zero_shift

I have been prototyping some network proxies in a largely "vibe coded" fashion and it has been a mixed experience.

It has definitely accelerated my learning: through the process of writing rigorous plans, I have learned so much about network programming... the intricacies of HTTP2, how to design a fast MITM proxy, performance pitfalls in SSL...

These are things I studiously avoided learning for a decade, now demystified, mostly through Claude patiently rendering many figures and diagrams.

And with Fable, I was able to ship a working Envoy Rust extension in a one-shot.

On the other hand, my grasp on the details is tenuous. Every so often the agent can't progress and I am stuck for ideas, hitting different prompts like they were slot machines. I forget how to solve problems by myself.

I can feel myself becoming supine and dependent on something I know is going to become more expensive, a dependency AI vendors will seek to exploit. It has happened quickly. I do not really consent; it is forced on me by my employer.

> It is, but why is that a problem?

I used to have several good answers, but now I use Claude for everything, I can't remember any

I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic

The linked thread is titled "Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund" however I felt this lacked sufficient context to appear newsworthy.

> Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal

You can't make that assertion when these same people made the LLM revolution happen, by securing the capital and human resources to realise their dream / nightmare

I agree - it is hard not to be cynical. Funding is becoming scarce; IPOs are getting harder.

The hedge funds are trying to back out. I think they realise the web of financing makes them double (triple? quintuple?) exposed.

Amodei wants to manage the narrative and make the slowdown look at least semi-deliberate.

The cynic in me would argue the safety and alignment play has always filled a role of plausible deniability when plans go off track. "Oh well we had to pull the model", etc

I'm not going to criticise you for using Claude to build this. Honestly, for me as a consumer, it is a neutral thing provided the software is high quality

What I would ask is this: why should I use your software when I could generate my own?

For a relatively low cost in tokens, I could use Cursor & Fable 5.1 to generate a decent text editor of my own, if I constrained it to use high quality dependencies

So this is kind of the real quandary of OSS development: is there really any point creating tools for developers any more?

> The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades,

My very first experience of RN was having to update an app to handle the mandatory change to 64 bit APKs

Which required a massive update not only to several dependencies but also xcode, iOS frameworks, the weird objective C caches that get smuggled into node_modules, _as well as_ all the rigmarole or making the 64 bit APK build work

It was completely miserable

Yeah that rings a bell. It's been two decades... I should start reading again. I remember my essays better than the source material

It's been on my mind a lot, how I've lost touch with all this

This unearths some thoughts, back from my English degree twenty years ago

But basically I don't think those problems are all meant to be solved

Yes, the supernatural events described on stage are very difficult to pull off even with modern effects. But they were impossible with Jacobean setups. And that's kind of the point

There is always a tension between what is seen and spoken in that play. We're meant to get the sense that Macbeth is partly talking himself into his frenzy

Supernatural events happen but they kind of have a bathetic, eye-rolling quality to them, like the prophecy that "Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him"

Which YEAH, it does, in that Macbeth's enemies construct a bunch of battering rams from the forest timber. You are supposed to groan at that. Magic is way weaker than any of the human beings and their ordinary vices

I have found this extremely relevant as a (primarily) non-verbal thinker.

I don't, generally, think in words, more in - I guess I would call it something like meta-shapes? A sense of a shape but not things I can exactly visualise.

(You might be surprised to read this and then hear I have an English degree. Surely I thought about Shakespeare in words?! Nope. Shapes, movement, structures)

For me, having to write is critical because it is the only way I practice serialising my thoughts in a way other people can understand.

If I do not then I get very "deep" into my own way of sensing ideas and it's difficult to dig myself back out.

This might also be why I have never been very enchanted by LLMs? They only seem to "think" verbally. So it is always a translation effort for me.

I never can really enter any "flow" state with an LLM. My intuition is that highly verbal thinkers can enter flow with LLMs very easily

Would you like cookies? (No) -> You can revoke consent at any time (Revoke) -> Would you like cookies?

This is one of the things that did in Jan Hendrik Schön.

I can't remember the exact measurement but he was showing a set of curves that were simply too neat for a relatively small sample size - roughly 100 or so plastic transistors. In reality you cannot get that neat an effect without a huge sample population

I disagree with you, Simon. I almost always see "Use Boring Technology" to close down conversations, not open them up.

> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings

This is a thought I want to pull on

I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli

Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems

Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them

I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.

Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).

Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated

> I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be.

I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker.

Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without

But surely it does? It is TCP, even with multiplexing

I thought that was the whole motivation for building HTTP/3 on QUIC (UDP)?

You are being downvoted but I think this is correct. I doubt Netflix is really doing a double blind RCT on which languages produce better AI pull requests. How would that even work, have two versions of each service in different languages?

It's anecdata and maybe, MAYBE, a spreadsheet. Or a Google Form somewhere.

I work at a large devsec company which uses primarily Go and TypeScript

I've found that the LLM generated Go has few mistakes, and generally isn't too obscure. But the volume of code is so high, colleagues do a bad job of reviewing it.

I've seen a lot of very silly decisions made, like returning the wrong HTTP code, or miscategorizing a metric used for an SLO, that I just don't think is helped by the sheer volume of code one has to wade through.

Ironically, we are considering migrating some initiatives to Rust, exactly because experiments indicate it works well with LLM development.

I mean this isn't true, formatting is the most trivial part. And so many languages have an opinionated formatter these days (e.g. Black)

To be honest with you, I didn't think this idiom through

I made it up on the hoof (pun intended)

Cows are the most common animal on the farm, and overall they produce the most value. But they are very replaceable. When times are bad, you slaughter them.

Cows are like your rank-and-file application developers: you scale them up and down with the times.

Goats are more niche. You don't have many of them on your farm. But they solve important problems (eating weeds), and they look after themselves, so you seldom slaughter goats.

Goats are like specialists in your company. People who know how the "real" things operate. You don't need many of them. But they are involved in enough critical things, niches that can't be scaled down, that you seldom lay them off

It depends what you mean by enterprise project?

If you just mean a large company, I would say they do exist - though it may take some looking for them.

You can find them in companies that have to deal with "real" things (hardware, factories, production lines), or where there is an interest in taking advantage of emerging technology (advertising, e-commerce)

I would call my current project relatively systems-level too, as it's a network proxy. Not quite kernel level but definitely not trivial "if this then that" style coding.

My perspective is that application programming - CRUD, forms, IO orchestration - was always vulnerable, even before AI. Think about APIs for payments, APIs for subscriptions. E-commerce in a box type solutions.

That's why I always pushed to do more systems level work, on more exotic or weird technologies. It's not because I think I'm a better programmer, than someone slinging Spring code or React forms. But because in this industry it's better to be a goat than a cow.

I feel this was already a severe problem pre-AI. From what I hear from my partner (in university administration), nearly half the students demand accomodations for disabilities. Many of those conditions are very difficult to falsify

It doesn't feel good, but at some point we have to ask, can we support every single case, at the expense of the whole? I'd like to be convinced that's not a necessary tradeoff

I think you have the right observation but the wrong conclusion.

The appeal of digital systems, at a social level, is that they can transmit information accurately for almost no marginal cost. They come at the risk of fraud.

With AI the levels of risk have increased. Anyone can now be a fraudster, and it gets harder and harder to prove anything online. Either of us two, in this conversation, could be a well tuned LLM.

So society, collectively and at an individual level, is forced to reassess reliance on purely digital information. Which means that the advances in the technology, actually end up reducing the utility of digital systems more generally.

You can argue that this makes education costly and less accessible. It does. It absolutely does. There is also no alternative except to see higher education get wiped out, which would have devastating economic and social effects.

So we are going back to blue books and vivas.

That's fair. It starts easy, then gets difficult.

> the answer was what the Unabomber proposed the whole time.

The Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) killed 3 people and injured 23 others across 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995

It's absolutely incredible to see this talked about as a "reasonable" position on AI taking jobs.

edit: updated as it is not clear if Mosura is being serious or exaggerating for rhetoric

Firstly, this generation of AI is not going to take away all jobs

Secondly, we already know what happens when sectors face mass unemployment from the 1980s, when steel and coal workers were laid off en-masse: nobody came to help

Accelerationists want to see their jobs go up in smoke because they think that if enough white collar workers are impoverished, everyone who was formerly poorer than them, will chip in to rescue us

Just like they didn't in 1985...

In a context where the state already has less tax revenue due to mass unemployment! It's completely bananas thinking that only survives on internet brainrot forums

Starcardian also died this year - killed in a road accident whilst cycling

We already have human intelligence. Creating new humans is easy (and fun)

The only reason to emulate human intelligence is to capture it, exploit it, and reduce the negotiating power of those who have it naturally. Anyone who wants this is not a friend of human beings