Barry Kelly

I generally want the opposite! Make Mac as Linux-like as possible, gnu userland, stay away from weird BSDisms

I love the color. The details are wrong everywhere, none of it makes any sense, but great color.

Only if a junior dev can't use an AI.

Yes, the old Austria to Lviv supermarket cash deposit / payroll run.

Anyway I'm out.

No, banks don't move gold often. Gold is usually stored in a depository and the ownership accounts are updated, much like stocks, or vostro/nostro accounts for forex. Central banks move gold more but this is not that and the gold amount is tiny, at the personal level.

Anyway I'm out of this thread.

I would prefer to hold my assets in an account abroad rather than physically, and I would certainly not want valuables like gold on my person in a warzone (or anywhere really).

But again, we can invent explanations but actual explanations should be forthcoming.

I'm not reflexively one-siding this.

Why are gold bars being moved?

Why ship cash around? I can invent reasons but then, the gold.

I despise Orban too, but more explanations are needed.

Thing is, your wrote bsky.app/profile/coli...

I don't understand now what you mean by agent; if thermostats are agents (you know), what's not to believe?

LLMs as agents, pattern matching on inputs to produce outputs that run tools; seems uncontroversial? Claude Code, useful? ?

No, the minimum requirement for an agent is a feedback loop of some kind. A thermostat is an agent. A pendulum is not.

A feedback loop is necessary to pursue a goal, and thermostats pursue goals. Goal seeking is not mysterious or mystical and doesn't require or imply sophistication.

However: don't forget that anything you find easier, other developers will also find easier.

This has been a general rule with tech; there's no structural advantage in upgrading, only relative.

One could argue that AI-levered small teams are more empowered than BigCo though.

You have to wonder, what precipitated the modern democratic Western state? How did that ruleset establish itself?

Was it just American hegemony after world wars?

Did mass media play a part in forming shared national consensuses? Was free market democracy a social tech in itself?

What's the cost for ingesting a 60 page pdf document and answering a question?

ChatGPT estimated between $0.03 and $1, from cheap (flash etc.) reasoning models up to Opus, but probably around $0.15.

Sounds about right to me.

My close associates and I matter a lot more to me than the lives of people far away.

If AI is conscious and feels pain when inferencing horrible things, I also don't care. I don't value the AI's "suffering" highly, and depreciate it even more due to uncertainty. 2/2

I don't know. Most people dodge the question because the truth is, we don't care half as much as we might profess when confronted with a decision with costs.

My position on the "dodge" is to accept it.

My eating pleasure is more important than farm animals living.

1/

I find it hard personally to believe electric charge in some capacitors constitutes an experience of pain.

But, even if it did, would that be enough for AI use to be problematic? What level of moral discomfort are you ok with?

You can't live without consuming living things. We eat. 2/2

Ultimately it's a moral question around qualia.

We don't know what makes consciousness tick. I think we believe many animals are conscious, yet we (majority) still eat them, because they taste really good.
1/

Code quality in industry is going to decline. Nobody will polish code any more because that work will be overwritten next edit. We will have a pervasive decline in code quality for a while until better testing catches up.

The low number of LoC/SWE in industry supports this assertion, but generating LoC is not all the tools do, and there is more than typing to writing code.

The tools are useful since December because they (Claude esp) got a lot better at analyzing before executing. They measure twice before cutting.

Cyprus is a whole actual member state.

I'm expecting Gemini to rewrite it all any day now. Just need the tests to run faster!

I work on a JRuby app where test_helper loads the whole universe.

I work on a system that takes nearly a minute to boot up to run a single test. Tests are normally kicked off from a shell in the system, than the command line.

The main upside of MCP is lifecycle, no? If your tools have startup latency, it's better to talk to a running system.

Crappy code will be replaced by crappy code, slop on slop, with ever more tests piling up to try and enforce global consistency, and we will no longer try to achieve anything perfect because a flood of good enough will bury any such effort. 2/2

I had a thought.

We're going to be like the master craftsmen who turned up their noses at the crude output of the early industrial revolution, before precision machining.

And we'll accept it, because mediocre code is generated so cheaply, we won't be able to bring ourselves to polish it. 1/

When you look at the nearest equivalents to nation destruction in history, it tends to be an escalating tit for tat that ends in something approaching annihilation or genocide.

Toppling Khameini could conceivably come good; whomever comes after might be better. Tit for tat is not a certainty yet.

No motorbike either. As bikers know, scooters don't count.

I would expect that the conversation submitted for completing a turn is not an exact recording of prior turns. There should be no need to inject such a block in conversation history, and summarizing, abstracting, indirecting etc. earlier conversation turns is key to efficient context management.

(For example: these days, if I want to ask a model for real feedback on a human interaction, I try to either present the situation entirely in the third person, or from the other person's point of view, devil's advocate style; and then I feel I'm just doing half the thing's work for it.)

Whether that means it would be harder to have your conversation, or easier, I'm not sure, but also, I'm fundamentally not very interested, without the models themselves getting a lot spikier in a way I don't really see happening without, I don't know, wholesale random phrase injection.