2/ That's a fair challenge - and I definitely have more trouble reading through an absolutely ramped to the max collection of C# code (which reinforces the behaviour you describe) than a superscript; but for interchangeability, the middle between those two ends is typically better - you're trying to minimise functional context for the thing that a software developer needs to do. This has the additional failure mode that the feature that is envisioned (of sufficient complexity) never actually gets delivered, but the component parts that can be well encapsulated do. And this is because no one holds the full system in their heads. But this can be explained away to business as "there's too much complexity, we need another cycle" and "we need to iterate" and therefore the cycle continues.

I think I actually convinced myself away from encapsulation and separation of concerns in that last comment.

Software is a tool working within a socio-technical system. Some systems have low user workflow diversity and a low rate of change - a game being a perfect example. Games get patched, but the diversity is purely in user data, not in feature use - everyone uses the same engine, the same textures, the same game logic. Some systems have high user workflow diversity - such as business software.

Pair that with the fact that games, due to the nature of the system, have to optimise for low latency AND they run on the edge - and it's natural that the primary optimisation will be for CPU cycles. For business software, for which distributional advantage of running it through web + the high rate of feature change that is a result of the specification being opaque and a moving target - means you have plenty networking latency that can hide your CPU latency for long after it becomes a true problem for you.

Not to mention that "clean code" optimises for developer churn and business priority shift (which is a luxury games which are an upfront investement don't have) as a result of accelerating industry of software technology and greater saturation of developers.

Had software remained the domain of the same number of practitioners such as <1995, even given everything else, the organisational systems would have evolved to protect them at all cost because churn would be catastrophic, and then they would enjoy more power and would be able to structure code not optimising for brain shift, because they'd hold the context in their heads.

I'll leave as exercise for the reader what pushing AI into the software development equation does for the system and inevitable hardware throughput implications.

If that doesn’t worry you, it should.

The current training loop for coding is RL as well - so a departure from human coding patterns is not unexpected (even if departure from human coding structure is unexpected, as that would require development of a new coding language).

The immediate reply to that comment is: "On the internet, no one knows you're an editor." This is a direct play on the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." By setting the anecdote in 1987 (a few years before the World Wide Web was publicly available), the commenter is implying that back in the analog days, if a dog wanted to be a writer or an editor, they couldn't hide behind a screen—they had to sit in a smoky London pub and do business face-to-face.

Which makes a lot of sense actually. I would imagine that's what the replier to you thought you meant.

As AI companies start extracting rent from the prompting, one of two things are going to collapse - either the long tail revenue base of low-value inference is going to collapse, because people won't be using Chat GPT to get a recipe if it costs them money or if it is ad-ridden; or the cost of economically-valuable inference is going to go up - and whether it goes up to economically stable positions is a toss-up.

And I say this as an AI enthusiast with <50% probability of a bubble burst in the short term.

This goes beyond assholes on twitter, there’s a whole subculture of techies who don’t understand lower bounds of risk and can’t think about 2nd and 3rd order effects, who will not take the pedal of the metal, regardless of what anyone says…

The more likely scenario is that he was hired for the amazing ability to move fast and break things.

The ai would still be sycophantic even without the pre-prompt. It’s been reinforced to do so, it’s baked in the weights.

I fear the only solution to this is that a climate correcting perverse incentive materialises, such as fusion at scale being more profitable than fossil fuels, but without mass-panic induced traits such that fission has.

If half doesn’t make you leader what does? Maybe you should elaborate your definition of leader? For me it’s “has the highest market share”. And in that definition half is necessarily true.

It’s funny that for PC’s you went for manufacturers (apple is 4th) but for mobile you went for OS (Apple is 2nd). On mobile devices, Apple is 1st, having double market share compared to 2nd place (samsung).

The need to paint Apple as purely a marketing company always fascinated me. Marketing is a big part of who they are though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...

Edit: i am not talking evolution of individual agent intelligence, i an talking about evolution of network agency - i agree that evolution of intelligence is infinitesimally unlikely.

I’m not worried about this emerging a superintelligent AI, i am worried it emerges an intelligent and hard to squash botnet

The first group doesn’t care about the narratives, the second group is too focused on the narratives to see the real threat.

Regardless of what you think about the current state of ai intelligence, networking autonomous agents that have evolution ability (due to them being dynamic and able to absorb new skills) and giving them scale that potentially ranges into millions is not a good idea. In the same way that releasing volatile pathogens into dense populations of animals wouldn’t be a good idea, even if the first order effects are not harmful to humans. And even if probability of a mutation that results in a human killing pathogen is miniscule.

Basically the only thing preventing this to become a consistent cybersecurity threat is the intelligence ceiling , of which we are unsure of, and the fact that moltbook can be ddos’d which limits the scale explosion

And when I say intelligence, I don’t mean human intelligence. An amoeba intelligence is dangerous if you supercharge its evolution.

Some people should be more aware that we already have superintelligence on this planet. Humanity is an order of magnitude more intelligent than any individual human (which is why humans today can build quantum computers although no biologically different from apes that were the first homo sapiens who couldn’t use tools.)

EDIT: I was pretty comfortable in the “doom scenarios are years if not decades away” camp before I saw this. I failed to account for human recklesness and stupidity.

We are an organism born out of a molecule with an objective to self replicate with random mutation