don't see the harm in this? isn't this already the case for 99.9% of phoneline havers already?

In this blog post I walk through the steps I took to translate scientific papers into sparkling prose that maintains tight links between generated sentences and the passages they're based on, and touch on some of the broader issues related to what an editor is in a publication that is AI-generated, and why I think rare disease reporting is a uniquely appropriate and ethical use of AI!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112732

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

issue seems to be there is way off the site? top story about thinking machines has no way to click through to original link AFAICS

Here are some thoughts that that book sparks ...

"the whole is other than the sum of its parts" - someone, based on Aristotle. The way Nicole Rust puts is that the whole->part relationship is one way. In other words, you can determine the parts from the whole, but not the whole from the parts. A cell is a complex dynamic system with many overlapping and interacting feedback effects and diverse homeostatic drives. Its state emerges into its own entity that, once formed, bears only a tenuous relationship to its parts.

Understanding of our bodies and minds may be more tractable at more common levels, levels where the life system is at (whole), not where it was (parts) is where I think she's going: language, art, kinship, etc. But I'm not done yet.

that makes sense, i could see it being useful. though it would be a feature easily replicated by Apple or Android if it got some traction.

Maybe this idea of apps being "replaced by agents" is less literal than I'm thinking.

Like with music, maybe it could be an agent that in general helps me be a cooler, more informed music listener by constantly thinking about new ways of accessing myriad sources of info about what's cool, or what I would think would be cool.

- Spotify

- Le Monde (french news)

- Maps

- Find My

- Amazon

Anyone have a take on how these (maybe not precisely) could be "replaced by an AI agent"?

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise.

in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc.

that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.

i could see a long tail of impenetrable chaos as private correspondence gets hacked, ppl get divorced, fired, fight back, flood the zone with their own reputationslop so they have a grounds for denial, decide to take it ALL down to distract. recursive waves of tyranny/chaos. this isnt the singularity we were promised!

What if it doesn't understand what you're asking it to do and keeps failing and you have to keep rolling back? Can you understand the 20,000 lines it's generated so you can make the change yourself without tearing your hair out? Can you fix bugs in it that it can't, without starting from zero and having to understand the whole codebase?

I have just gotten off 3 years as a developer for that kind of project, and I used the best AI tools diligently every day. It often saved me time. Like from some small drudgery of half day of flailing about in config land. Or it could generate some nice rails controllers and a javascript front end from a well-written spec. writing tests was also a strong suit.

but just as often it failed to understand the depth of the product and its myriad concerns and led me down the garden path, reducing my efficiency.

Aside from that, a large part of my job was the parts that weren't coding - wrestling with specs that were far from ready for primetim, chaotic internal processes, deployment, internal coordination/communcation, talking to customers, etc.

In the end it seemed like it saved me maybe 20% of my time overall. Nothing to sneeze at.

I get that greenfield apps that have no customer contact can be created with a phrase now. That's pretty amazing. But I would love to see Opus 4.6 up against a real beast of a codebase that you're far from a master of.