We do still read code. Most people are not doing a fully unseen development strategy because we have needs around efficiency, security, compliance etc and we can’t simply blame it on our agents like we don’t control them like OpenAI do
Which tangentially brings up another analogy: many high level languages don’t compile directly to assembly but to an intermediate language first (LLVM). We don’t read the LLVM code ourselves.
I don't want to say what people should and shouldn't do, and a world in which all the world's professionals spend their days talking to sycophantic machines with only a loose commitment to the truth is really funny to me.
But, high level languages don't really lose precision in any way that matters (except when you need extreme performance, resistance to timing attacks, or niche stuff like that). Natural language on the other hand loses precision that's usually important, so I don't see how your comparison is valid.
Not seeing it. “We do still read code” implies neither that every single person does, nor that they need to master the language being read. Taken together, it seems to me that you need a fair bit of extrapolation (or a presupposition that programming languages are already obsolete when that’s the very point being contested) to make the analogy work.
Deterministic vs None-Deterministic, understanding what compiled code does also is possible without Assembly knowledge, not so necessarily with models, where I do like to at least understand what has happened and quite often find a crime or five.
Heck, OpenAI can't even get their models to reliably do what they intend, so yeah.
Ok, I feel you know what this is actually about, but here spelled out:
Do any of the optimizations you mentioned affect the underlying behavior of the run code? Semantics...
If not, it doesn't fit to LLM use, where this is very much the case. We can talk about bugs in compilers and undefined behaviours and so on and so forth all the livelong day, but you know as well as I that this is not of the same scope of impact.
I could and in the past would have written a long diatribe about how pure compilation to assembly is deterministic, thus making this not really suitable and that while yes, there are things like JVM that aren't 100%, we have contracts, docs, specs and, because of them, an expectation of consistency that LLMs do not deliver. I did not because I thought that was not necessary, but see my error now, that is my mistake.
There is the observable behaviour, and the machine code instructions that actually get generated in every single case for the same kind of text input.
Which for example, unless you can exactly replicate the world every single time a PGO data gathering session is done, there are no guarantees that the compiler will generate exactly the same machine code pattern, when given various PGO files generated at different occurrences.
Thanks, yes. To get back to the "We do still read Assembly code in the world of compilers" analogy, in the case of LLM usage, the observable behaviour is...
This. Ironically, an increase in slop production could end up making it harder for new non-AI authors to get recognized, due to default assumptions that unknown quantities are slop.
He also continuously claimed DOGE actually saved taxpayers money when it objectively did not.
Elon did some great things, like bringing EVs back into public consciousness, and SpaceX really did push the aerospace industry back into research/discovery mode. However, his behavior on social media and in the political sphere has been unfortunately quite, and I emphasize "quite" here, horrible.
They're lies when he makes these "bad predictions" knowing they won't come true. He has constantly committed fraud in order to get the stock price of his companies up.
This is probably bait but FYI it’s not normal to send thank you emails in much of the world following an interview so perhaps consider that not everyone thinks like you and it’s not a slight to receive no thank you emails. Where I live a thank you email would be seen as a strange way for someone to sneakily try to persuade you to hire them outside of the proper interview process. If you don’t get an email you may just be dealing with someone not from your culture.
Note it’s all nationally significant infrastructure, not just data centres. And thank god because this country can’t even build a rail line without having to fight every minor concern by anyone who feels like complaining. It makes big projects impossible and the whole country suffers. Infrastructure is vital.
With a harness you could feed the code to a linter and if there are errors feed that to a model automatically. It’s amazing that the models are good enough that I haven’t bothered doing this
The shear volume of writing, the false rigor and vestigial artifacts (preface, interactive charts, MORE filler hidden behind accordion dropdowns) are a tell. I would be more annoyed but I'm fascinated by this kind of false productivity that AI is encouraging.
I don't agree with the conclusion anyway, as AI is CURRENTLY providing wealth to me with side projects that wouldn't have been possible to take on 2 years ago.
There are lots of subtle LLM-ism sentence structures that you can perceive, sort of subconsciously. Spend any amount of time with Claude and you'll unconsciously start to copy them.
This essay has several: Sentence structures, heading phrasing, and yes, dashes. I expect people know to start steering LLMs away from em dashes at this point though.
Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost. Social help to make raising a child less exhausting. Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future. All difficult but not impossible.
> Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost.
Countries like Sweden and Norway have equal non-transferable paternity leaves and "free" daycare/education/healthcare. They birth rates are still nowhere near replacement levels. The hard truth seems to be that majority of women with education and opportunities don't want to spend their best years on children and bear the cost to their health from multiple child births.
> Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future.
Please. Now is objectively the best, safest time to have children. When western societies had high birth rates the expectation was basically "it is a coin toss whether a child will survive until adulthood and then they will have to deal with wars, famines and epidemics".
> Please. Now is objectively the best, safest time to have children. When western societies had high birth rates the expectation was basically "it is a coin toss whether a child will survive until adulthood and then they will have to deal with wars, famines and epidemics".
This argument is rather one dimensional. If you're trying to solve the problem in modern developed society, you can't look to what happens at a more primal level, you need to address the actual concerns people are living with.
We have more choice and visibility into options and unfair power structures now, and unless your solution is to remove choice again, then looking back to a time when people depended on children for survival and safety isn't going to offer much relevant insight. Instead it's going to lock you into positions with no way out.
reply