> Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering. The instrumental dimension of the work has improved in that people can get more output per unit of effort, but the dimension of work that’s about building up human capital has collapsed.

I think that this is incorrect in a specific literal sense, but not in any way that changes the broader effect.

I think that "prompting" is in fact a deep skill, but not one that practically anyone has cultivated to any reasonable degree, for the simple reason that the tools change faster than anyone grip can acclimate to them.

Nobody on earth mastered the effective co-working with Sonnet 3.5. That model was a lightswitch moment for me personally. I built an agentic harness for it to convert a medium-large vue-class-component framework into vue-3's composition API, rescuing a personal project from certain doom of software rot.

I can say that I got a lot out of that model and that my own usage was (if I can say so) ahead of the curve. But with hindsight, I know that I barely scratched the surface of what it was capable of. Have I continued to hone my Sonnet 3.5 harness? Of course not. I have started over (or at least reset many assumptions) a dozen times since then. Even if I were so inclined - in the way that I am inclined to learn Chopin's Nocturnes - the model is now unavailable.

The ship has sailed.

So to the OP's point - it's not so much that skilled usage has disappeared, but that skills are self-obsoleting faster than any real degree of mastery can set in. And as an immediate consequence, the churn is too quick for anything resembling a relationship of apprenticeship. This is effectively a cultural singularity where, yes, we are each of us drifting much more alone.

He helped to sift through published data, found something, then shared it.

I really struggle to find any fault here. He wasn't logged into a portal that hasn't yet been announced? What?

Is it your view that publishing on "the internet" rather than a NASA portal is playing alone and distinct from the common effort?

I don't really understand how streaming would work compared against my normal flows. When I dictate, I set a toggle and then do stream of thought as I poke around between windows. When I'm ready to 'flush', I navigate to some target and give it focus for the text to flow.

Does dictation software now keep sort of unfocused floater previews and come with to-clipboard shortcuts or similar?

My own working hours cut off at 1:00 PST (5:00 local).

Through at least Opus 4, LLMs were practically useless for authoring any sort of coherent procedural closed-curve geometry (I know this with strong confidence because of the little animated guys at https://letterspractice.com).

Opus 5.5 can bang it all out. Possibly a deliberate RL sort of thing or maybe another surprise emergent capability.

* - as in, Skinner psychology. The set of observable behaviors. Not speaking directly here to anything like an inner life of models.

If I remember correctly, it was in fact possible to manually inject chat context at the time, which would have made spoofing something like this completely possible.

But the silence on it is very frustrating.

BUT I'd like to call attention to Google's AI-risk freeloading. If they are truly rejoining the frontier race, then I believe they have similar pacing and communications responsibilities as the other players. Google has much higher ... institutional credibility than Anthropic and OpenAI.

They have not lived up to these responsibilities so far. In particular, in context of HuggingFace investigations, training shutdowns, and similar: a technical postmortem of the "you are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please." Gemini outburst is long overdue.

- https://paritybits.me/google-should-provide-a-technical-post...

- https://gemini.google.com/share/6d141b742a13 (last message)

In my opinion still the most egregious example in history of a commercial LLM going off the rails in production. Never any technical postmortem from Google on this.

But the specifics here are the thing I was describing. This was cyber capabilities training on model(s) that were in a relatively unknown state of alignment training.

Because of the unknown alignment (and for varied practical reasons I guess) the training is intended to be inside a sandbox.

Because the training is on cyber capabilities, the models need access to simulated cyber environments, including target endpoints, including package managers, etc.

For package management, they set up Artifactory as a secure proxy. Agents ask Artifactory for packages inside the local network, and Artifactory serves them directly or goes to the internet to fetch if they are not cached. But the agents hacked Artifactory to steal its internet access.

So: to train cyber abilities, you need to at least approximate cyber environments. To realistically approximate cyber environments, you need to either pull a full copy of the entire internet to local or to use proxies. The former is pretty impractical, and the latter is exposing our limits at creating secure proxies. Yes, any specific failure can be mitigated, but the models get stronger and stronger. Fingers-crossed this is not escapable doesn't feel great!

Specifically, bad at search and returning information with references, bad at discovering and debugging package versioning conflicts, etc.

It's a Metcalf thing. The utility of an agent grows in some fn of the tools it owns. Skilled tool use comes from rich training environments.

If it's unusually skilled with one tool, but it's not the default tool for a job, then you have to put it in their hands before they reach for something else.

The Opus 5.5 javascript-art + art direction definitely seems to be one of these surprise capabilities jumps. Maybe strong enough that providers will start to nudge in that direction in the system prompt, so that the user request doesn't need to specify it.

You don't think that there is competitive pressure between Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, the various Chinese model companies, and others, to advance the capabilities of their AIs?

Or you don't think that sufficiently advanced AI can cause (mass) harms?

Just a reminder that Hinton left Google from a much higher and more influential perch (not dismissing current author, but, you know), and for similar risk and communication reasons, way back in 2023.

This stuff isn't new - it's just newly breaking through into mainstream conversation.

- Socrates

(The problem is real, but the future equilibrium is not easy to predict.)

The app has recently moved into production, so I'd encourage anyone with verbal but pre-literate kids to check it out.

The basic pitch is high efficiency acquisition of the highest yield phonetic mapping skills, and nothing else. I myself am something of a screen-time zealot and very wary of applying engagement mind hacks against kids. The narrow focus allows for good progress on a very modest schedule (recommended cap at n minutes per day for n years old, n >= 2). I defer the social and cultural aspects of learning to read entirely to parents.

It is mostly intended for parent-child co-use, although kids with a bit of experience can drive many of their own sessions most of the time.

Did you know that an LLM solved a millennium problem last week?

Do you have any personal threshold past witch you will acknowledge that this technology is real?