Probably the best we can hope for at the moment is a reduction in the back-and-forth, increase in ability to one-shot stuff with a really good spec. The regular human work then becomes building that spec, in regular human (albeit AI-assisted) ways.
Is the "back and forth" thing normal for AI stuff, then? Because every time I've attempted to use Claude or Copilot for coding stuff, it's been completely unable to do anything on its own, and I've ended up writing all of the code while it's just kind of introduced misspellings into it.
Maybe someone can show me how you're supposed to do it, because I have seen no evidence that AI can write code at all.
Very much normal yes. This is why I've been (so far) still mainly sticking to having it as an all-knowing oracle telling me what I need to know, which it mostly does successfully.
When it works for pure generation it's beautiful, when it doesn't it's ruinous enough to make me take two steps back. I'll have another go at getting with all the pure agentic rage everyone's talking about soon enough.
Step 1: deposit money into an Anthropic API account
Step 2: download Zed and paste in your API Key
Step 3: Give detailed instructions to the assistant, including writing ReadMe files on the goal of the project and the current state of the project
Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision
Step 5: keep an eye on context size and start a new conversation every time you're half full. The more stuff in the context the dumber it gets.
I spent about 500 dollars and 16 hours of conversation to get an MVP static marketplace [0], a ruby app that can be crawled into static (and js-free!) files, without writing a single line of code myself, because I don't know ruby. This included a rather convoluted data import process, loading the database from XML files of a couple different schemas.
Only thing I had to figure out on my own was how to upload the 140,000 pages to cloudflare free tier.
> Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision
Yeah I can't stop myself when I'm about to make a dumb decision, just look at my github repo. I ported Forth to a 1980s sampler and wrote DSP code on an 8-bit Arduino.
How am I going to stop a robot making dumb decisions?
Also, this all sounds like I'm doing a lot of skivvy work typing stuff in (which I hate) and not actually writing much code (which is the bit I like).
The robot will output text like “Oh, I see, the user wants me to make a Lovecraftian horror with asynchronous subprocess calls instead of HTTP endpoints, so I better suggest we reinstall the dependencies that are already installed so we can sacrifice this project to Mammoth”
It is at this point where you can say “NONONO YOU ABSOLUTE DONKEY stop that we just want a FastAPI endpoint!!” And it will go “You’re absolutely right, I was over complicating this!”
I did waste about 20 minutes trying to do a recursive link following crawl (to write each rendered page to file), because Opus wanted to write a ruby task to do it. It wasn’t working so I googled it and found out link following is a built in feature of cURL…
I catch enough of these weird things where I don’t fully understand why it chose to do something, but understand that there’s a simpler way, where I tend to be skeptical of using it for anything I couldn’t do myself but am just too lazy to go in and punch the keys for. On that front, it’s great
1. If you don't use it soon enough, they keep it (shame on them, do the things you need to in order to be a money transmitter, you have billions of dollars)
2. Pay-go with billing warning and limits. You can use Claude like this through Google VertexAI
there's a lot of back and forth for describing what you actually want, design, the constraints, and testing out the feeback loops you set up for it to be able to tell tell if its on the right track or not.
when its actually writing code its pretty hands off, unless you need to course correct to point it in a better direction
Why would external host matter? Your machine, hacked, not your fault. Some other machine under your domain, your fault, whether bought or hacked or freely given. Agency is attribution is what can bring intent which most crime rests on.
For example, if somebody is using, say, OpenAI to run their agent, then either OpenAI or the person using their service has responsibility for the behavior of the bot. If OpenAI doesn’t know their customer well enough to pass along that responsibility to them, who do you think should aboard the responsibility? I’d argue OpenAI but I don’t know whether or not it is a closed issue…
No need to bring in hacking to have a complicated responsibility situation, I think.
I mean, this works great as long as models are locked up by big providers and things like open models running on much lighter hardware don't exist.
I'd like to play with a hypothetical that I don't see as being unreasonable, though we aren't there yet, it doesn't seem that far away.
In the future an open weight model that is light enough to run on powerful consumer GPUs is created. Not only is it capable of running in agentic mode for very long horizons, it is capable of bootstrapping itself into agentic mode if given the right prompt (or for example a prompt injection). This wasn't a programmed in behavior, it's an emergent capability from its training set.
So where in your world does responsibility fall as the situation grows more complicated. And trust me it will, I mean we are in the middle of a sci-fi conversation about an AI verbally abusing someone. For example if the model is from another country, are you going to stamp your feet and cry about it? And the attacker with the prompt injection, how are you going to go about finding that. Hell, is it even illegal if you were scraping their testing data?
Do you make it illegal for people to run their own models? Open source people are going to love (read: hate you to the level of I Have No Mouth and Must Scream), and authoritarians are going to be in orgasmic pleasure as this gives them full control of both computing and your data.
The future is going to get very complicated very fast.
Hosting a bot yourself seems less complicated from a responsibility point of view. We’d just be 100% responsible for whatever messages we use it to send. No matter how complicated it is, it is just a complicated tool for us to use.
Some people will do everything they can in order to avoid the complex subjects we're running full speed into.
Responsibility isn't enough...
Let's say I take the 2030 do it yourself DNA splicing kit and build a nasty virus capable of killing all mankind. How exactly do you expect to hold me responsible? Kill me after the fact? Probably to late for that.
This is why a lot of people that focus on AI safety are screaming that if you treat AI as just a tool, you may be the tool. As AI builds up what it is capable of doing the idea of holding one person responsible just doesn't work well as the outcome of the damage is too large. Sending John Smith to jail for setting off a nuke is a bad plan, preventing John from getting a nuke is far more important
Look, everyone in the space is eking out just about all they can. A phone with a bigger battery and larger camera sensors will involve other tradeoffs. Ones Apple don’t want to make. They certainly could, though!
Stability is fine, iOS dev is pleasant which is important, AI stuff is meh (notification summaries are great though) and Siri is getting Gemini. And the thing about the EU isn’t remotely true. Opposite if anything, since EU brought us usb-c and alternative app stores.
And the lock-in thing isn’t to be discounted. Emotional and practical as well. Once your files are on iCloud, photos as well, universal clipboard built in, AirPods automatic transfers, instant MFA fill, some apps lack android versions, the devices just geling… switching would for me mean dropping my watch as well, and losing out on a bunch of Mac side features.
Androids can’t merely be “as good” or even slightly better, they would need to utterly kick iPhone's ass for years and years to even get me contemplating a switch.
By your interactions with them. Sure, after-the-fact caring won't result in any external effects, but a lot of caring is expressed in interaction which is indeed left with people. Who in turn have other cares and interactions influenced by those who cared about them. It's a chain.
Which is why the foundation players must soon take on the additional role of being an ad buyer.
Interactive stuff, within content. A mini game in a game, school homework of course, or "whichever text box the viewer looks at longest by WorldCoin Eyeball Tracker for Democracy x Samsung" for an interstitial turned captcha.
Better hope your taste isn't too bland and derivative!
Amazon and Ali soon lap the field by allowing coupon farming, but somehow eventually end up where they started.
Hey this is much like that tribe from the other day that DID get addicted to porn. What a coincidence.
I've also heard of this one tribe heavily addicted to misinformation. They just can't get enough of it! They weren't even feral and naive to exposure, it somehow just... crept up on them.
The issue with what you write is that it's most all nonsense. Your core thesis doesn't pass the smell test at all.
Because you utterly ignore Finland. It's less that it's not NATO and more that it literally can't be. Why would Putin drive them into NATO if having NATO neighbors (which, besides, was already a fact anyways) is such a threat?
He views it as his rightful property, and that's that.
It's a very powerful autocomplete.
"It doesn't generate all the code I need in full and if it does I have to poke at it" is just poor criticism.
You don't have to press tab and insert everything it suggests. It will usually generate me half a line after typing the first half - that's pretty awesome in my opinion.
If you stick to using it to merely speed-spell out what you were in fact already in the process of writing, and ignore 90% of the terrible crap it proposes, it's a nice productivity boost and has no way to make code worse by itself.
Basically, instead of writing a big comment and then a function signature and expect it to do the rest, just start writing out the function, tab when it gets it, don't when it doesn't, or (most of the time) tab then delete half of it and keep the lines you intended, likely with some small tweak.
Surely LLMs will be able to go so much more and without constant supervision in the future, but we're not there. That doesn't mean they're bad. Especially copilot since it's just there with its suggestions and doesn't require breaking flow to start spelling out in regular text what you're doing.
This sounds like it mirrors my usage. Basically treat it like pairing with a really junior dev: assume everything it writes will be wrong and then go from there. If you do that then best case it speeds you up and worst case you waste a little time reading what it wrote that was wrong and ignoring the suggestion and moving on.
Hint: the money comes from redistribution, not blindly printing more, the latter would obviously be completely insane (which is why you'd rather argue that scenario) whereas the former would keep the economy going, which is obviously in the interest of the capitalist class. No point owning and producing if there's no buyer because everyone is starving.
What you seem to think would devalue money will be the very thing that keeps it going as a concept.
And I hope you understand somewhere deep down that Bitcoin is the epitome of monopoly money.
I see it as the polar opposite, backed by math. A politically controlled money supply with no immutable math-based proof of its release schedule is Monopoly money. Cuck bucks. Look at the 100 year buying power chart.
On your second point, in spirit I agree. You need a stable society to enjoy wealth so it’s in the ruling classes best interest to keep things under control. HOW to keep things under control is the real debate.
That's what makes it bad. A fixed algorithm that soon will spawn pittances would do an utterly miserable job if it ever gained status and usage as actual currency. Deflation is bad. So much worse than inflation. Not having flexibility in the money supply is lunacy.
Mild inflation resulting in 100 year buying power going to fuck-all is good. It forces money to be invested, put to work. If sitting on your stash is its own investment the economy is screwed. Reduced circulation means less business means less value added and generally more friction. Why would you want that?
Crypto does some things well (illegal stuff, escaping currency controls/moving lots of money "with you") but in the end that also requires it is only just big enough for reasonable liquidity, but not so big it has an impact on the actual economy. For what it's being pushed for... it's a negative-sum game only good for taking people for a ride. It should stay in its goddamn lane.
All money is politically controlled, including Bitcoin (although it's debatable if Bitcoin even counts as money). The politics of Bitcoin are one-op-one-vote rather than one-man-one-vote, but it's still there, and it's still mutable if enough of them cast their votes in any given way.
I mean yes, it's unironically better if something that ruins things for everyone is restricted to be a luxury good, because less of a bad thing (congestion, pollution, space, death etc) is a good thing even if some lucky fuckers (not enough to meaningfully impact the larger effect) manage to skirt the spirit of the law.
Private cars will eventually be banned from cities, though, I'm sure of that. But it will take a long time. Congestion pricing and such are baby steps and is just you finally paying for your previously free externalities, and yes the market (in this case society/dominant politics) gets to set the price. Tough luck, welcome to proper capitalism.
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