saulpw

It doesn't make sense! AI-generated text is insufferable. It requires so much parsing to get to what it's trying to say. Once I figure out what it's trying to say, I can generally say it with fewer words and less pompous structuring. I bet you could too, and then your blog post would actually be readable!

> That closing is the whole trick.

This is such a short blog post. You read this line (an entire paragraph by itself) and thought "good job Claude, you really captured what I was trying to say here"?

Let me put it another way: Unicode is for letters, not for words.

They are not part of any existing writing scheme. I think they could be a different standard like ":+1:" and ":chainsaw:" but it makes no sense for them to be built into text rendering.

Truly new ideas are, say, 0.01% of all 'novel' ideas, with the rest being rehashing or recombinations. And even then, the truly new kernel of the truly new idea is some small fraction of the whole thing. Like Einstein's theories of relativity, they were truly fresh, but mostly had to recombine existing work in 'novel' ways.

So it's not there are zero new ideas, but so few compared to the whole of the intellectual domain, that we can say 'there are no new ideas under the sun' and be basically correct to within a small rounding error. And AI is sufficiently ingenious to serve the needs of the vast majority of humanity, even though we'll still need to find/cultivate/inspire some new genius humans if we want to have more truly new ideas in the future.

I use an account on a matrix server other than the default matrix.org. My password manager won't fill it in so I have to type this server into the login form manually every time I login.

At first, maybe not much. But when you're properly set up, it's amazing to watch it cook.

I think a lot of people/companies are using 10x the tokens for 10% improvement. If you're willing to spend a modicum of attention/effort looking at what the bots are doing, one max Claude plan with Opus and occasionally Fable is very effective.

There are many polls vs one election. It's a lot harder to manipulate all the polls.

Also, yes, we can and should be volunteering locally. AND ALSO we can have independent statistical review.

How do you confirm the election results itself though, when the election purveyors can't be trusted? Statistical polling has been a third-party check on elections for a century.

How would that look any different than literally right now?

I see no evidence that you're committed to it getting better over time. Tell me again in a year or two when something you've made has actually gotten usable. Until then, build your credibility by making something good, not just making a sloppy copy.

Don't sloppy that copy!

I just produced a restoration/translation of Below The Root last month! Check it out, hope it brings back some memories: https://root.saul.pw.

Well we've been doing exactly this for 200 years! IMO the use of fossil fuels for manufacturing novelty products that go straight-to-landfill, and daily suburban commuting to bullshit jobs, and diverting water to inhabit cities in inhospitable deserts, is a greater cause of our 'slow genocide' than AI will be. So why would we stop now, when we couldn't be bothered to even slow down before? (Annual carbon emissions aren't even trending downward, much less getting to net negative!)

So while I also foresee and lament humanity's self-genocide, it seems a bit hypocritical to get salty about AI "automation" while broadly accepting our industrial civilization's trajectory.

Yeah this was my impression too, I thought it was structurally impossible to have a private key like "4"?

Original comment you responded to said "> [Meta] have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade" and you responded with a list of tech that is supposed to indicate their contribution. I'm not impressed. I'm also not impressed by fast fashion and child labor phones. Big Tech has been a scourge and 20% less web traffic because of zstd does not absolve them.

I also "use" Facebook tracking and ads and I'm not psyched about that either!

Yawn, I've used none of these except Linux and I would expect that their Linux contributions have been self-serving and not made it better for regular users like me.

I mean, Hack? Who cares?

We were lucky for decades to get paid to do what we enjoy. Virtually no other field gets this. Maybe artists but note that very few artists make even a living from their work. So yes it sucks but as they say, "don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened".

"Gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do" is not a waste. That is work. In fact it is the most important work with LLMs. If you spend all day in a hammock dreaming up what next needs to be done (and it's the right stuff), and then type a few sentences into the LLM to generate it overnight, that is better time spent working than spending all day cranking out 20 PRs that are of mid-low value.

> AI can make it very easy to do more and more busywork that doesn't move the needle.

I'm struck by the fact that the origin of the word "business" is "busy-ness".

Also Cory does not have Qualified Immunity, and if Cory is caught doing this, Cory can be punished.

Typescript was Microsoft and Swift was Apple, so those follow the same pattern of Go and Rust.

10 years is enough time. The industry was absolutely using Perl (1987) in 1997 and I was using Python (1991) professionally by 2003.

I mentioned Zig already; Julia also feels like it fizzled in a similar way, by getting attention without commensurate adoption.

But I will concede that you're right about Lean. It feels important that it's solving tomorrow's problem (i.e. today's) rather than yesterday's problem.

AFAICT there have only been two programming languages that people rely on today that were created after the year 2000: Go and Rust. Both were sponsored by large organizations which had clear goals that drove the design and development. All other modern languages are not going anywhere. The days of Python and Ruby and Perl and PHP being personal projects that people created, that grew into widespread languages that other people use seriously, are over. (Zig feels like it's a potential counterexample, but it's already been 10 years; for every other language mentioned above, after 10 years they were clearly well along their adoption curve.)

Depends. I say, let your needs drive your personal infrastructure. For example, I wanted to run Claude Code in YOLO mode 6 months ago, but I have lots of projects that I wanted to keep separate from one another (or at least be intentional about how they interact), and especially I wanted give some a set of permissions that they needed, but not this other set, and vice versa, and I could see them doing "grep -r" and "find $HOME" to just search over everything (with constant "I'm sorry, I exfiltrated these API tokens, so you need to rotate them"), so I built a little container setup to isolate them, and it's been working decently well for me and given me peace of mind when I let a project cook for a few hours.

Now I find that sometimes I do have tasks that I just want completed, and they're small or obvious or scoped enough that I know my role would be basically opening up a session and telling it to implement it and then asking another LLM for review and then fix the problems it found and then rubberstamp it--this is all for my personal setup so "QA" just involves me trying out the feature in my normal workflow anyway. So now I have a little miniature "software factory" that does the above, but without me needing to be in the loop. I press Alt+N and type e.g. "make TTS streaming" and continue about my other business, and in 5 minutes my text-to-speech setup has gone from nothing showing up until I toggle my push-to-talk switch, to words showing up at every pause.

I know it's not a bigco "software factory" but it serves my needs. And isn't that what this new era is about? We have a magic genie that grants wishes as long as they're well-enough defined and it's connected to the right other pieces to make it happen. So create an internal process that allows that genie to grant your wishes reliably and in bulk. What else is a "software factory" anyway?

Keep your identity small[0].

[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

> What is needed is a human at the beginning, to decide what needs to be done - and a human at the end, to decide whether it’s finished.

I've been thinking the same, this is very well put.

diskprices.com, I was going to say $500 but looked it up before posting.

I'm pretty cynical about the outcomes of capitalism in general. But I can buy a new 10TB HD for $300. Or a gigabit internet connection for $100/mo. Think back 10 or 20 years. How is this not a radical price-per-bit decrease for consumers?

Yup, I learned all too late in life that it's not really about buying and selling, but about allocation. Sounds like they dramatically increased their allocation of (US) cash? I don't think that sounds like a better place to park your money right now..