The theory is that the new hire gets better over time

It always amazes me how few people get this. Have they only ever made terrible hires?

The way that a company makes big profits is by hiring fresh graduates and giving them a cushy life while they grow into good SWEs. By the time you’re paying $200k for a senior software engineer, they’re generating far more than that in value. And you only had to invest a couple years and some chump change.

But now businesses only think in the short-term and so paying $10k for a month of giving Anthropic access to our code base sounds like a bargain.

Executives are mostly irrelevant as long as they’re not forcing the whole company into the bullshit.

I’m seeing a lot of this, though. Like, I’m not technically required to use AI, but the VP will send me a message noting that I’ve only used 2k tokens this month and maybe I could get more done if I was using more…?

More as an alternative to a search engine.

In my ideal world, StackOverflow would be a public good with a lot of funding and no ads/sponsorship.

Since that’s not the case, and everything is hopelessly polluted with ads and SEO, LLMs are momentarily a useful tool for getting results. Their info might be only 3/4 correct, but my search results are also trash. Who knows what people will do in a year when the LLMs have been eating each others slop and are also being stuffed with ads by their owners.

Coding junkie is where you sneak away from your friends and code a few lines in the bathroom

We’re talking here about garbage code that we don’t want. If the choice is “let me commit bad code that causes problems or else I will quit using computers”… is this a dilemma for you?

It does seem silly, but it’s perfectly aligned with the marketing hype that the AI companies are producing.

The disconnect is coming here:

I just don’t see the line where any of that is impossible. It seems inevitable

I agree with you that robots building robots is not impossible. I disagree with you that it’s therefore inevitable. I strongly disagree with you that it’s therefore inevitable in the immediate future.

OK, cool. That definitely helps things.

I think where we’re disagreeing is that I think in a capitalist society the promise of money will inevitably corrupt the government (because it’s made of people). Maybe it can be avoided if the government performs additional regulatory action to stop anyone from getting too wealthy, but that sounds like beyond the limits that you want to set for government.

Without force

Whoah, whoah. Why’d you rule that out?

Your business plan: quality goods at reasonable prices. My business plan: hire some goons to kill you and take your stuff.

Historically, this has a lot of precedence.

In an unfettered marketplace, what stops a dominant player from introducing fetters?

When I read your message, I get the impression that you think of “The Government” as this independent actor. I see it as a system that is primarily controlled by wealthy people. Either directly or through their funding advertisements (including astroturfing/bot-farms) to promote what they want.

So the larger companies do get government assistance… because they are the government. And this isn’t some kind of weird coincidence. It’s fundamental to capitalism’s operation. You can’t have a system that’s based on capital and then have it be unbiased towards entities who have vastly more capital!

Their “real” job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.

Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it’s invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of “he’s not working very hard so he doesn’t deserve the money.”

socialized capitalism

I think I understand your complaint, but I’d say “free market” rather than “capitalism”. But regardless of what we call it, it doesn’t actually exist unless you have a more powerful external system regulating it.

Start with a truly free-market capitalist system. One company manages to temporarily pull ahead (through luck and skill). The rational thing for the company to do isn’t “make better products” (that’s hard) but “destroy competing companies” (much easier). And the end-product would be that the company becomes a government so it can force consumers to pay.

So I’d argue that socialized capitalism (which I’m picturing as a socialist system that permits certain specific free markets and handles the fallout of business failures) is what you actually want.

I once did some programming on the Cybiko, a device from 2000 that could form a wireless mesh network with peers. The idea was that you could have a shopping mall full of teens and they’d be able to chat with each other from one end to the other by routing through the mesh. It was a neat device!

This is good advice for all tertiary sources such as encyclopedias, which are designed to introduce readers to a topic, not to be the final point of reference. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, provides overviews of a topic and indicates sources of more extensive information.

The whole paragraph is kinda FUD except for this. Normal research practice is to (get ready for a shock) do research and not just copy a high-level summary of what other people have done. If your professors were saying, “don’t cite encyclopedias, which includes Wikipedia” then that’s fine. But my experience was that Wikipedia was specifically called out as being especially unreliable and that’s just nonsense.

I personally use ChatGPT like I would Wikipedia

Eesh. The value of a tertiary source is that it cites the secondary sources (which cite the primary). If you strip that out, how’s it different from “some guy told me…”? I think your professors did a bad job of teaching you about how to read sources. Maybe because they didn’t know themselves. :-(

I think it was. When I think of Wikipedia, I’m thinking about how it was in ~2005 (20 years ago) and it was a pretty solid encyclopedia then.

There were (and still are) some articles that are very thin. And some that have errors. Both of these things are true of non-wiki encyclopedias. When I’ve seen a poorly-written article, it’s usually on a subject that a standard encyclopedia wouldn’t even cover. So I feel like that was still a giant win for Wikipedia.

I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken. It’s true that Wikipedia contains errors, but so do other sources. The problem was that it was a new thing and the idea that someone could vandalize a page startled people. It turns out, though, that Wikipedia has pretty good controls for this over a reasonable time-window. And there’s a history of edits. And most pages are accurate and free from vandalism.

Just as you should not uncritically read any of your other sources, you shouldn’t uncritically read Wikipedia as a source. But if you are going to uncritically read, Wikipedia’s far from the worst thing to blindly trust.

I don’t think the article summarizes the research paper well. The researchers gave the AI models simple-but-large (which they confusingly called “complex”) puzzles. Like Towers of Hanoi but with 25 discs.

The solution to these puzzles is nothing but patterns. You can write code that will solve the Tower puzzle for any size n and the whole program is less than a screen.

The problem the researchers see is that on these long, pattern-based solutions, the models follow a bad path and then just give up long before they hit their limit on tokens. The researchers don’t have an answer for why this is, but they suspect that the reasoning doesn’t scale.

Just saw: they’re changing it back because you don’t appreciate it enough :(

I was at Google when they announced that only AI-related projects would be able to request increased budget. I don’t know if they’re still doing that specifically, but I’m sure they are still massively incentivizing teams to slap an “AI Inside” sticker on everything.