'nuff said.

Great if true. Bad for the hyperscalers, Nvidia, all the frontier labs apart from meta and Google since everyone can just run a LLM on their IoT coffee machine instead of paying someone else. Nice.

I think some of the benchmarks that Meta didn't pick show Gemini 4 Argon ahead but really the benchmarks are not that great any more and getting increasingly disconnected from reality as people search for "headroom" in the evals to avoid saturation I think. Opus 5.5 is "top" for example but I really dislike the way it talks to me (it feels quite condescending, holier-than-thou, uptight etc) and prefer Gemini 3.8 flash as a daily driver just because it's so much more pleasant (and faster!) to work with and it's code is good-enough for my needs, despite being weaker in the benchmarks.

It's a status and wealth thing.

Nice to drive sure, but software is TERRIBLE (like embarrassingly bad, even years and years after release and endless OTAs) both in the car and app. And the dashboard is all touch sensitive nonsense where they've cheaped out in places that really really really cause annoyances - e.g. to control the rear windows, you have to press a touch sensitive "rear" thing and then you can use the same two window buttons that normally operate the front buttons - wtf?! There is no backlight on the touch sensitive heating controls so you can't change them at night without just flapping your hand around etc. There are no rear speakers, no alloy wheels, drum brakes, no reversing camera, hell there is even visible exterior paint panels around the window where they didn't put a bit of fabric like every other car.

The ID3 is a very very basic and badly implemented car as a daily driver. Take it in to VW to fix the faults on the warranty and you always have to pay a diagnosis fee for them to even look at it because that's not covered. Hateful contempt for the user/owner/driver.

I understand they have made some updates in the newest model, but certainly the OTA updates have not prevented the software problems so you'll probably still have those even if you are wowed by having physical buttons for demisting the windows or unlocking the doors.

I am not sure I trust that specifically being about china Vs say US, but there you go.

For me, the entire thing that made me want to use Deno was it was a clean-sheet rewrite that was aiming to overcome the negatives of node and npm. It was a breath of fresh air. Yet overtime they basically ended up just trying to replicate node. Such a shame.

Still, I like cloudflare's offerings so I'm very interested to see what they come up with after work on worded/celld

This happened to software engineers already. Mathematics isn't special.

Hold someone accountable for this behaviour - Dario, Sam, Sundae whoever and you can bet there'd be fucking improvements in sandboxing and security m

Someone told me some years ago that it was "impossible" for Google to apply an upper usage caps due to technical design reasons which I found absurd. You can build a globally distributed continent-scale SQL database with consistency guarantees, but you can't stop me paying more than X USD when my usage ticks over that? Huh?

It smelt much more to me like Google's business model made it impossible to stop customers spending money, not their engineering.

I voted with my wallet.

I think it is largely because IMHO React is very much an "overlay" on top of (and inspite of) normal web standards and general beat practice (e.g. JSX throwing out decades of separation of concerns etc), leading to whole swathes of people who have basically only ever been "react developers" not generalist frontend engineers. They find the DOM APIs "icky" because it takes them out of the React lifecycle, mindset, and ecosystem etc.

Tldr, React and NPM are a pox on the world of frontend development and especially the JavaScript ecosystem. It's given JavaScript such a bad name, unfairly.

Still with AI basically nothing matters any more - no one sees the code any more.

One way AIs really really really excel is pulling together a lot of different data sources and reasoning over that data. In the past sure we could collect data and create huge datasets, but the analysis of that data - extracting themes, finding commonality or issues etc - either required extensive human research and analysis at best, or at worst crude regexes or keyword matching.

Now an AI can pour over that data and make its own inferences and decisions and findings that we've simply not been able to do before at this kind of speed or scale just because of time and resources.

And the AI, having done that, can propose new things for e.g. training, i.e. new things that no human has ever done before that the AI is simply repeating. For example it can propose a task that it knows from it's research is hard for it to solve currently, and then we just throw compute and randomness at it to find the "best" solution from many many attempts, then repeat until we hill-climb up to a perfect 1.0 score (... although of course we have to try and avoid cheating/attempts to short-ciruit the eval)

So this could be coding tasks, UI control tasks, protein folding, maths, chemistry etc etc. Anything that is easily and objectively programmatically scored. You can run this in a loop many times, each time you go around the loop the model gets smarter, learns more things from it's research, new areas of loss it can optimise etc etc.

It's harder where there is not a way to objectively score the outcomes (e.g. art, creative writing). Often this uses a fuzzy "judge" model that is trained specifically to give the work a score based on it's appraisal. This works but you can see how we might end up with feedback loops, so often it is paired with humans who provide feedback to provide supervised fine tuning datasets.

Tl:Dr - It's not just "repeating what it's seen". AI is finding new ideas and creating new things millions of times a day, and that is just software engineers asking it to write code or fix bugs, let alone people using it for actual research or whatever.

And people are worried about human extinction when this is the potential trade-off!

C++'s death cannot come soon-enough.

Seriously though, things have changed so incredibly rapidly in the past year or so. I have never been such an efficient or such a proficient engineer than I have this past year (delivering feature after feature, project after project, faster and better than I could before with better feedback from users etc) and I don't even see the code any more. It could be c++, it could be python, or java or what ever - I don't really care any more: the computer deals with that trivia while I concentrate on what to build and how it should work.

Its amazing. It really is.

With respect, I don't find your arguement about them being "so far behind" especially convincing when you are using previous-gen releases and not actually using their current release.