lagrangeinterpolator

Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?

Honestly, the manifesto should have stopped here. They admitted defeat right out of the gate. But the manifesto must continue, because the LLM cannot fail, it can only be failed. I wonder if this report is starting to get under their skin.

The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.

This is not even a meaningful distinction. If I use an IDE command to change the name of a method everywhere it's used, did I change all the names or did the IDE change all the names? What difference does it make?

I can only see this as them ordering engineers to use the AI more and go faster. The manifesto talks a good game about how "expertise" and "good engineering practices" are not dying, but telling engineers to offload more of their work to AI has the unavoidable tradeoff of making these things worse.

As a side question, how is it that all of these fuckers always want to use the precious gift of AI to go faster, not to, say, give their engineers more time to improve the quality of their software? Almost like they don't actually give a shit about good engineering practices!

The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the AI revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 — using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place.

At least they're realizing that maybe one of the anti-AI talking points has some merit to it. But they don't seem to realize why they need stuff like code review and CI/CD: the AI is unreliable and these processes are needed to reduce the probability of a major fuckup reaching production. All they think is, hey, more opportunities to use AI!

("Another takes it is place." I had to look at the original text to make sure. At least we know the CTO wrote this himself after many drinks at 3 am. Damn, why are all those people on the internet so mean to us? I'm gonna show them!)

The third reason is a collective action problem. Using LLMs effectively to write code is something an individual engineer can do for themselves… But to retool the company at large requires amounts of both organization and resourcing that we simply have not invested in yet.

What do I even say to this? Once again the problem is that there isn't enough AI, and the solution is to buy more AI. We're gonna buy so much more AI that we're retooling the entire company and shoving it up every bodily orifice.

Excuse me? What happened to the mythical cybersecurity abilities of Claude Mythos? Physician, cure thyself!

Anthropic has not informed customers, and the malicious version was silently deleted the backdoored version without telling anybody.

Now we see Anthropic's attitude towards security when the incident does not make for good marketing. Also, considering Binance was just hacked for a massive $3B in stablecoins, and this backdoor allowed remote access to developer laptops, I have a feeling these things are connected. If that is true, then this is by far the worst cybersecurity incident involving AI, worse than even the much ballyhooed PHP2Shell.

Edit: From Molly White's article

Binance later wrote that their "initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop", which allowed an attacker to “submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”

Okay, now I am really suspicious that these things are connected.

The boosters hope that the AI will replace mathematicians, but they are running into an awfully inconvenient fact: theorems and proofs are useless without people who care enough to understand them and make meaning from them.

Another nitpick: they say no mortal can resist the One Ring for very long, but even someone who just watches the movies knows that immortals can also be corrupted by it (which is why Gandalf and Galadriel were very careful to not accept it). I know there are so many examples of tech bros not understanding media, but Lord of the Rings is by far the worst offender.

No mortal can resist the Ring of Power for long. Anthropic’s co-founders carried it for longer than you could have.

We all know how LotR goes. Boromir got the One Ring, carried it back to Gondor, used its sheer might to defeat his enemies in Mordor, and saved the world. Whatever problems you may have with Boromir, we all know that it would be a lot worse if Sauron got the One Ring. What do you mean, destroy the Ring? Are you a Luddite? This technology is here to stay. It cannot be destroyed by any craft we here possess, unless you're crazy enough to try throwing it into a volcano or something.

If Davidad and Janus are right, and are not merely suffering from a sophisticated form of LLM psychosis

That's all I need to know. The statement is correct since it is vacuously true.

What terrifies me is how we will react. In the aftermath, like after 9/11, there will be an overwhelming pressure to DO SOMETHING NOW. Everyone in Washington and in San Francisco will be panicking. There will be no time to think, no time to talk, only time for DECISIVE ACTION. All our worst instincts will take over. And then…

When this bubble started, there have been so many people urging caution. Many people have urged for time to think and talk, to make sure that we could properly address the many negative aspects of AI. Nope, we went full speed ahead with this nonsense. DECISIVE ACTION. And here we are.

Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

There was an annoying booster who said "Ed Zitron is definitely falling for this one". Ed Zitron is not fooled. In fact, he is frustrated with the report not properly breaking down the expenses (and having a mysterious "other expenses" category).

I really dislike how he believes that LLMs and fascism are "separate axes". Where does he think the LLMs come from? Does the stork deliver them? Is ChatGPT powered by magic fairy dust? Does he think that Sam Altman is a great defender of liberalism and democracy who definitely hasn't donated tons of money to Donald Trump?

I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My "Very Sane AI Newsletter" has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.

Damn, I was raking in so much cash from my mathematical theorems. Pretty good source of passive income, came with nice tax benefits too. Too bad it's all gone now. Maybe I should put my money in REITs.

I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I'm sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.

So far I've come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and "rent seeking". If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it "better", and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn't stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.

And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.