I could be misunderstanding what a "software factory" is but I think whatever I have done fits the criteria. I have a custom agent that goes around implementing software and maintaining private repositories completely autonomously and I can communicate with it using issues and comments.

It seems like a useful pattern, just maybe not what people had in mind. I think people figured that you'd build an AI Microsoft or something. I don't think that's true because most of what a company like that does isn't really software engineering anyway, but there is probably still something to this pattern.

> Can you provide examples outside of gross negligence on part of the dog owner?

And the answer is no, I can't. The reason why is because there is essentially no such case. It is basically negligence by definition when your pet hurts someone who didn't cause it directly themselves because it is your responsibility.

So I asked:

> Can you provide an example of where your dog harming someone else is in fact not negligence on your part?

Which is a really easy question to answer and it seems you could not.

> 1. They, and many other experts, have been saying the same thing since well before the current paradigm existed.

Some experts sure. "Some experts" say lots of things.

However, this is actually much to their advantage. If you were a frontier AI company, a legitimate concern to use as justification for your regulatory capture is exactly what you want. That is, after all, generally how regulatory capture gains public approval.

AI safety was also why OpenAI had to charge per-token for GPT-3. It must've been such a struggle for them to make that difficult decision. I'm sure Sam Altman spent a lot of nights crying to sleep over that one.

It's good that we never got open weights for a GPT-3 class model, right?

> 2. There is nothing about regulation that is required to give them an advantage; it’s a fallacy to suggest “regulation = advantage”

It's difficult to outline the number of different ways that regulatory capture can and will benefit OpenAI and Anthropic.

If we limit things to "Fable"-class models, then nobody competing with Anthropic/OpenAI is ever allowed to outdo them. If you literally legally aren't allowed to make better models, you can never charge the "premium" of having the current top-tier model. You have to compete by being cheaper than Anthropic instead, which is a lot less enticing from a standpoint of trying to become profitable. Take a look at the per-token pricing of Fable real quick. Yeah. Being able to charge a premium for the model that does the cybersecurity thing is literally their most important asset.

If Anthropic really is making a profit now as rumored, then they need regulatory capture as fast as they can possibly get it. Once Anthropic and OpenAI prove that AI is a viable investment, entities with a lot of capital will suddenly become even more interested in re-allocating it towards taking a slice of this pie.

> 3. It would be preferable to argue the facts (is it or is it not dangerous? Why or why not?) than conspire as to why they’re stating what they and plenty of others have been saying for decades

OK. On the factual end of things, AI safety experts have been raising the alarms for over a decade and so far essentially none of their predictions have come true.

The rationalists, the main group pushing the AI safety rhetoric that dominates the Western AI sphere and is virtually absent in China, which appear to be going entirely off the deep end at this point in time, put together their best minds to produce AI 2027, which of course like most predictions started to fall apart a bit before hitting the one year mark. Predicting the future is hard.

I have made this point before but I will make it again: I think AI safety experts deserve at least as much skepticism as Ed Zitron in their claims. They've been making similar dubious claims about AI capabilities and an incoming singularity for a long time now, and so far the best we can say is that maybe it will eventually come true.

Maybe. Or maybe you've read too much goddamn science fiction.

On the other hand, time and time again it has been proven that it can be a good language to write tools that are perfectly sufficiently fast, like esbuild. With ts-go the choice to target Go instead of Rust seems to have come down to sensibilities and ease of translation, and possibly some other factors as well. I don't think they were aiming for maximum performance, and it would be unsurprising if you could squeeze quite a bit more out of ts-go itself with some effort.

The real benefit was getting the initial "10x" improvement, of course. Getting an additional 2x-3x is fantastic, but it's less noticeable when your codebase is already getting typechecked faster than you care to measure. For me even my largest codebases are chewed through plenty fast on ts-go, and I trust the TypeScript team to have done a good job (especially having seen some of their process for doing the port) so I think I'm good on missing out vibecoded Rust ports and whatnot. Interesting for sure, but we'll see how it all pans out in the long run.

But negligence seems like exactly what OpenAI and/or their contractors are guilty of anyhow.

At this point, my only reason for still being around on here is because I simply don't know of any place that I find strictly better. Most of the popular alternatives to HN are annoying in ways that I find equally hard or even harder to tolerate.

I actually have felt this way for a fairly long time but Apple always baits me. Like the twelve or fifteen different times Apple OSes have finally supported some parts of WebM on certain devices sometimes when it works. Oh my god, I gotta update so I can have another couple WebMs load successfully only in Safari and not in any other app that doesn't decode it itself. Or back when I used an iPhone, third party keyboards - I use a lot of jailbreak tweaks but I gotta give that up so I can upgrade for third-party keyboard support that is so ass that nobody would ever use it. Heck, I wish I had updated my iPad even less. One fewer major version and I could've made use of the virtualization support that was dormant - but Apple fixed the glitch that let you use it on Apple Silicon iPads, so now you can't. Thanks! This is important to do because it helps... Uhh, security, probably? Something like that.

Since Snow Leopard or so, most of my Apple software upgrades have been bitter sweet at best, but usually just bitter, like I've been baited into having a worse experience.

Of course, it is probably apparent that I simply don't like Apple very much, especially not anymore. And I hate to have to justify myself by doing this, but we lack the maturity needed for me to avoid it, so... I am going to point out the obvious that this is hardly limited to Apple. GNOME 3 may be the single biggest downgrade any desktop system I've ever used has been. It has improved over time, but GNOME 3 has never been even close to as relatively good for its time as GNOME 2 was. Same for KDE 3 -> KDE 4 although I think as a rare standout KDE Plasma 6 is genuinely getting better continuously over time and remains one of the things I am excited to update. Windows 10 -> Windows 11 was so bad that it seemingly durably made several of my friends switch to Linux full time and just simply give up on things that absolutely can't be made to work on Linux - that is a powerful statement, and months later it seems they were indeed not fucking around. Android has been enshittifying at an alarming pace, too, although I don't feel like the Android experience from a software perspective is degrading or getting worse, but Google really knows how to blow their own leg off and by god they're going to do everything they can to make sure that all of the advantages they have over Apple are rendered meaningless so they can drag themselves kicking and screaming out of accidentally having succeeded at something.

I don't feel like it should be necessary for me to justify this, because Apple's recent growing incompetence in shipping working software and release engineering stands on its own regardless of industry trends. I'd SSH into my Mac Mini, but I can't. I have to go reset it, because it's been on for 60 days and can no longer open new network sockets. (I am not making this up. macOS genuinely has/had that bug and mine genuinely is in that state right now.) It's not that everyone else is doing great. When it comes to Linux systems it's easy to give them a lot of slack because they simply have no goddamned money, but still, things could be better. It's just that Apple is richer than ever and yet worse than ever at shipping software. I struggle to square the circle.

This doesn't necessarily imply that radiation hormesis is the only possible explanation, but the easy hand-waves are all basically out. Something weird is happening here and it seems to repeat in different circumstances, too. There is not much to go on other than confounding results and proposed mechanisms as far as I can tell.

Edit: I realize after commenting that you're not suggesting medium is useless, but just arbitrary and differs between models. Personally I don't want to directly compare mediums between models, I just want to be able to compare across effort levels.