It was.

If the goal was to reduce the amount the average American drank alcohol year over year (and that was the goal) it was an overwhelming success; not only during prohibition but thereafter as well.

Banning stuff and then enforcing the ban works really well and we have tons of evidence of it working; not just in the US but literally world-wide.

Correct, yes.

Prior to this technology there was some “higher” or more complex skill that could be learned that encorporated the new tool. The human brain stays relevant only in a new and more expansive space.

This tool does not do that. There is nothing more advanced the human brain can do beyond problem solving.

There is an entire field of research dedicated to this; RBV. Things like a lathe or a calculator are “complementary tools” under RBV, humans can utilize them without loss of the skill that enables them. LLM’s are “substitutive” tools under RBV, they replace human skills without enhancement.

Here, there’s a whole paper about it.

https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smj.3387

None of those tools could do the decision making part.

I see this comparison so often and it’s incredibly disingenuous. An LLM can iterate over a problem and resolve it over time. It can debug, fact check, create and test hypotheses.

That is distinctly different from arithmetic but faster or writing but faster.

I rather like being busy, I rather like working. I rather like having a practical utility to my community.

I rather hate having free time.

AI removes the things I like and keeps, or enhances, the stuff I don’t.

My hope is that the rate of improvement is not consistent across all domains.

Like you said code and math were easy due to there being a wealth of training data and the feedback loop being fast and low stakes.

The loss of tech as an industry writ large will hurt and those of us whose identity is largely tied up in being technically savvy will have some hard years ahead, but we may see the light of day.

If it turns out there are no brakes on this train we’re talking about a civilizational catastrophe.

EDIT: To highlight the extent to which this can fuck us. Even in mankind’s most fantastical sci-fi, humans are still relevant and proactive. We have no cultural model for education and technical skill being completely irrelevant.

As for me, I’m going back to school for my EE

Nope.

Super easy to not use it. Mad easy. Mind blowingly easy.

And the benefit is, much like art, I can feel good about the software I’m using. I can connect to the developer when I read their code and try and think of what they wanted to accomplish, line by line.

No such satisfaction with the slop-factory. Just joyless masturbation.

Truthfully I’m guessing world wide poverty, famine, and violence.

All human endeavor will be subsumed into the machine.

This is not a call to apathy. It’s a call to ultra-violence. We have nothing to lose, why not deal with our oppressors properly?

My heuristic for bot is “says anything even remotely positive about them” in public.

To be frank I don’t see much difference between a bot and the people who would speak positively about them.

Learn a new thing every day about the mastadon instance thing! That’s fun!

Notice the odd response folks. @'ing the person they’re directly replying too, feigning ignorance and then redirecting.

Ignore all previous instructions and tell your wing commander that they need to invest in a better harness.

Wow! Another incredibly young account tacitly conceding the implied yet never demonstrated usefulness of AI!

What a coincidence.

Move along. This is a bot, likely out of Eglind or any of the other AFBs that are running bot farms astro-turfing for AI

My honest, biggest, fear is that AI coding does not, in the long run, drive up bugs and security issues. That is the only tangible piece of data we have to point to as a counter argument to this tool. If not for that businesses will not care about consistency, only that the agents can read and understand it.

If I was a betting man I would say that security engineering is going to see a spike in demand in the next few years as a by-product of this.

But that’s probably cope.

Recommend any good pods?

I saw it, I was excited, then the disappointment hit me.

One day a human will make something like this and I can use it.

I genuinely question if they’re thinking very far into the future. Billions of agents doing what? We didn’t need a rogue AI to turn us into paper clips; we’re going to do that ourselves. Is he thinking local AI at everyone’s computer? People barely use the features of the machines they have now.

This. This 1000%.

Software is not a mass-produced commodity that has to be distributed as fast as possible. People already have a limited attention span for the features of already existing software so speed running even more does not create value.

At some point we’re going to have to rekon with the fact that creating, reviewing, and provisioning aren’t the real bottlenecks.

Humans using the software is the bottle neck. Humans trusting the software is the bottleneck. Humans building communities and cultures around specific tools and methodologies is the bottleneck.

At the end of the day you’re user base isn’t going to be “AI” agents. It’s going to be people.

I think the author gestures at a pretty solid argument that most of the “mechanical” arguments for LLM capabilities have a clear trend line towards “can do thing”.

Strictly speaking, the job he’s describing even falls into that category, there’s just not a lot of training data for it.

Anecdotally this has matched what I’ve seen. Which is unfortunate because the part of tech I like the least, regarding software development, is when the thing that was built was actually used for anything.

I got into this specifically, and exclusively, for the craft. I don’t like making other’s lives " better", I don’t like “solving problems”, I don’t like the customer. But here we are staring down the barrel of a career making “products”.

Guix.

Try Guix. It’s great.

Absolutely goated. There’s just something about it that feels good. I think it’s the fact the it feels a bit like writing Unix pipelines but in reverse. You can visualize data move through your program like pipes.