"We understand many things imperfectly," Harlow conceded. "But however contentious a matter might be, my own counsel would always be to avoid taking a position that justifies barbarity."

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Latifa had always feared that civilization would be brought down by people with thirty-second attention spans, but now she was beginning to suspect that the greater danger came from those who could sit through three-hour vodcasts, robbed of the ordinary human reflexes that should have compelled them to switch to something new instead of marinating in the stream of inanities.

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He needed to spend an hour with a book, a game, or a TV show, just to lay down a clear memory that separated each day from the next, or he ended up back at his desk in the morning feeling like he'd never been away.

screw you, forbes readers

My buddy Scott is a highup Project Manager at Red Hat. We hang out on a tiny group chat.

Scott has a huge experience with Open Source (and did some pioneering work in containerization) and is on board with the idea that AI is the future of development. He's really worried that the good guys get busy, overcome their inertia and reservations, and learn the arts of leveraging AI to make good stuff (with efficient token/energy use) and learning how to defend things from the bad guys, who never seem to have the same kind of compunctions about using any tool they can find.

He's fighting a war on two fronts; he yells at me for bringing up stuff from the AI-skeptic side, both from absolutists who will push back against AI tooth and nail, as well as from middle of the road developers who find utility in these "Jr Programmer Level of companions" but keep bumping their head into the limitations and confusion that results as context windows get filled up and what not, as well as some of the infamous AI gaffes making the rounds.

The other front is against executives who are too gung-ho about it all - who say "just build it" without acknowledging how the problem is no longer the coding - we now are in an age of surplus programming/build potential - but deciding what to build that will provide sustainable value, as well as socializing and building community around what gets built.

One of Scott's favorite articles is "The AI Vampire":

Here were my takeaways:

* Yegge claims that a real corner was turned last November, in terms of what models like Claude Opus could do vs the earlier stuff. I'm currently nursing a theory that says, there might be a qualitative difference between those "$200/mo" models vs the "$20/mo" models that both the naysayers and the CEO types have been messing with, which has increased the skepticism in the first camp (as they run into limits) but with CEOs empowered enough to build cool stuff and not getting bothered by the MVP/prototype level of what they make. (I don't think Scott agrees with my analysis, but anyway) But Yegge says stuff like the long vaunted "10x Programmer" is now actually unlocked.

* Yegge points out that this AI-driven 10x mode is actually exhausting (hence the title of the piece) I'm guessing coding with AI takes a significant part of the fraction of doing it "by hand". It's a more concentrated set of demands and focus.

* and So we have a classic "where does the value go" situation. If the company tries to get 10x the work all the time, endless go-go-go mode, that's just a recipe for burnout. Conversely, if it's more like employees just put in 1/10 the effort, that's a plan to get swamped by competitors who are increasing their productivity. Yegge thinks its crucial we find a balance for the value capture.


And so I'm working but wondering what the rest of my career looks like - and where I am on the bellcurve of adoption...

JFC. Trump's new dime has an eagle that drops the olive branch and just sticks with the arrows.

Is this guy trying to be a comic book villain?

via

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I was really bummed to see journalist Benj Edwards got in trouble with AI fabricating quotes (he claims he was loopy with COVID and mistook paraphrases from one tool for actual quotes from another.)

I really enjoyed his previous work on computer history and retrogames - his occasional appearance on the podcast Retronauts, and I even bought a arcade stick for the Atari 2600 he was making as a side hustle.

Plus, this piece on 10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents was right on - from the sheer fun of it, to the challenges when an AI reaches the end of its competency and familiarity...

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reminds me of Vonnegut's

simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

I liked some of these bits of advice for s**** people

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If Oil goes up to $200 and gas prices follow... remember those stupid Biden stickers saying "I did that"? Can we get some for Trump?

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[after watching a video of an elephant nurshing where the still looked like it might be an elephant jerking off]
"Don't you wish you had a nose you could jerk off with?"
"...yeah I do."

The other day I was thinking what the closest analogue to actual feeling via an LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, etc) might be and I got to thinking there was an Asimov bit about something similar:

"Of a certainty, Partner Elijah. It is a pleasure to see you."

"You feel emotion, do you?" said Baley lightly.

"I cannot say what I feel in any human sense, Partner Elijah. I can say, however, that the sight of you seems to make my thoughts flow more easily, and the gravitational pull on my body seems to assault my senses with lesser insistence, and that there are other changes I can identify. I imagine that what I sense corresponds in a rough way to what it is that you may sense when you feel pleasure."

Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. [...] This is not 2003. This is not endless nation-building. It's not even close. Our generation of soldiers will not let that happen again.

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There's always someone who thinks that if only we were crueler, if only we'd killed another million Vietnamese, then we would have won this war. If you reduce war to the satisfied feeling you get when you kill the enemy, it makes it a lot simpler.

Meanwhile, burning oil tankers and Oil about to go to $200 a barrel. Mighta been nice to have had a plan, guys.