“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out.” — Carl Sagan

So the first thing we'd want to do is activate a magnetosphere on Mars. I rarely see anyone talking about that[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/real-mart...

[2] https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmos...

Not in my reality. I ask AIs to do things (write code, mainly), and they do. But sometimes they go ahead and do something I didn't ask them to do, like deleting a file. I only asked them to write code, and yet they decided on their own to delete a file.

I think the distinction is that, in their current form, AIs have the agency that we give them (--dangerously-skip-permissions), and they use that agency in unexpected ways.

A more correct statement would be: AIs can decide to do things on their own, within the limits of agency that they've been given.

A moral imperative would be: With an understanding of how random we know an LLM's output can be, we should exercise extreme caution when we grant them agency.

On the other hand, we can't all exercise "extreme" caution all the time. But we expect it of our civil engineers when they build bridges, and our architects when they build houses.

Computer Science needed to become Computer Engineering some time ago, where it would have enforced the same kind of ethics training that the other established engineering professions require[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Parnas#Technical_activis...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723897

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/3f62c90925f64fc09425be8...

Of course there is/was plenty of human damage as well.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/4-000-000-early-deaths-...

To my mind, the last great arms race between nation states was a misdirected love triangle between USA, Russia, and The Bomb, and look at all the damage that did.

Since AI is the new arms race between USA and China, slowing down may just give the humans involved enough time to realize they should be loving one another, instead of the machines.

Maybe saying, "let's slow down", is another way of saying, "I love you."

Or, maybe it's just: "let's not all of humanity kill ourselves like some bad ending to a Shakespearean tragedy."

Either way, it's a better note than, "We must achieve sea/air/nuclear/quantum/AI/spiritual supremacy before those other bastards do!"

Preface: I do think the nature of the work is changing, now that LLMs are capable code generators. And I'll admit that I started working with LLMs because of FOMO, but also to keep my skills sharp in an evolving market. I'm not 100% certain this will pan out, but I do think that working with LLMs is a skill unto itself, and I feel that I'm much better at it now than I was when I started (in earnest, roughly) a year ago.

Q: What's my setup like? A: I'm using both Claude Code and opencode w/ DeepSeek flash. Recently I've started providing the task context to both simultaneously, and then have one act as a real-time reviewer, and one as implementer. I don't consistently use one or the other for implementer, and I'm still learning their capabilities and "who's good at what." But this allows me to get one model to provide an instantaneous code review to the other, as soon as the one model is done writing the code. I set my permissions for both to ask every time on every action: Read, Write, Bash, etc. I grew up playing turn-based RPGs, so I prefer turn-based battle to real-time.

Q: What kind of work I offload, vs do myself. A: Almost all of the code is written by an LLM, but, since I'm reading and rejecting a lot of code, and basically micro-managing them, I feel that the code that's generated is roughly what I would have written myself. Work that I don't offload is any kind of email or communication, or non-code writing, with the exception of README files, and the prose session summaries I have them write.

Q: How do I make it enjoyable? A: I make it enjoyable by finding new ways to work with the LLMs, and specifically, getting them to produce better quality code. The real-time code review process I outlined above is one method, but I've also found that the LLM will write better code when given a "guiding principles" document.

HTH

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49615278

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

    Feature-flag evaluation: DISABLE_TELEMETRY, DO_NOT_TRACK, CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC, and DISABLE_GROWTHBOOK each
    disable the feature-flag evaluation that Remote Control availability depends on. Unset the variable
    wherever it’s set, in your shell environment or in the env block of a settings.json file, to use Remote Control.

    "env": {
        "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC": "1"
    },

I've only started really thinking about developing my own harness, but one of the reasons would be to implement some mechanism where I could give the agent a "turn budget", say, 5 turns, when I can clearly see what the agent is going to be doing for the next few turns, without my needing to allow each turn to go forward.

But it sounds like the same thing would be useful for you as well, just in the other direction.

Could you say more about what "certain points" you're trying to get them to stop at?

I'm thinking now of the hoops you have to jump through to edit a package.json file to update your dependencies, and thinking yeah, what if you could do: "UPDATE dependencies SET version='1.2' where name='madlib';"

It reads to me like this person is engaging with the tool in a fairly hostile manner, and the LLM is like, “so you want to play it like that, huh? Well, let’s play it like that then!”

The language that you use to prompt the LLM is the language you’re going to get back.

If these companies (and countries) believe that they're in an "arms race" with LLMs, then it may be extremely sane to have regulators step in and let all the engines cool down for a bit. Seems like international agreements to pause development will be necessary as well, otherwise the US companies will just say, "but China ...".

Does anyone else here feel the same way? I think most folks default to a kind of cliched, "you can't stop progress" stance. I'd be happy to see more discussion on this topic.

Maybe we could find agreement in the idea that the USA and Russia agreeing to halt nuclear weapons testing was a good thing. Seems like there's a bit of precedent here for cooler heads to prevail, which benefits us all.