But the nuance under discussion here is exactly the kind of stuff you people take for granted in the AGI or reasoning threads. If it's practically relevant for tools/workflows with claude code, it's a good angle, maybe people are more willing to pay more attention to the details.

Setting aside coding agents.. we really need this information to even pretend to evaluate the claims of stuff like mathematical breakthroughs, which is exactly why we will never see it. Very embarrassing to get the right answer for the wrong reason. But to give the models some credit, you could argue that even paying too much attention to the thinking is misunderstanding how CoT works. The argument would be that thinking in LLMs isn't really thinking, that it's self-reinforcement and circling to to encourage stability around beneficial attractors instead of degenerate ones. Can't have it both ways though: either the thinking is thinking and so it should be correct. Or the thinking is NOT thinking, and it's NOT real justification for the outcome, and these systems are even more hopelessly opaque than we usually assume.

Even establishing the scope of the discussion is tedious, and most people have no patience for that, so the practical choices are basically having a dumb rah-rah type of discussion, or none at all. I'm breaking my own best advice by even writing this down but the only answer is: Read More, Talk Less. If you're in school and talking with other students or if you're talking to colleagues with known background in the context of known practical problems they would like to solve.. it's different. But the forums? Read-only is not even effective as far as "checking in" on the "collective culture" in engineering to get an accurate picture. Actually engaging is even more effort for even less profit. I regret having opened the thread, so back to burying my head in more research and hands-on projects :)

Always wild to hear people say stuff like this. First, all user-hostility is clearly disrespectful by definition. Second, almost all software, even the free stuff, is insanely user-hostile. We are all so completely frog-boiled on this it's not even funny. Yes, even people in tech and maybe especially people in tech.

Everyone reading this has probably used 10 applications today that are completely ignoring instructions to disable updates/telemetry if they even bothered to lie to you that this is possible. IOS has years-old "bugs" where turning off voice control isn't actually possible, official docs are gas-lighting you, and the settings are just ignored.. so people just deal with paused music that inconsistently triggers on 1/5 of your sneezes or coughs and get used to it. Spotify performance/ux/sanity has been completely degraded for months now. Web-browsers routinely force updates to require multi-gig downloads of AI models, and before that, they had on-and-off regressions in basic stuff like copy/paste for multiple years. Your popup-blocker that helps you to stay sane feels fine about popping up some shit that tells you how many pop-ups it freaking blocked. This is just my last 10 minutes. You can dig into any one of these problems, lose 45m on some janky fix, and also know for sure that you'll need to spend the same effort on some related goddamned problem less than a week later.

Besides the "ads for paying customers" type of stuff, this drip-drip of millions and millions of little points of persistent friction never stops. You think you broke it or you are going crazy until you deep-dive the bug reports or the reddit threads and realize it's all gas-lighting, and someone has made a choice. If the choice wasn't about disrespectful surveillance, auto-updates, or profit-maxxing enshittification then it's a greenhorn developer refactoring something for devx or aesthetics over UX, and the breakage didn't even happen in service of a real feature.

You try to freeze the apps with snap or containers or whatever for some stability hoping to GTFO the fix-it-again treadmill. You assert proudly that "Computers work for me, I don't work for them!" It's smoother for a while but there's always something. A phone-home with a suddenly bad endpoint, a missing remote tag/version gets yanked, or the operating system itself will betray you with yet-another iteration of unnecessary path-changing nonsense that breaks everything anyway.

Although they are opposites in every other way, Linus and Bezos may be the last living bosses that valued stability, backwards compatibility, and not fucking up shit that works fine. When they are gone god help us all.

Roughly speaking GOFAI usually "solves" the frame problem only to the extent it accepts hard limits on the domain of discourse, which trade has bad consequences for expressiveness and/or the ability to update things like axioms and beliefs. We tolerate this because if we don't then we're off the happy path and basically doomed. Then time passes, we forget that we agreed to tradeoffs and float the idea of possible generalizing/taming/adapting ;)

Not expert enough on SL to really connect the dots, and it's complicated by the fact that the BI family is a weird place that is in some sense neither monotonic nor non-monotonic. Two main issues though. The first is the applicability thing, because lots of stuff just will not allow clean partitions anyway (back to causal and ramifications). Even in the restricted domain of program-logic, if we're talking side-effects and outside the world of theorem provers or something, the real domain is causal logic anyway, plus all the irreducible difficulties of distributed consensus, etc. The second issue is the partition itself, which is fine if you bring it with you, but it has to be discovered otherwise. For problems of unknown structure, I'm guessing that immediately puts you in the position of looking at the exploding space of all possible partitions. Adding an algebraic operator makes for very clean notation but in practice you can't just wave away how difficult that actually is, if it's even decidable in general (and I'm guessing it's not).

Turing/Godel/Tarski will all have their due.. so back to the argument for hybrid systems. Heuristics can prune a search space, but what can't be decided ultimately needs some kind of intuition. Which isn't to say that we don't need all kinds of sophisticated heuristics and backtracking and the rest, but just that we need everything we can get for hard problems. Another way of looking at it, GOFAI and new-wave AI are both pretty bad at generalizing but since this happens in ways that are sort of complementary, we can get a lot of leverage by combining them.

Not at all resolved. If anything it is worse than before as we begin to understand it better, and now there are different versions of it that cover representation, relevance, epistemics. Pivoting "away" from logic just relocates it again. Arguably the whole challenge of neurosymbolics is (still) getting a persistent sidecar for logic bolted onto something like a language model. We actually have fairly decent autoformalizers (!!) and we still can't make that work very well in general.

From one perspective, the frame problem is pretty closely related to the "binding problem", causal reasoning and ramifications in general, and relevance is central to all. We have good pure formalisms for relevance, epistemics, and do-logic too. But we can't get language models to drive them very well, and language models alone are terrible at trying to do this sort of thing natively (see distractor sensitivity, mediated causality and multi-hop reasoning with implicit bridges).

Neurosymbolics probably is the key, but until there's more traffic between old-school and new we're facing the same old problems. When/if there's real progress.. I think we'd know. It may or may not be AGI-complete but the improvements for things like long-horizon and truly out-of-distribution planning would probably be immediate, obvious, and jaw dropping

To actually engage more with the substance of TFA.. very refreshing to see someone bringing numbers. To me this shows we (still) need something somewhere between the numbers and the anecdata. It's annoying to hear claims of "1000x productivity" or claims of negative/neutral productivity without any extra context whatsoever. So you brought data? Great! But still no context. Boring CRUD? Complex UI? A rewrite/port of legacy? What industry, language, how many human collaborators, and what baseline for SLOC??

We need to get rigorous about this stuff and actually aim for a decent framework which can answer "Are LLMs a value add for this project? How much value? How much cost?"

Such a thing might be information-theoretical, complexity-based, or counting integration touchpoints / info boundaries / sources of ground-truth? We could even try to implement that framework with LLMs and probably should! But the default answer of "Yes definitely, always useful, just token-maxx it since LLMs are the future" is (still) only marketing, not engineering

Not true.. you just need to replace late-stage capitalism locally. There's a very reasonable concept of circular economy that's relevant here. It breaks down only in that sometimes you need things that you can't make and must go outside the circle. Especially if you intentionally work to mitigate the main stuff requiring you to go outside, it's not some law of nature that it must continue, or even a law of capitalism. Some protectionism / local-first is part of it, but the bigger part is just being rational.

The bad kind of globalism, enshittification, dead-economy theory, and basically ALL of the really ugly stuff we could talk about here are characteristic of late-stage capitalism and the associated short-term thinking, and it's totally consistent for a real capitalist to reject it. Why? Because getting as rich as possible isn't incompatible with sustainability.. particularly from the perspective of corporations/countries that plan to last longer than a single human CEO or exist beyond a single generation of shareholders/citizens.

Unpopular opinion, but combining this with the other "no thanks" sentiments in this subthread is the right answer. Your app is so complicated you need async? Then it's complicated enough that you can benefit from infrastructure. I don't want to watch coworkers try to badly rebuild message queue or scheduling semantics in an application code base. Just use infrastructure that's made by people who know what they are doing. That was problematic in 2015, but in 2026 it's a bit of docker, and it's not just about web/microservices. Very easy for sufficiently complex apps to simply leverage a local sandbox of celery, redis, graphdb's and whatever. Stand-alone is overrated since we don't have to do it anymore.. app devs should get more comfortable working with ensembles like this so they have access to best-in-class solutions.

You don't like infrastructure AND have such a need for performance AND don't want threads or multiprocess? Consider using another language. Async is mostly a solution in search of a problem, and the enduring popularity of TFA goes to show this has been the right conclusion for ~10 years.

Large and fascinating topic I'm researching, very relevant for agentic AI and ML too. One way that groups can fail is that they just don't work to dampen / vote out individual errors properly (see PAC learning, Condorcet). Other kinds of errors only occur in groups, and can occur even when constituents individually aren't actually wrong. Some related stuff is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet's_jury_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

The last is probably the most relevant here and made worse by the negative effects of hierarchy. To quote one section:

> The negative effects of informational cascades sometimes become a legal concern and laws have been enacted to neutralize them. Ward Farnsworth, a law professor, analyzed the legal aspects of informational cascades and gave several examples in his book The Legal Analyst: in many military courts, the officers voting to decide a case vote in reverse rank order (the officer of the lowest rank votes first), and he suggested it may be done so the lower-ranked officers would not be tempted by the cascade to vote with the more senior officers, who are believed to have more accurate judgement;

For token-maxxing, our "senior officers" are just executives, and line workers aren't going to vote. Who is the senior officer for those senior officers? It's not shareholders! It's really the executives of even bigger companies, because that is the actually applicable promotion ladder. It's all kind of obvious, but also a genuinely better explanation than "monkey see monkey do". These are just the simpler things, and there's more gnarly dilemmas in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#%22Design_princi...

But I think the biggest "sin" in terms of mixing fact/fiction was mostly implied and not actually stated. What's implied is that Groth saw inside mathematics some kind of terrible truth that motivated him to stop working and withdraw from the world. I don't think it's stated explicitly, but due to proximity with other topics in the book, reader is invited to conclude that there was a discovery of some kind inevitable doom, possibly a super weapon, etc.

We don't know that, but in a lot of ways it might be more surprising if he never thought along those lines. My understanding is that the other limited sources really do say he was talking to God in dreams, preoccupied with apocalyptic visions, became more interested in physics, politics, religion, the problem of evil, hostile entities ambiguously demonic, etc

Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the book is pulling from. Seems like the best short source, but I'd love to hear recs for a good biography. The autobiography that Groth is careful to say is not an autobiography is on my shelf and also in pdf form. Haven't read it yet, but I'm not sure it's the type of thing that's going to cover the descent into madness properly.

https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/slaoui/notes/recoltes_et_sem...

For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/konstantinos-foutzop...