysayers. They will say "it's impossible", "this technology doesn't work like that" and conveniently forget that technology must follow the law, not the other way around, and that the laws can be changed to fit the technological advances.
I have been saying this for many years but about customer support. It should be mandated by law that when a customer wants to reach out to a live person, they should be able to do so in a reasonable time.
Take a screenshot from the demo and ask an agent to build the same thing from scratch. Sharing prompts is meaningless due to non-deterministic inference
Agree. These LLM-generated explainers tend to be useful only to the person who prompted for that explainer. That person knows what's unclear to them, they have their internal mind model that is known only to them and they can refine the explainer to their liking and keep prompting until it looks the way they want it to look and explains concepts how they want them explained. I use these all the time but see no reason for sharing something that is a couple prompts away for anyone else.
I use Coder with one workspace per project. A workspace is an isolated VM and I let the agents loose there. They can do anything they want in the workspaces but once the code is pushed, it's reviewed by an external agent before being merged. It's not an elaborate setup. It started very straightforward and the basic setup still works for me, but I have been adding some features here and there over time.
I would like to address the author's conclusion and questions regarding the meaning. Mathematics without human understanding is meaningless. The universe works fine as it does without a single proof written by human or AI. The only reason humans started sciences was to evolve human understanding and do useful things with that understanding.
The photographers could be asking the same question - what's the point of photographing moments if everything can be generated? But to the subjects who are in the photos the meaning is in their memories and experience. A generated family picture might get a few likes on Instagram but it has no residual value and disappears until another generated picture takes its place. A real photograph has value to those who have been captured in it.
If game publishers discovered fully downloadable games so the users could store them and not worry about being rugpulled, I think they would be able to compete with Steam without that 30% cut.
But let's be honest, it's mostly luck. Luck being born in the right country, luck being born at the right parents, luck being surrounded by the right social circles. Being smart definitely matters, but it's just a compounding effect on the very large foundation.
It's exhilarating (for the lack of the knowledge of a better word) to see OpenAI and Anthropic starting getting hacked and getting a taste of their own medicine. Brings back hope that actual software engineering is not dead yet.
Making transfers to those countries is almost impossible from Western banks. It would require sophisticated multi-bank international transfers to do that, which take a long time and are fairly easy to stop.
Not a totally related comment, but I thought it would be interesting to share. Today I needed to get some work done in a hurry and my plan reached 5-hour limit. Since I needed to get it finished and it was just the finishing touches on the ongoing work, I decided to add $5 balance in extra credits (they are consumed at API rates). It took one prompt ("Continue.") and maybe 5 minute on Opus 5.5 xhigh to burn through it without finishing what I needed. I added $10 more and asked to continue - a few more minutes and that was gone too. Thankfully, by that time it was nearly done so I decided against burning any more cash.
API rates are like setting money on fire, crazy, no wonder they are profitable.
Predicting global events is next to impossible. Don't look at the predictions, as his prediction game has slowed and he has recently admitted that he was wrong on his predictions. Look at his exposing of financial shenanigans which let the bubble grow.
Lots of respect for him for staying unwaveringly principled while knowing when and how to adjust his expectations and predictions. He is really well informed and it's something else to watch him speaking live on the podcasts and be so specific with numbers. He really knows his stuff.
It's so funny how people's behavior converge to the same patterns over time. A few years ago I was using Google searches with "reddit" appended when I wanted to see genuine people's opinions, such as reviews. Later it started getting written in mainstream how everybody was doing it. Now you are saying about Google as a quick LLM chat (because it's easily reachable from the browser's URL bar) and that's exactly how I've been using it too.
So probably the rule is, if I have discovered some convenient usage pattern, it's very likely that many other users have it discovered independently, too.
Also, it's interesting to see how Google's value has fallen to the point when it's used mostly for very low stakes use cases.
It's at least not worse than Microsoft. Go and start a chat with Copilot. Which one? I don't know, they are all the same. Or maybe they are all different? All I know that if you start a chat in one interface, there is close to a 0% chance (but not quite) that you will find the same chat in another interface.
That agents with virtually unlimited computing resources can find these bugs is not surprising and of little interest at this point.
But can they fix and harden the software without introducing new bugs in the meantime? I would argue that over decades we have placed the industry in such feature hell that there will always be new critical attack vectors.
Now that writing the walls of code and building features is cheap, it is time for us, humans, to learn to reduce complexity in the software and to learn which features are not worth implementing.
Definitely there are many problems to this solution, such as what to do with existing billionaires. If it was up to me, I would say to them "figure it out, the late payment interest will start to accumulate soon". But realistically it could be done over multiple years and in stages to limit the negative effects.
Why couldn't there a wealth ceiling? Let's take $1B per person, everything above that is taxed at 100%. Would it destroy the capitalist dream and people would lose motivation to grow their wealth, or would it stimulate cooperation and wealth distribution?
I don't know. With each new release of these models, they compare side-by-side how they are better than the previous ones, but at the same time I feel less impressed by each new release. Somehow they manage to be a seemingly big step forward but at the same time I feel I have seen so much AI that I just look at the common failure modes and they are all still there.
It's easy for them to show demos of abstract things because they don't necessarily have to follow real-world rules, but anything modeled after real world falls short of expectations.
Would you use hosted models if they promised anonymity and no log retention and servers were physically located inside jurisdictions that respect privacy (Switzerland, Norway or similar, I'm not into law) if that meant better price/performance ratio than your current rig?
What's the point to provide it with Apache 2.0? It's likely going to get sucked into the LLM training or inference process sooner rather than later. By that time license is no longer going to matter.
It will be $1/hour in a year. Then you will have to pay a different rate for better graphics. These things don't end well. Once they see that they have a stable customer base, they will figure out how to squeeze even more money from their customers. Of course, it will be advertised as something that the customers themselves required and they do it for them, not for themselves.