Although if this theory is true — that AI helps with coding but coding is not the friction point in organizations with multiple humans, even that should allow faster iteration by allowing one human to do more coding therefore reducing the size of teams required to make some programs. You should see good acceleration in solo shops too.

However, most of the engineers I respect have gone from being skeptics a year ago to convinced today. I don’t personally know any true holdouts any more. If there are studies that disprove productivity gains more than six months ago, I’m happy to believe that it was true of the AIs that were available at the time. But I’m going to need something much more recent before I disbelieve my lyin’ eyes where it pertains to the AIs available today.

There is no such thing. A problem with a union is that everyone's going the same place, and you're not driving. Maybe that place is better than where you could get to on your own, or maybe not. But one thing that is definitely not true is that your union is going to do exactly what you want.

I was trying to understand a game I've been playing, The Last Spell. I asked it for a tier list of omens -- which ones the community considers most important. At least a few of the names it posts are hallucinated ("omen of the sun" does not exist, and the omens that give extra gold are "savings," "fortune," and "great wealth").

Obviously not a critical use case but issues like this do keep me on my toes regarding whether the thing is working at all. I should ask 3.5 flash to do the same job. (I did try and it once again hallucinated the omen names and some of the effects.)

Human cloning is a solution with no corresponding problem. We can make more humans very easily, if we have someone willing to bear those humans and take care of them.

If AI becomes demonstrably useful, opting out will be incredibly challenging, since we cannot force other countries to disarm.

Counterpoint: AI's displacement of culture workers is to this point negligible. Nobody is consuming AI-generated media, except maybe in the trashiest tier of tiktok scrolling. Culture workers feel screwed, but they have not in fact been screwed.

Also, under certain constructions of the word "territory," (including the legal one) all territory in Japan is human territory. The bears are allowed to live on some of it but it is at the sufferance of the Japanese people.