People who use AI set the bar themselves when they claim they generate "very high quality work using Claude". Humans more rarely make such claims about the code they write themselves, but when they do, I expect they face similar scrutiny.
AI code is competent, but it's not great or high quality unless you have a good enough eye for quality to steer it with an iron hand. But if you do, you know the quality comes from proper guidance, so you still wouldn't say AI code is great. If you do say exactly that, it comes across as having low standards (which is fine if you own it) and people are going to jump on that just to bring you down a peg.
> They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast.
I don't know about that. The Gemini TUI takes like four full seconds to start on my machine. I have no idea what the hell it's doing. A lot of the fancy new TUIs that are coming on the crest of the current fad are hot garbage. I hate them.
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
It really irked me when I read it the first time and it drives me nuts that no one else seems to catch this, you’re the first one in some 100 HN threads to point it out
And my take! A fork of fish where any command that starts with > or a capital letter is fed to $fish_llm_command: https://github.com/breuleux/fish-shell. With Claude's help, that took all of 30 minutes to make.
I don’t tidy up very often, but when I do, it doesn’t take much time or energy. I just dump everything that isn’t version controlled into a junk folder, and it feels great.
> It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.
It's generally easier to make such a process tamper-proof than an election. You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment. Then anyone can verify the integrity of the process by verifying the seed includes their contribution, and computing the candidates themselves.
>You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment.
If that were a viable model for the real world, we could make existing elections just as tamper-proof.
If the government doesn't have enough power, the wealthy won't need to bribe politicians to do their bidding. They will do their own bidding directly, and there will be nobody to stop them.
It's like, if you want to sell your cyanide penis pills under big government, you need to bribe someone. If you want to sell them under small government, you just... you just sell them, that's what.
There may be ways to design a government where power is better distributed, e.g. using sortition, but ultimately it needs to be richer and more powerful than its wealthiest citizens, otherwise these wealthy citizens will assess, correctly, that when push comes to shove, the laws won't apply to them, and they do not need the government's permission to do what they want.
Even a small government still has courts, in fact they would be a far more sizeable fraction of the government and thus a lot more effective. So if people like Epstein engage in criminal behavior, or even just unlawful behavior that they would be liable for, they can definitely be held accountable.
But suppose you have egalitarian nation N -- what stops the billionaire from non-egalitarian nation B from influencing your politicians? Especially if nation N is small and nation B is large.
Moreover -- why would low-level elites (think: entrepreneurs, small business owners, etc.) stay in nation N if it was more profitable to do business in nation B -- recall this is precisely the type of person that is often most mobile and internationalized.
> These feel like they involve something beyond "predict the next token really well, with a reasoning trace."
I don't think there's anything you can't do by "predicting the next token really well". It's an extremely powerful and extremely general mechanism. Saying there must be "something beyond that" is a bit like saying physical atoms can't be enough to implement thought and there must be something beyond the physical. It underestimates the nearly unlimited power of the paradigm.
Besides, what is the human brain if not a machine that generates "tokens" that the body propagates through nerves to produce physical actions? What else than a sequence of these tokens would a machine have to produce in response to its environment and memory?
The point is that "predicting the next token" is such a general mechanism as to be meaningless. We say that LLMs are "just" predicting the next token, as if this somehow explained all there was to them. It doesn't, not any more than "the brain is made out of atoms" explains the brain, or "it's a list of lists" explains a Lisp program. It's a platitude.
In the case of LLMs, "prediction" is overselling it somewhat. They are token sequence generators. Calling these sequences "predictions" vaguely corresponds to our own intent with respect to training these machines, because we use the value of the next token as a signal to either reinforce or get away from the current behavior. But there's nothing intrinsic in the inference math that says they are predictors, and we typically run inference with a high enough temperature that we don't actually generate the max likelihood tokens anyway.
The whole terminology around these things is hopelessly confused.
I mean.. i don't think that statement is far off. Much of what we do is entirely about predicting the world around us, no? Physics (where the ball will land) to emotional state of others based on our actions (theory of mind), we operate very heavily based on a predictive model of the world around us.
Couple that with all the automatic processes in our mind (filled in blanks that we didn't observe, yet will be convinced we did observe them), hormone states that drastically affect our thoughts and actions..
and the result? I'm not a big believer in our uniqueness or level of autonomy as so many think we have.
With that said i am in no way saying LLMs are even close to us, or are even remotely close to the right implementation to be close to us. The level of complexity in our "stack" alone dwarfs LLMs. I'm not even sure LLMs are up to a worms brain yet.
Sure, you can put it this way, with the caveat that reality at large isn't strongly definable.
You can sort of see this with good engineering: half of it is strongly defining a system simple enough to be reasoned about and built up, the other half is making damn sure that the rest of reality can't intrude, violate your assumptions and ruin it all.
AI code is competent, but it's not great or high quality unless you have a good enough eye for quality to steer it with an iron hand. But if you do, you know the quality comes from proper guidance, so you still wouldn't say AI code is great. If you do say exactly that, it comes across as having low standards (which is fine if you own it) and people are going to jump on that just to bring you down a peg.
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