In some sense, I think the promise of free software is more real today than before because everyone else's software is replicable for relatively cheap. That's probably a much stronger situation for individual freedom to replicate and run code than in the era of us relying on copyright.
I did the same but with GPT embeddings. My primary problem was different though. I wanted to find when I talked about a related subject somewhere. Search works really well.
For this particular experiment, regardless of phrasing, I think the guys with the most appetite for risk have to be Cloudflare. They're shipping at an astonishing pace but I think there have been far more outages than there were before in jgc era. Perhaps Anthropic's application side teams are faster and more cowboy[0] but they are super AI-native so that makes sense.
0: I think this is the eras cowboys win so they're (unsurprisingly) smart about doing this
You don't. I can guarantee that 90% of the generated code will never receive a detailed review, simply because there's too much of a cognitive overhead, and too little time, everything moves too fast.
I remember having to do such a code review before an AI in a highly complex component, and it would take a full day of work to do it. In this day and age, most of the people i know take like half an hour and are mostly scanning for obvious mistakes, where the bigger problem are those sneaky non obvious ones.
Exactly. Its same for reviewing somebody else's code. How many companies did this perfectly before llms came? I know mine didn't. But these days people that aren't senior enough do reviews of llm output, and do a quick mental path through the code, see the success and approve it.
What could work - llm creating a very good test suite, for their own code changes and overall app (as much as feasible), and those tests need a hardcore review. Then actual code review doesn't have to be that deep. But if everybody is shipping like there is no tomorrow, edge cases will start biting hard and often.
The sequels are pulpy and quite sleazy to be honest. I read them some decades ago but there are ex-beauty-queens in a tiny human colony who must have sex with everyone else to keep the population going or some such stuff. You moved from top-grade cosmic level thought to whether X or Y is sleeping with Z. It's not that the subject is not meaningful. It's just like if you were reading about WW2 in some book and the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something.
> “the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something”
Are you talking about the same Rama sequels by Gentry Lee?
I admit it's been a long time since I read them (maybe 20 years), but I certainly don't remember anything quite like this. I remember it more like the other poster here said: they basically said everyone was corrupt. In a nutshell, Rama comes back to Earth with instructions that a bunch of humans need to come aboard to live out their lives there. But instead of sending their best, some parts of Earth send their worst: criminals and such. So pretty quickly there's several different "cities", with one of them basically run by some crime boss. One of the main characters' daughters gets involved with the crime boss somehow and murders him before killing herself, as payback for killing her father. Later, the human habitat goes to war with the aliens in one of the other habitats, because the humans had broken through to their side and invaded them for some reason I forget. There was even one plot point that the father had hacked into the ship's environmental controls because the humans insisted on having wood-burning fireplaces, even though this messed with the environmental control systems. Instead of just not burning fires, the basically forced him to change the system to accommodate their fireplaces.
But I don't remember any sex slaves. Maybe I forgot that part.
Perhaps you mixed plots together. "Rama II" takes on expedition to the second ship which ends with 3 people being trapped inside and put on a journey outside solar system. Then "The Garden of Rama" describes how these three had to adapt to life on the alien ship. There happens the plot where the main character Nicole has 5 kids, 3 girls with one man and 2 boys with another. First part is written as her journal, then book continues normal narration and focuses on second ship reaching the destination and reasons why they were bought there in the first place. Then, plot with return to the solar system happens where other people were boarded in secrecy on third ship. And it at some point revolves around Nicole's daughter who lives a destructive life.
Unlike others in this comments tree, I liked the other books. These go against the typical space exploration journey where you have humans on their ship surrounded by technology they're familiar with and on which they can fully rely. Here, characters are uncertain of their future - they don't know where they're going, have to adapt to the surroundings, discover the unknown and face downsides of human beings. There's none of that familiar splendor of "going boldly where no man has gone before" or heroic actions, great fights in the outer space. Lee's contribution shows us as small, even unsuited to live among others - here and there.
On the other hand, I'm not fond of his other books where he tried to continue this universe: "Bright Messengers" and "Double Full Moon Night". These felt like distilled, fast-tracked version of "Rama" with more religious overtones because of two characters included.
---
Clarke's own books and these which he co-wrote with other authors have potential for adaptations for the big and small screen. "Rama" series taken by good writers and directors could become a new hit comparable to "Lost" show - which if you stretch some things, feels somehow similar.
In my case, what I like to do is extract data into machine-readable format and then once the data is appropriately modeled, further actions can use programmatic means to analyze. As an example, I also used Claude Code on my taxes:
1. I keep all my accounts in accounting software (originally Wave, then beancount)
2. Because the machinery is all in programmatically queriable means, the data is not in token-space, only the schema and logic
I then use tax software to prep my professional and personal returns. The LLM acts as a validator, and ensures I've done my accounts right. I have `jmap` pull my mail via IMAP, my Mercury account via a read-only transactions-only token and then I let it compare against my beancount records to make sure I've accounted for things correctly.
For the most part, you want it to be handling very little arithmetic in token-space though the SOTA models can do it pretty flawlessly. I did notice that they would occasionally make arithmetic errors in numerical comparison, but when using them as an assistant you're not using them directly but as a hypothesis generator and a checker tool and if you ask it to write out the reasoning it's pretty damned good.
For me Opus 4.6 in Claude Code was remarkable for this use-case. These days, I just run `,cc accounts` and then look at the newly added accounts in fava and compare with Mercury. This is one of those tedious-to-enter trivial-to-verify use-cases that they excel at.
To be honest, I was fine using Wave, but without machine-access it's software that's dead to me.
Well, the license change sounds pretty strange, but to be honest if I were to use this software I would use it without adhering to the MIT. It's machine-created content which is not, in general, copyrightable. You can assert whatever license you want on such content, but I am not going to adhere to it. For example, I declare you may use the following under the Elastic License
That sounds like it's smuggling in some assumptions that do not hold. Modern industrialization has led to human flourishing on an unprecedented scale. Pre-industrial civilizations are not getting to this point without high-energy-density materials and bootstrapping to photovoltaics, wind, and nuclear seem highly unlikely. Even solar concentrators seem unlikely to help considering fossil fuels provide portable energy storage that was unmatched in utility until recently.
I think there's probably a lot of rosy math in this counterfactual. Perhaps one can argue that post the nuclear age, we could have made some choices that environmentalists would oppose that would nonetheless have been better for the environment, but "from the beginning of use"? I think that I'd like to see.
EDIT: It would be a fun universe to play with, though. Do we use solar concentrators to provide the power to make grain ethanol? We'd have to master food production first without Haber-Bosch though. That sounds like a real challenge.
My statement is just forward looking - I don't see a way to get out of the energy trap from 1700 to perhaps 1900 besides fossil fuels, practically speaking, the regret I have is that we've continued past the point where alternatives are comparable or even superior.
Well, that seems a bit reductive because nothing can create a single cell right now. All cells are self-copied-and-divided. Omnis cellula e cellula, as they say. There is no cell constructor anywhere. Both Nature and Artifice use the same device to make more cells: a previous cell.
One thing that seems reasonable is to have car points and driver points. In the event of violations, both the vehicle and the driver are assigned points depending on detection. Then after a certain number of points, the vehicle is impounded with the owner able to have it stored at an appropriately licensed facility of their choice that ensures that the vehicle cannot be driven on public roads.
Reporting vehicle theft etc. can provide immunity from points on the car.
That seems extremely unreasonable, cops can prove who was driving at the time of the violation or they can not bring a case. If I lend my car to someone and they break the law, it’s not the car’s fault.
I’m glad my state found these unconstitutional as well.
Well, objects used in the commission of a crime are frequently confiscated. That's not outrageous. If I lend someone my gun and they rob a bank, I will likely not get my gun back though "it's not the gun's fault". Automated machinery has the advantage that it is impartial and effective, and given that law enforcement costs a lot in these circumstances, and that chasing cars for small enforcement violations creates worse outcomes, it seems thoroughly reasonable to apply the crime to the detectable object.
Yep. Cars are horrifically dangerous and we treat them like toys. It's part of driver culture in the US and why we'll never design for public transportation.
If you're curious what it's like for a couple of normies doing IVF, I wrote down our experience here to the degree I remembered: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF
If I'm understanding that right, it cost $25k per run, and you did 3 runs, so $75k total? Or was it $25k for the full thing? Did insurance cover anything?
Our IVF clinic has a publicly available price sheet[0] so that is correct (thought he prices are higher now): $75k total for us. My wife and I are relatively old. Friends who were approximately 10 years younger collected some 50 eggs on a single cycle. There is a drop-off in egg -> embryo but the women with the 50 eggs are likely going to end up with more usable embryos than us.
Insurance coverage is broader now. When we did it, we used cash pay but nowadays where we live in California there is SB 729 that means most big insurance plans will cover IVF. Personally, I think that's a bit regressive. Older, more established couples like us are benefiting from what will be primarily paid into by younger couples. But if pre-implantation testing becomes widespread (a good thing, imho) then IVF will be more widespread so perhaps this is a forward-looking policy. Still, expanding the child tax credit and raising it to 10x what it is would be good, I think.
Didn't read that account but I went through it with wife. The egg collecting / embryo creating process is the expensive part, so depends on how many times you have to do that process. The re-implantation was significantly cheaper, so also depends on how many times you have to do that part but at least its less costly.
We ended up doing 1 extraction and 2 implantations. If I remember it was roughly ($15k-20k) then (~$5k * 2). This was about 8-9 years ago. We had no fertility issues and had other reasons for doing IVF, but if you do have fertility issues it's more risk the extraction and embryo process will fail and need repeating.
I went through this with my partner and it cost around CAD $30K all-in. Thankfully it was 100% covered by insurance (for the drugs) and by a provincial program (for the procedure).
The drugs for stimulating follicle growth cost around $500/day and the first cycle didn't result in enough mature follicles to be worth attempting the egg harvesting. In the second attempt, the duration was extended after a scan to let more develop. Every extra day, is an another $500.
If it weren't for the government program we were seriously looking at going to one of the many clinics in Mexico offering these services.
We weren't so lucky with the numbers though; here's significant attrition at every step and if you aren't starting with a good number it can look like: 5 follicles > 4 mature eggs > 2 embryos > 1 child
The video was helpful and addressed many of the clinical and ethical concerns I have. Can you consent to a procedure that has a 30+ year impact? Are these treatments completely safety tested if long term studies are not being done? What are the ethics of making women take health risks for money, especially when health is increasing in value, and money is losing its value
thanks . yeah i had a close family member do the same and it was a pretty long and painful process. it was > 10 years ago but I think the concerns are still similar.
I've been through six egg retrievals. I've probably been lucky in the the physical effects weren't bad for me (but I've had/have endometriosis so I'm pretty used to just dealing with pain and discomfort). The emotional effects were harder. Not just the stress of not knowing whether it was even going to work (most times it didn't), but also the hormonal shifts resulting in rapid mood swings and irritability - which my partner found hard to deal with.
reply