I actually think the "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet" does a lot to characterize the capabilities and effects to a lot of people. Obviously coders are more in tune with how well agents can work, but that's also due more to the RL breakthroughs than foundation modeling.

NVIDIA local AI builds are moving in that direction, but are wildly expensive. I think a lot of the current AI backlash (esp data-centers) comes from the public's accurate intuition that the current centralized, monopolistic, cloud-centric solution disempowers them, and eats any gains this magical technology would've brought them. Plugging a sliver box into the wall and your router, with no recurring fees; that would make people feel different about "taking our jobs" because they would be the unquestionable beneficiary.

In the same way that googling for an SEO article's superficial answer ends up meaning you never really bother to memorize it, "ask chat" seems to lead to never really bothering to think hard about it.

Of course I google things, but maybe I should be trying to learn in a way that minimizes the need. Maybe its important to learn how to learn in way that minimizes exposure to sycophantic average-blog-speak.

I'm relieved to hear this because the LLM hype in this thread is seriously disorienting. Deeply convinced that coding "by hand" is just as defensible in the LLM age as handwriting was in the TTY age. My dopamine system is quite unconvinced though, killing me.

Hobby-project vibe coding is pretty cool (if I'm being honest, its fucking miraculous; this tech is wild) but isn't it clear that there's a problem with the linkedincels, the investors, the management that are all convinced this will remove say 50% of programming jobs? I understand these things have legitimate uses, but I'm at my wits end hearing about how deep understanding, craftsmanship, patience and hard work aren't "results oriented".

There's definitely zealotry developing against AI, but I suspect it is a proportional (if unhelpful) response to the hype machine. Is it really zealotry to insist on the value of your mind and your competence? These people saying you should never "hand write" your code-- how the fuck did the discourse move so much that this isn't a laughably stupid thing to say? "I'm a CEO, and if you aren't using consultants to make your decisions you've already lost"

People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.

People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.

The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.

I hope make more of these, I'd love to see a transformer presented more clearly.

All this fluff about targeting specific muscles etc is simply not analogous to LLMS. Maybe old-school barbells are paper files and fax machines, and cable machines are Slack, Asana, and Excel?

If your rebuttal is "Michelangelo would've only painted the broad strokes and the faces" you're still missing the point that he still /did some painting/.

In 1924 a leading socialist was stabbed to death with a file by Mussolini "deputies", and in the ensuing public outrage Pirandello wrote an open letter to Mussolini: 'I will consider it the greatest honor to become one of your humblest and most obedient followers'.

Not a huge fan of the way these 'literary critique' pieces are written, but it was interesting nevertheless. The author alludes to some topicality of the 20th century fascist's mind, but doesn't provide anything specific.

If you imagine students take 4 classes per semester and faculty teach 4 per semester… it seems stunningly feasible.

On the other hand you trust your bank, for example, so you follow the link on their website and install the App, and the trust came from their own brand.