I've always hated interfaces that try to complete my sentences for me. It started with suggested replies in email and IM apps. I sure noticed it when they started showing up in the llm chat interfaces and it really bugs me.
This is the one case I don't mind it. Suggested responses feel like they cheapen human interaction, but here I'm talking to a robot that really does tend to know what I want next, and also is highly unlikely to be offended by a less-than-heartfelt response.
The suggestions in the box where I put my text push me out of flow. Bad enough it says “want to do X?”, but when it’s in my own text box it screws me up. It’s not more efficient. It actively makes things worse for me.
The worst is Gmail's recent feature to suggest an entire goddamn email that includes cheery little details, doing its best to mimic human pleasantries and small talk. Rather than simply offering "yep/nope" type short replies like it once did, it'll now auto-compose and suggest a multi-paragraph email responding to questions like "How's the family doing?" or "Is your older cat tolerating the new kitten yet?" with completely fabricated saccharine slop.
It's like Clippy pops up and goes "It looks like you're trying to maintain a shred of human connection in an online interaction. Would you like a smiling skinwalker to do that for you instead?"
The world has a lot of tech journalists, but I have yet to see the longform article, with actual interviews, trying to dig into what is happening in this kind of manic push for features that seem to have no traction with anyone
There are failures in the history of software that come down to believers not realizing that they could never deliver on the promise they were selling, but at least the promise was compelling. But nowadays we are seeing this large orgs try to ship things that could never work. The 1000s of copilots. The hallucinated cat story... The kinds of thing you'd never demo to a serious product-centric exec, because it'd be your last day at the company.
And then there's the current execs, but I guess you'll never find one that will be honest with a journalist here. Can they not see that their product orgs are bankrupt? Whatever Nadella wanted, it sure wasn't the current copilot situation. It's not one product going wrong, but large parts of organizations going in directions that don't pass the smell test. We are in one of the least stable moments in tech since Windows 95 changed winners and losers. The times where malinvestment ruins established companies. How are we seeing basically every large company flailing?
Sadly, I believe there are some geniuses being paid a half mil a year who are so misguided, they think the only problem is the skinwalker doesn't sound enough like me.
If they can just keep working on it and make sure to train it on all my past emails, it'll be a perfect simulacrum, and its oily token secretions will be impossible for my friends and colleagues to distinguish from my own writing. I'll have one that's just like me and you'll have one that's just like you. And then we can automate away those pesky distractions that occasionally delay us from consuming content perfectly matched to our interests. Won't that be grand?
Fold? You'll pick coveralls from the daily bin with the other Amazon warehouse picker scum. Now come back to lineup before the cameras dock you three meals again...
You get a feeling some people would send a robot wearing their face to hug their mom if they thought the mom couldn't tell the difference. And to have sex with their wife. It'll happen too which is the sad bit.
“““One evening he felt the need for a live model and directed his wife to march around the room.
“Naked?” she asked hopefully.
Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in
exasperation. It was the despair of Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s life to be chained to a woman who was incapable of looking beyond her own dirty, sexual desires to the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which noble man could become heroically engaged.
“Why don’t you ever whip me?” she pouted one night.
“Because I haven’t the time,” he snapped at her impatiently. “I
haven’t the time. Don’t you know there’s a parade going on?”""" - Catch 22, Joseph Heller.
“““All Colonel Cathcart knew about his house in the hills was that he had such a house and hated it. He was never so bored as when spending there the two or three days every other week necessary to sustain the illusion that his damp and drafty stone farmhouse in the hills was a golden palace of carnal delights. Officers’ clubs everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses. No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.""" - also Catch 22, Joseph Heller.
This is hilarious as someone who hasn't used the gmail composition interface in years. I left it to use my own domain, but it seems like I get to enjoy this mess with popcorn too instead of tears.
This isn't that though. I agree, I hate those interfaces too.
But this is more like, when I've read 7 paragraphs of its reply and want to accept all of its recommendations and go ahead, I can just press the right-arrow key and hit enter, rather than typing out "Yes, agreed with recommendations 1-3, go ahead and build".
It saves me from any typing on probably something like a third of turns. Like I don't use it at all during the "design" phase of a session, but I use it constantly during the implementation phase, where I'm basically just sanity-checking that it is resolving all the edge cases correctly that are coming up.
It's a milder version of that situation where you talk to a microphone, but it has a slight delay so you're like stunlocked for feeling like eternity 3 seconds.
I hate that too, but I think it’s more the ux than the concept of a default. There are definitely situations (“here’s the default install path, press enter to confirm”) where defaults are a good experience, and LLM generated ones can fall in this category.
What I hate about sentence completion or suggestion is usually that it happens right when I’m trying to think and so destroys my focus, it’s actually way worse than just a passive option, it’s actively harmful to the task I want. The worst is google docs “help me write” - that may be gone now, I’ve blocked it with ublock origin, that waits until you’re thinking amount what you’d write and then hits you with a distracting pop up. It’s obviously PMs that don’t care about their users and want to maximize some AI use metric.
Anyway rant aside, it’s the interface more than the concept that’s the big problem.
I found your commit and your usage of AI seemed reasonable. It seems to me like your PR itself and the subsequent comments and correspondence was also human written.
I think a PR "in flight" shouldn't have been closed like that.
All this will do is push out developers like you that honestly disclose, and instead people will now just lie.
> Heterogeneity belongs in the type system, not in the runtime.
Is the intent that applications developed with this are compiled for target hardware on a machine-specific basis?
e.g. I define a machine file for my i5 and GTX3080, and another machine file for my gnarly datacenter rack, and the compiler compiles specifically for each?
That way the same source file is "provable" for different hardware configurations without relying on a runtime to be identicallu implemented?
> Is the intent that applications developed with this are compiled for target hardware on a machine-specific basis?
Vx gives you the power to do so, but one can be conservative by putting all the values in the fleet/*.vx files to extreme values. An analogy to that would be when we compile for X86-64, we can specify `-mcpu` otherwise by default the compiler picks a conservative backend.
Vx allows one to define compute elements(number of cores, etc), memory elements (number of distinct memory elements, hierarchy if any) and their relationship (placement, ownership etc). Together they define the toplogoy of a machine. Toplogy goes into machine description files (see https://github.com/vx-lang/Vx/tree/main/fleet) and the compiler uses them to 'monomorphize' the program based on that topology.
People that think using AI for basic stuff like promotional posters and menus is a good idea have no idea there's a large(?) subset of the population who is instantly repulsed by it.
Before AI, such designs were neutral to positive. AI versions can create extreme negative polarization.
It's equally likely that those business owners are simply burying their heads in the sand about it.
A local restaurant here caught a LOT of flack about it when they did a reopening under new ownership with AI menus, and had to revise their menu very quickly to avoid losing too much potential business.
I also see event organizers complaining about nobody showing up to their event, refusing to acknowledge that maybe it's because the flyer they had Gemini make was unworthy of any note in a sea of identical flyers with the same tired aesthetic.
> People that think using AI for basic stuff like promotional posters and menus is a good idea have no idea there's a large(?) subset of the population who is instantly repulsed by it.
AI-generated images can be indistinguishable from ones created by humans.
I also doubt most people care if something was AI-generated, but it soon won't matter, because most things will be, simply because they'll win on economics and efficiency.
It's similar to using CGI instead of practical effects in movies, using typewriters (and then word processors) instead of quill pens to write, or photoshop instead of an airbrush to create illustrations.
Most people don't care how something was created. They only care about the end result, which for AI-generated content can be as good or better, faster, and cheaper than what many if not most professional humans can do (and certainly better than the oceans of human slop of every kind out there).
> It's similar to using CGI instead of practical effects in movies
The use of CGI in movies led to a dramatic reduction in my willingness to see movies. Weirdly, there was a relatively short period of time where its use wasn't largely problematic, but over the last decade or so its use has become irritating enough to me that I factor it into my movie-seeing decisions.
> AI-generated images can be indistinguishable from ones created by humans.
The people who make basic posters and menus by prompting an AI are neither using the proper tools nor the proper prompts to reach that level of quality.
> I also doubt most people care if something was AI-generated
A lot of people hate AI, even if only because of what it represents - which is giant tech companies completely overhauling your day-to-day life for a few cents of profit.
> They only care about the end result, which for AI-generated content can be as good or better, faster, and cheaper than what many if not most professional humans can do
Exactly, and the AI-generated content is 99% obvious slop. Could a skilled professional have used AI to make something decent-looking? Yes, but that's not what is happening. What we are actually seeing is someone who has never used AI prompting it for "a poster" and grabbing the first output. It doesn't even have the quaint look of work created by an enthusiastic-but-untrained amateur, it just looks plain bad.
If all AI output looked amazing and nobody could ever tell - or simply didn't care - then we wouldn't be seeing articles about "AI fatigue", would we?
Isn't it the case that public companies owe a primary legal/fiduciary duty to shareholders over customers?
The question of choice between a profitable vs unprofitable venture is easy. But yeah, to what extent is choosing profitable instead of VERY profitable a breach of duty to shareholders?
As far as I am aware, the answer to your question is ‘no’[0].
> Contrary to what many believe, U.S. corporate law does not impose any enforceable legal duty on corporate directors or executives of public corporations to maximize profits or share price. The economic case for shareholder-value maximization similarly rests on incorrect factual claims about the structure of corporations, including the mistaken claims that shareholders “own” corporations, that they have the only residual claim on the firm’s profits, and that they are principals who hire and control directors to act as their agents.
This started long ago, and is one of the best examples of “if you repeat a lie often enough eventually it’ll be widely believed”. It’s a useful tool to manipulate public opinion over a few generations. But no one would ever do such a thing, right?
Mm not really. This has been argued so many times on HN. It’s imbued in de facto case law. You’re not going to find it in legislation.
Willingly getting sued by hostile shareholders is in itself not acting in the best interest of shareholders so while it’s not in code, it’s buried in many decades of case law and in reality it reflects the maligned incentives for companies.
So your contention is that a Cornell corporate & business law professor wrote and published a book and ignored all of the de facto case law that disproved their thesis? If so, do you have a rebuttal of the thesis by another subject matter expert that you can offer as a citation?
> Willingly getting sued by hostile shareholders is in itself not acting in the best interest of shareholders
Really? So if I am a hostile shareholder demanding massive workforce reductions so I can get a $1 dividend today, even though this action will make it impossible for anyone to get a $10 dividend tomorrow, it is in the best interest of shareholders for the company to capitulate to my demand? What if other shareholders are employees? Whose best interests are served then?
I’m not contending that the cornell professor is wrong. In fact, quite the opposite really. Perhaps my point wasn’t clear. What I’m saying is that reality is fuzzy enough that a majority of the country’s CEOs (often not lawyers) continue to operate on said myth. There have been enough lawsuits, even if many end up being frivolous, the myth persists. Honestly whether or not it’s written in stone doesn’t actually matter, it’s how executives behave.
Your own citation is basically an acknowledgement of that. In particular:
> “This dogma drives directors and executives to run public firms with a relentless focus on raising stock price. In the quest to “unlock shareholder value” they sell key assets, fire loyal employees, and ruthlessly squeeze the workforce that remains; cut back on product support, customer assistance, and research and development; delay replacing outworn, outmoded, and unsafe equipment; shower CEOs with stock options and expensive pay packages to “incentivize” them; drain cash reserves to pay large dividends and repurchase company shares, leveraging firms until they teeter on the brink of insolvency; and lobby regulators and Congress to change the law so they can chase short-term profits speculating in high-risk financial derivatives.”
Oh, I understand what you are saying now. Thank you for clarifying! I agree that executives these days do seem to persist in operating according to the shareholder value myth, despite it being a myth, and despite a bunch of them seemingly admitting to knowing better in 2019[0].
That false pledge certainly suggests that rather than being controlled by the dogma, they perpetuate it so workers and citizens accept turpitude as inevitable and necessary. The carrot is the stock option; the stick is the myth that everyone will get in big trouble if workers refuse to put shareholder wealth first.
>Isn't it the case that public companies owe a primary legal/fiduciary duty to shareholders
The shareholders own the company. It is their property. They paid for it, they own it, and likewise they can do whatever they want with it.
It would be crazy if I proposed you let me drive your car to work everyday. Why? Because you own your car, it's your property, and it works for your own interest. Basically every human agrees with this logic, but somehow "the company is just focused on pleasing shareholders" escapes this.
Shareholders functionally own the company. Yeah you can't stroll inside and take a ream of copy paper because you own a few shares, but the company also cannot be sold (ownership transfered) without you getting paid for your slice.
The shareholders, via the board, hold final say over the company, it's direction, and it's alignment...because they own it.
Raid your own assets, cut costs manically so you can have a few splendid quarters with stock buyback bonanza or focus on long term value creation, which a lot of times involves giving at least a passing tought to other stakeholders such as client and employees?
The getting was great for some time for HP shareholders under Fiorina, or GE shareholders under Welch. Lots of them left the sinking ships at the right moment, but I bet that lot of the others left holding the bag, would have preferred having bought AAPL.
This is like asking how many times can a politician can break his word before people vote for the other guy.
It's more like voting for public officials. Shareholders can vote to fire a CEO if they feel he's not acting in their best interests no mattter if that's the case or not.
The overwhelming majority of incentives for executives is and always has been aligned with squeezing more value out of customers, in the form of increased margins, lowest possible costs with the highest prices the market will tolerate.
There are a few, I mean very few executives who stand firm on defending good faith toward customer happiness and quality. One of the only things stopping the spiral is competition. That’s why there’s an incentive to consolidate into a few massive conglomerates.
"Fine. Please no. I'm out..." in that order