I think it's still important for young people to learn coding without the LLM. they need to see the little pieces before they can build big structures. It will be like calculators, just on a bigger scale: you learn how arithmetic works, and then you rely on the calculator when you are multiplying large numbers.
My guess is it will probably take some time to incorporate LLM use into education. People who are graduating right now have a problem, being between two worlds. Those graduating in a few years might have chance to figure out what to do.
> I may have built a system that is above my own level of understanding
If I venture into an unknown area, I end up where the letter-writer ends up when he is visiting programming. Suppose I am curious about an advanced math topic, like Navier-Stokes. The LLM's answer to the news about the new advance last week is strewn with words I don't understand. Asking about anything produces another essay with more things, a loop that never closes. If it were my specialist area, I imagine I would eventually hit some point where the explanation connects to something familiar.
I think this is the wall people run into when they don't have the fundamentals. You eventually get to a point where the machine is asking you for decisions that you won't know the consequences of, and when you are trying to clarify, you end up in a massive rabbit hole. It's not that different from asking a real expert about their area, they will eventually ask you to clarify something that means something to them, but not to you.
I learned programming the slow way. I would run into phrases like "memory barrier" or "green thread" and find an article using the keywords, which led to more searches, which led to more...
There are also many false dawns. Early on, after some success writing some trading strategies, I thought I had it, in the sense that I would be able to write any program required. But it wasn't true, I would run into an iceberg from time to time. Huge areas of knowledge that I hadn't come across.
Obviously I'm not claiming I finally know everything, but LLMs have arrived at a very convenient time for me. For the things I build, there is rarely anything that I don't understand at a fundamental level. When it asks me something, it's an incidental question: what decision should we make? What are the superficial changes that are needed to fit the architecture to the desired product?
I am essentially using LLM as a very quick junior, who knows how the OS works well enough to compile things and analyze logs. These are things that would take a lot of attention in the old days because they can break on very small errors, but the direction was known from the start, and thus for me (having paid the learning cost already) it is just a matter of waiting for the AI to get the code into the desired state.
I have a somewhat usable experience. I was asked to build a trading system a few years ago, which would connect to certain exchanges and show an orderbook. This kind of thing is bread and butter, but writing it up at a new firm would still take weeks.
In recent engagements, I've simply declaratively told the LLM what properties I wanted to see in the solution, waited, and answered a few questions. Since the architecture is the same, there weren't a lot of real decisions. The time difference is immense.
Some green parties. Their primary goals might seem unrelated, but turns out caring for the environment and climate change is correlated with long-term thinking.
Note I said "some", before rushing to mention all the examples of green parties engaging in misguided policies. Those also exist
In the anglosphere it's more difficult because first-past-the-post voting makes such parties unlikely to succeed or be relevant
In my country people voted in a party as majority that, not once left their terms peacefully in the past. AFTER our genZ ousted the other party, that came to power as a majority 17 years ago, changed constituency and controlled the parliament using majority, and turned into an autocracy
Now this party is shaping everything up using their majority for their favor (no surprise), ignoring all the agreements agreed upon by all the parties before election, under the interim government.
I think democracy is perhaps a fundamentally unstable system. It requires constant corrective force, and a lot of it, from a lot of people. When the members of that democracy start to get a little too comfortable it fails.
Humans are designed to operate in smallish clans with benevolent dictators whose right to rule is based on social currency with people they personally know. Anything else is a house of cards on unstable foundation.
I'm not sure how you fix that, but democracy so far has maybe been the least bad patch.
That was Churchill's view, as he said during a speech in the House of Commons in 1947:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time . . ."
The American founders predicted all these problems, which is why they formed a representative democracy. However over the years we have chipped away at that aspect and ended up with an election systems that encourage populism.
It had to be a joke. Conservative policies have made things much worse. It’s hard to believe they have a party that gets 60 million people to vote for them.
Response to sister comment: conservatism, and the groups that claim to support it, are separate. Same with liberals, and socialists, and the Democrat Party.
So name one. These politicans have names, do they not?
We do have the name of one politician who balanced the New York City budget though. Its probably not going to please a lot of people to hear that guy's name though. But that's what people want, right? Balanced budgets?
But no. That's not what people want and we all know it.
One aspect of that balanced budget that should be noted is that it does rely on a sizable funding increase from the state government.
Now, that state is legally required to have a balanced budget itself, so perhaps this is a small side note rather than a major change in perspective. I just think it’s not spoken about enough when discussing how that budget process went.
So what is he? A Democrat, and what else? Parties are groups of people, ideologies are pure ideals.
They are distinct, with overlaps in their demographics.
Turns out, that was just a lie that some people told fiscally conservative people to get them to vote against their interests, just like other "wedge" issues like abortion or trans people.
Trump, sitting on top of a Republican government, is responsible for 10Trn of the debt, about a quarter.
Conservatives gave up on principles long ago and have settled for simply lying about everything, including what's happening and who's responsible for it.
The words are so overloaded. Republican is just generic right wing. I think the "conservative" the parent is talking about is the neoliberalism like what Milton Friedman would propose. He would have wanted half of the government gone, next to no market intervention (he even argued against seatbelts in one lecture). That would actually be the "conservative" someone you stereotypically imagine like Ron Swanson would adopt, who describes the perfect government as just a person in a tiny white room. The Republicans are a joke, just like the Democrats. They're both there for themselves, and have no actual agenda, manifesto, ideals, or values. They've got all the junk identity politics, religion, abortion, immigration crap mixed in such that you're either picking crap or crap. There's nothing "liberal" about the Democrats and nothing "conservative" about the Republicans. The Republicans were even the ones who freed the slaves! Make of that what you will.
Well intelligence is not measured by patterns in text. The illusion only takes place in the text domain.
Even then, it's a pretty fragile illusion at the moment. Clearly the reasoning traces dont ground the answers. There's no intelligence taking place even as-measured by text.
Why could you not use text to measure intelligence? Isn't that what we used to do? Have students write an essay, and then deduce that they had enough intelligence to put some thoughts together?
Well that's the trick. That the systems we use, as a proxy, to measure intellinnce in people are actually fairly easy to immitate.
But let's be clear these were always, and are, bad measures of intelligence. You cannot test a dolphin this way. And its easy to cheat on tests either thru recall , wrote-learning, etc. and IQ tests haev very poor individual test-retest reliability.
In humans there's a convenient correlation that verbal articulation in text is a strong but weak correlate of intelligence. Its "Good enough" for allocating meat bodies to our various institutions. But if you've met many well-tested people you'll realise how, in practice, terrible this measuring approach is. The world we inhabit is filled with misclassified "intellects" who perform well under text-based rubrics. Add LLMs to that heap, the cheater par execellence.
Sure. Let's first establish a measure is not what is being measured. Then, as far as measures go, we need measures that capture the entire animal kingdom. I can go it into it, but its a lot of time and I'm busy atm.
Consider thought that all mammals have imagination, and model-based reinformcement, and a wide vareity of other capacities required for intelligence. And so merely issuing "text" captures, incorrelate, only these capacities by proxy.
I'm sure if you thought about it yhou could come up with tests that distinguish lizards from birds and the greater apes from the lesser. Those are the tests
"Reality TV" as it is now was born from a writer's strike. Producers couldn't outright give the people scripts and written lines, but they could stand off camera and feed them lines off the cuff in the style of leading questions. If anyone thinks these shows are not intentionally pushed in the directions the producers want, then they just are not paying attention. Which is precisely what these producers want
In my headcanon it was all born from an experimental show (Big Brother) in around 2000 - which was obviously and intentionally stage managed but otherwise largely genuine behaviours. It took them a couple of seasons to really optimise for the "right" contestants and how to maximise the drama etc etc.
The move to more and more of reality tv content is as much about budgets as anything else imo
I know many people who watch, I watch myself, and we all know it's semi scripted and that the overall arcs are decided in advance. The really interesting thing about reality tv is once you realise that this is happening, the "Reality" part really comes back into play even stronger because you can see how people react in such situations (the situation being them being part of a scripted reality tv show while wanting to increase their social media following etc). These days there's also the whole component of social media posts and real life events between the seasons that sometimes are more juicy than the show itself, but only get exposed because of the show.
It's just that most people who don't watch, or like to feel smarter than those who watch, think that you just sit there and suspend all belief instead of seeing it for what it is and acknowledging it's pretty interesting.
I don't think it's a matter of "feeling smarter" (at least not for me); I don't like most reality TV because the things you mention just don't resonate with me as being interesting or worth watching. I don't particularly care how a bunch of "regular people"[0] react in the situation of being fed scripts while wanting to increase their social media following. I don't care about random people I don't know and their "juicy" events. Some people do, and that's fine; it just isn't my cup of tea.
My partner got me into The Challenge early in our relationship. There's a lot about it that I don't like, and it's pretty clear that the competition itself is steered by the production team in ways that aren't really natural, and the outcome week to week is often likely not what would happen if the cast members weren't interfered with. I'm not on social media and don't care what the cast is up to off-screen, and I never watch the "reunion" episode at the end of each season because it's just a bunch of big-personality drama and performances made for internet points. But the show itself can be fun to watch sometimes, and some of the challenges they have to complete are genuinely difficult and cool to watch.
[0] The "regular people" thing is also really blurry. Sure, most (all?) reality shows pull from people who aren't otherwise actors or famous, but being on a long-running reality TV show can create that fame and lead to other (no-reality-TV) acting gigs. (Arguably many of the long-time cast members of The Challenge are celebrities in their own right, with curated public presences, and some of them have since taken on regular non-reality acting roles.)
I don’t see how that differs from any other fiction. Either the whole thing is non fiction, or it’s fictional.
I would even go so far as to label only videos of an event itself, like security recordings, to be non fiction as re-enactments and whatnot can have a lot of extra information that was not there in real life.
It would be very difficult for any TV show or film to meet this bar for non-fiction, because even if the footage is real there's still an edit.
The Senna documentary[1] is in the grey area. It's entirely composed of archival footage - no reconstructions, no talking heads, no voiceover. But the filmmaker has still chosen which footage to include and omit and in what order to construct a narrative. I don't think that neatly falls into fiction or non-fiction in your model.
What am I missing out on if I cannot tell what is and is not fiction? It seems detrimental to assume something is real and then it turns out to be fake (but I will never know).
I'm not sure if anything I say will convey the point because I think you already got what I meant, but think of Santa. During childhood it goes from reality to the middleground of "I wonder if" to later clearly being fiction. Not knowing what is what and later finding out or not is interesting in itself.
I don't think that follows. It's fine to recognize that something that isn't non-fiction is fiction, and, frankly, that's the only reasonable thing to do, since you can't know what's true and what isn't. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it just as much as the next person, or get something good out of it.
MTV's The Real World began in 1992. Did it inolve a writers' strike?
Edit: Looking at Wikipedia's account, there are many reality TV shows going back decades before that. Some are game shows and other things - t's hard to tell what matches the modern model.
A moat allows the owner a degree of passivity. Eg, you own the desktop OS. You are already using this moat to get office software on every machine, while competitors either have to dance to your tune when publishing a program, or think of a way to get their own OS out there. You can see how the internet develops, knowing that you can get your own browser on every machine for free. You can watch for a bit before you move.
Relying on continuous inspiration is a treadmill that goes faster and faster. That's what's described here. Come up with something new and clever, someone copies it, come up with another thing. You can't be passive, you have to be moving constantly.
Inspiration and creativity used to be something society rewarded you for, since you could capture the value and build on top of it. That was the moat.
Now most people are punished for publishing because your work will usually get taken over by whoever has the biggest mouthpiece or compute, and there is no protection against that. I expect people to realize this sooner or later and take their work underground. It's already happening.
the followers acurred willing to jump into your new thing would be the moat then, as would be your "software factory" that enables the fast fashion fast software creativity
Whenever I create something cool - especially here - people copy it. If I do something really cool, companies do it. I always feel like I gave people things who didn't even do it right.
However... a moat can also be just working on something that takes ~2 years to create. That gives you 2 years of moat at a time if you can repeat it, so it's a bigger treadmill that you can leisurely stroll along. Because you want to stay moving a little anyway, to stay relevant.
Think about what it takes to crawl the entire web and rank pages. Nobody can do it overnight. Find the things that nobody can do overnight, and spend 2 years on it, building up that value. No matter what, nobody can do it unless they spend those 2 years. Nobody will, except the ultra dedicated (hire them).
It takes that time... I think of this as like digging the moat where it doesn't naturally exist. You have a regular website that anybody could make, but you dug a moat by aggregating some value, or building it up, or connecting it to some external source of value that you have privileged access to.
If you patented it, they couldn't copy it (a lot of patents are secretly invalid, but they'd still need to hire lawyers to find out), but you'd be out $300
I think this is probably true, but a lot of creative things are small-c creative: you brainstorm, you come up with a bunch of vanilla stuff, you connect some of those ordinary ideas.
The brainstorming thing, AI is really good at. "Gimme a bunch of 80s pop culture" is going to get you a longer list than you could think of yourself, and then you can just supply the judgement about what you want.
How do you know that it's formalizing what you think it's formalizing? If your Lean 4 has a bug, won't you be proving something other than what you thought?
The only places you can really have a bug are your theorum statement, your axioms, your environment (hardware, operating system, etc.), and the lean kernel itself. In most situations you don't have the AI control any of these. The only risk is the AI discovering and exploiting a bug in one of these systems instead of actually providing what you want to prove.
If I understand correctly, the only thing you need to do for correctness is express your axioms and your theorems faithfully. For standard purposes, I assume most of the axioms you want to use are prior art and can be easily reused.
These axioms don’t have to be the core axioms of math. If some other result has been formally proven, I presume you can simply use that result as an axiom.
As long as you do those things, what happens in between is immaterial from a correctness point of view because each of those statements is proved by the statements before them.
Yes, you need to manually verify the statement of the theorem of interest of formalized correctly. But you don't need to anything more than this: you can rely on the proof being correct. And the proof is overwhelmingly the most amount of code.
My point is, you will always have to check the work, no matter who makes it or how. If you can't check it, then don't rely on it. If you can check it, then do rely on it. Basic due diligence.
I don't get what the controversy is about. Are people expecting AI to be perfect? Do they think they won't have to do the work to verify it themselves?
Live resizing apps and dealing with apps that don't have a specified new design for the unfolded screen size is one of the big hurdles for folding phones that's new to the Duo for Apple so it remains to be seen how well that works for random apps.
It'll be interesting to see how many/how quickly apps adopt the UI that lets you make the most of the foldable screen. If it doesn't sell in big numbers app developers might not feel the need to and the user experience will be subpar. ...but I suspect it will.
> It'll be interesting to see how many/how quickly apps adopt the UI that lets you make the most of the foldable screen.
For iOS 27, apps are automatically automatically opted in to resizability. Apple was clear at WWDC that apps need to dynamically adjust to any available scene size at runtime, not just for iPhone Duo, but also for iPad windowing and iPhone Mirroring on Mac. There may be a grace period, but Apple hasn't shared one AFAIK.
Admittedly, software that's influenced by the iPad and iPhone, so there is new software, but it's not that new. Multitasking in iOS has been a thing for a while (iPad).
I'm not trying to discount the efforts involved here, just pointing out that they aren't starting from scratch. And much of the required features to support a dual-screen (triple-?) phone has been in the works for a while.
My guess is it will probably take some time to incorporate LLM use into education. People who are graduating right now have a problem, being between two worlds. Those graduating in a few years might have chance to figure out what to do.
> I may have built a system that is above my own level of understanding
If I venture into an unknown area, I end up where the letter-writer ends up when he is visiting programming. Suppose I am curious about an advanced math topic, like Navier-Stokes. The LLM's answer to the news about the new advance last week is strewn with words I don't understand. Asking about anything produces another essay with more things, a loop that never closes. If it were my specialist area, I imagine I would eventually hit some point where the explanation connects to something familiar.
I think this is the wall people run into when they don't have the fundamentals. You eventually get to a point where the machine is asking you for decisions that you won't know the consequences of, and when you are trying to clarify, you end up in a massive rabbit hole. It's not that different from asking a real expert about their area, they will eventually ask you to clarify something that means something to them, but not to you.
I learned programming the slow way. I would run into phrases like "memory barrier" or "green thread" and find an article using the keywords, which led to more searches, which led to more...
There are also many false dawns. Early on, after some success writing some trading strategies, I thought I had it, in the sense that I would be able to write any program required. But it wasn't true, I would run into an iceberg from time to time. Huge areas of knowledge that I hadn't come across.
Obviously I'm not claiming I finally know everything, but LLMs have arrived at a very convenient time for me. For the things I build, there is rarely anything that I don't understand at a fundamental level. When it asks me something, it's an incidental question: what decision should we make? What are the superficial changes that are needed to fit the architecture to the desired product?
I am essentially using LLM as a very quick junior, who knows how the OS works well enough to compile things and analyze logs. These are things that would take a lot of attention in the old days because they can break on very small errors, but the direction was known from the start, and thus for me (having paid the learning cost already) it is just a matter of waiting for the AI to get the code into the desired state.
I have a somewhat usable experience. I was asked to build a trading system a few years ago, which would connect to certain exchanges and show an orderbook. This kind of thing is bread and butter, but writing it up at a new firm would still take weeks.
In recent engagements, I've simply declaratively told the LLM what properties I wanted to see in the solution, waited, and answered a few questions. Since the architecture is the same, there weren't a lot of real decisions. The time difference is immense.
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