461–470 of 605 posts
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Follow-up: This letter feels like a "jump the shark" moment. Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sh...
First time reading this. It's actually funny how disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now. And writing a new programming language for a certain product, well, it could turn out to be pretty cool, right? It's how we get all those Elms and so on.
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Given an input clang will always give the same output, not quite the same for llms. Also nobody ever claimed compilers were intelligent or that they "understood" things
An LLM will also give the same output for the same input when the temperature is zero[1]. It only becomes non-deterministic if you choose for it to be. Which is the same for a C compiler. You can choose to add as many random conditionals as you so please. But there is nothing about a compiler that implies determinism. A compiler is defined by function (taking input on how you want something to work and outputting cod…
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You can be a bear and still think AI will be big one day. It's quite plausible that LLMs will remain limited and we don't find anything better for decades and the stocks crash. But saying AI will never be a big thing is just unrealistic.
I think we should split definition somehow, between what LLMs can do today (or next few years) with how big a thing this particular capability can be (a derivative of the capability). And then what some future AI could do and with how big a thing that future capability could be. I regularly see people who distinguish between current and future capabilities, but then still lump societal impact (how big a thing could b…
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1. the labour market has not much to do with whether it is a bubble or not 2. definition of bubble is that the market cap must precipitously reduce, which it hasn't.
> the labour market has not much to do with whether it is a bubble or not How can the very market we're talking about not indicate whether there is a bubble in that market or not? Do you think we should be looking at the price of soybeans instead? > definition of bubble is that the market cap must precipitously reduce, which it hasn't. Incorrect. It has, just not by very much. Which isn't surprising as we already est…
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No, you pretend you do. You got 200ms of round trip delay across your nervous system. Some of the modern AI robotics systems already have that beat, sensor data to actuator action.
> Some of the modern AI robotics systems already have that beat, sensor data to actuator action. What do LLMs have to do with this? You ever see a machine beat a speed cube? So we’ve had “AI” all along and never knew it?! Oh right, comparing meatspace messaging speeds to copper or fiber doesn’t make sense. Good point.
Anyone who's trying to build universal AI-driven robots converges on architectures like that. Larger language-based models driving smaller "executive" models that operate in real time at a high frequency.
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I can do it. My claim is that an llm acts the same way (or superset) to how a person with short term memory would behave if the only mode they could communicate with was text. Do you agree?
That is not a proof, that is opinion. And I do not agree. LLMs are literally incapable of understanding the concept of truth, right/wrong, knowledge and not-knowledge. It seems pretty crucial to be able to tell if you know something or not for any level of human-level intelligence. Again, this conversation has been had in many variations constantly since LLMs were on the rise, and we can't rehash the same points over…
How are you so sure about this?
> If one believes LLMs are capable of cognition,
honestly asking: what formal proof is there for our own cognition?
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I started working in 1997 and lived through the dot com bubble and collapse. My advice to people is to diversify away from your company stock. I knew a lot of people at Cisco that had stock options at $80 and it dropped to under $20. Because of the way the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) worked at the time they bought the stock, did not sell, but owed taxes on the gain on the day of purchase. They had tax bills of over…
I heard of stories like that! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50476... That lesson is part of why I dump my company's shares the first chance I get.
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I recently had ChatGPT refactor an entire mathematical graph rendering logic that I wrote in vanilla js, and had it rewrite it as GLSL. It took about an hour overall (required a few prompts). That is world-class level in my opinion.
I'm currently trying to get Claude Sonnet 4.5 to produce a graph rendering algorithm, and while it's producing results, they're not the right results. I should probably do this myself and let the AI handle just the boilerplate code.
The memo itself is an excellent walk through historical bubbles, debt, financing, technological innovation, and much more, all written in a way that folks with a cursory knowledge of economics can reasonably follow along with. A+, excellent writing. The real meat is in the postscript though, because that's where the author puts to paper the very real (and very unaddressed) concerns around dwindling employment in a so…
The sad reality is that no one in tech and most sciences is concerned with ethics . Our society has internalised the ideology that technological progress is always good and desirable in whatever form it comes about, and this will be our undoing.
As someone with a rigid moral compass and inflexibly stringent set of ethics that prohibits me from exploiting others for any amount of personal gain, you’re speaking the truth.
It’s immensely frustrating existing in a sector (technology) that’s so incredibly exploitative, because it means I am immediately sniffed out as a threat and exiled from the powerful groups in an org. The fact I’ve clawed my way from hell desk intern to Lead Engineer over the past fifteen years without compromising my ethics and morals in the process makes me proud, but it sure as hell hasn’t netted me a house or promotion into leadership realms, unlike my peers.
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How did Amazon.com create more economic activity? Same way. It just has to make it more efficient.
Amazon.com is a business. AI is a technology in of itself it isn't a business. Thus far it appears applications of AI that provide 'benefit' do so by removing or reducing the need for human operators. Examples include: fewer software engineers, fewer call centres, removing potentially whole areas of work such as paralegals and in general automating away many white collar jobs. By far the largest use case of AI is thi…