Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038827

Points: 270

# Comments: 198

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47991259

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487583

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Yes, we'd love to visit!

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

— Edsger Dijkstra

I believe that even when we have AGI, code will still be super valuable because it'll be how we get precise abstractions into human heads, which is necessary for humans to be able to bring informed opinions to bear.

I partly understand this perspective. I think it gets at 'proof of work' – if you can forgive me borrowing a concept from crypto. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a low-effort output. That's just embarrassing.

For example, I am constantly getting fairly decent spam emails, but I literally never respond because that would be so lame. No matter how good spam emails get, I won't reply.

My investor Dan Levine says that in order to get a reply for a cold email you have to pass a mini Turing Test embedded in the email. This is increasingly hard as we approach AGI, defined as the point at which machine intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human intelligence. But I still think it's possible, but hard work and definitionally unscalable. (If you find a way to scale it, readers will learn to build up defenses against it. It's a never-ending arms race.)

But relying on human-written writing as the proof-of-work is limited in two ways:

1. When we do reach AGI, it will, definitionally, no longer be possible. CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) definitionally don't make sense in a world where you can't tell humans and machines apart. 2. It's a limited way to measure 'proof of work'.

There should be other ways to show 'proof of work'. The easiest example is money. Imagine if there was a frictionless way to pay $10 or $100 to send someone an email. Or attach $10 or $100 in cash to an email as a thank-you to the recipient for reading it. This kinda already exists in that you can buy time with famous people on various marketplaces or pay $1m to charity to get lunch with Warren Buffett. (Buffett ended up hiring one guy who did this!)

So yes, nobody wants to be a dupe, and if I mass produce a lot of writing (even if it's super high quality), I would deserve to lose readers. So I'd never do that.

Instead, if I had AI that could write in my voice as well as me, I'd use it to help me dramatically improve the quality of my writing. I'd keep my effort constant, and the quality bar would go way up. Ideally, it'd be a gift to you, my potential reader.

How does that land?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476909

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476315

Points: 611

# Comments: 447

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298506

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

For example, at my startup val.town, our MCP server is way more powerful than our API, because we added a bunch of tools to it willynilly because we're not worried about having to be stuck with those tools forever. We can remove them and nobody's code will break. (Just like we could remove buttons in our UI.) But an API change needs to be thought-through.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47170102

Points: 3

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125579

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008128

Points: 1

# Comments: 0