This all reminds me of in the 90s when the Borland C++ compilers and Turbo Pascal shit came out and everyone was still hand rolling assembler because the optimising compilers were so bad. I thought Opus 4.6 was pretty good, basically a step change. The stuff I got out of Fable before they blocked it was nearly alien. If things keep improving, I don’t see humans writing code in 2 to 3 years except maybe super niche areas. This will all go the way that optimising compilers did. No amount of resistance, anger or denialism will change that.
I’d actually love it if LLMs could skip the slow high level lanaguages entirely and just churned out some weird LLM bytecode that was closer to the metal. I don’t want to read it or understand it at all. Here’s my spec, build it and notify when done. I want to ship stuff not build or dick around with code. Basically like when I go to a shop because I want a table, I don’t care if some carpenter “crafted” it or a machine mass produced and spat it out. It’s cute, but most people just want stuff and don’t care how it’s built.
In every case up until now, a jump in abstraction has moved us forwards in ease of understanding the underlying artifact at a conceptual, human level. High level languages are effectively runnable documentation.
It's possible to say that LLMs producing code may be the same category of thing, but the non-determinism and ephemerality of it all makes it difficult to imagine.
If my experience having to manually unf*ck “production” slop written by sweatshop tier offshore told to go wild with a Claude subscription is any indication then we are a LONG way off from any of that BS.
My job is safe because I’m the only person at the company that actually understands what the actual code is doing and I’m the one that gets the calls at 2am and weekends.
“Weird LLM bytecode”
Why not just generate object code for the target mschine directly?
As a non-US person, I will use whatever is the best and reasonably priced. I could not give one iota about who makes or hosts these models. The origin or political leanings of these models mean nothing in my usage calculus.
The one thing you can say though, is that “benefits himself” does not mean: buying a super yacht, a casino, an island, etc.
So yeah, he’d YOLO and do the Mars trip before any of the above. Which is what most nerds on HN would love, except their blind hatred for Musk would make them despise even that.
He’s certainly said things to deserve some hatred. I’m also lost why anyone thinks his mars trip is real. He has a long history of promising and not delivering.
There's no way in hell I'd even remotely consider trying to build a Mars base if i had all that money, either. It's a fucking stupid way to waste money.
I use the disparaging nature of the comments on HN as an indicator of AI progress. It’s negatively correlated. By that metric,
AI has improved significantly this year alone.
I like to take advantage of this effect. I will post various concepts in threads like these to see how "offensive" the hive mind finds them to be.
The more immediate & adverse the reaction, the more certain I become that the idea is probably worth pursuing.
Topics like SQLite vs hosted sql used to be the same way around here. In 2017 you'd get buried under the prison for suggesting that SQLite is competitive with MySQL. Today, the inverse is mostly true.
From my experience using HN, this feels made up. HN sentiment on AI seems to have only gotten better: with more overly pro-AI or nuanced voices plus more AI topics.
Interesting. Did Neanderthals have souls? We know we interbred with them. The question is then whether earlier hominids also had souls. Was "ensoulment" a gradual phenomenon or did it arise spontaneously? If it was gradual does it mean at some point there was a "cross-over" period where we interbred with soulless hominids? Interbreeding becomes philosophically awkward if ensouled and non-ensouled beings could mate and produce offspring. I don't think it's clear at all even what has a soul and what does not.
All living things have souls. For most Ur-Platonists (which includes nearly all orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews, and pagan Greek and Roman philosophers/theologians until the Enlightenment), the soul is:
* what makes a thing what it is (it's form/eidos/essence/universal/nature)
* what makes a thing a living thing at all
* what unifies and coheres the many disparate parts of a living thing
The relevant difference between those of us with human natures and those beings who lacked human natures is that our human nature (i.e. our souls) has the power to come to know universals/natures/forms themselves (albeit imperfectly), whereas other beings do not. For a dog, their senses are acquainted with many instances of cats, but they never are able to go from these individual sense impressions to the form/nature/universal of cat, or ficus carica, or what have you.
This is what's called "Majoring in the Minors" in Christianity. Neanderthals are no longer around. What's important is treating humans with a special dignity. If you start equating humans with anything else, like plants or animals, you get nihilism at best, and atrocities at worst.
I’d actually love it if LLMs could skip the slow high level lanaguages entirely and just churned out some weird LLM bytecode that was closer to the metal. I don’t want to read it or understand it at all. Here’s my spec, build it and notify when done. I want to ship stuff not build or dick around with code. Basically like when I go to a shop because I want a table, I don’t care if some carpenter “crafted” it or a machine mass produced and spat it out. It’s cute, but most people just want stuff and don’t care how it’s built.
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