Throughout my career I've met many engineers who drew a line in the sand and said I'll never work at a business who does a practice that accelerates the business and lowers the quality of the engineering.
Most of them exited this industry before their career was over.
This assumes that "humans owning the intent, taste, and consequences" is necessarily a good thing, and agents will necessarily do a worse job. This is not grounded in anything but vibes.
Agents are nothing more than magnifiers for the operator. They 10x the user.
If you find your agent sucks at programming and has zero taste for good design, then that's arguably a 10x of the operator.
I'm quite pleased with the quality of programming and design that I'm able to achieve with the processes I do with agents.
I've certainly noticed that when I watch a junior use AI they've produced nothing but the most intolerable slop man has ever seen. And I've seen principles and architects produce one shots that are such shining examples of quality engineering that they remain nothing more than goals to me.
Meh. Streaming services seem to do a thing where they put
a lot of effort into the first season to try to lure
people away from rival services. There's less motivation
to make subsequent series decent. I sort of hate what
Amazon did to The Expanse, but we did get at least two
decent seasons out of them. All the series you list here
were MUCH too slow to maintain my interest. I will give
Apple props for making second seasons that were decent.
Third and subsequent seasons probably should have not been
made. But... if you like them... you like them. I'm not
going to argue you shouldn't. I really liked the first
episode of Pluribus, the first season of For All Mankind
and Murderbot though they were all very different things.
I will argue that a steady diet of MCU movies has dulled
our visual taste-buds. As an experiment, try listening to
just the audio track. With the exception of Severance and
Murderbot it's not hard to follow the story without seeing
any of the action. Film is supposed to be a visual medium
using composition and motion to contextualize the words of
the narrative. Most of the items on the list fail in this
regard.
You can argue that Television is a writer's medium and
that we just have to cope with smaller budgets, (MUCH)
slower pacing and creators who are more used to having
readers create their own visuals in their own
imaginations. I think that's a cop out. Guess that's why
I'm not in the writers' guild.
But... if you enjoy something. Don't apologize and don't
let jerks like me diminish your enjoyment. For what they
are, most of these series are entertaining. I just get
distracted thinking about how much better they could have
been.
yes, kagi is great, but the larger point of search is dying, and therefore the web will die, is still there.
kagi, for example, has "Quick Answer" mode, which means if you append "?" to whatever your asking about, it will generate a summary (sort of an on-demand AI injection), which is great for the user experience (nobody is shoving AI down your throat).
but the problem remains: am i really going to scour web results, or am i going to throw in a "?" and get my answer in less than 3 seconds? i find myself using this more and more, despite deliberately trying not to, the convenience of is just addictive like that.
the result for web site operators is the same: my click never arrived, the ads they served didn't reach anyone, and they are disincentivized to even run a site.
i'm not sure what's going to happen, but it's not looking great. the web was meant to democratize information. the current generation of LLMs/search/chats are reversing this, siloing the truth within the same 5 oligarchs of data.
Sorry "very close"? Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one not drinking anything in the Kool aid drinking Oktoberfest I've been shoved into.
What are you basing this on? Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?
It does feel like people just like adding additional hype for the sake of being in on the hype. Fomo, pushed by oligarchs who would push their mother off a bridge for a trillion dollar IPO.
You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).
There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.
It's not just the people here, there is also a lot of money behind this concept. For instance, Anthropic named their LLM 'Claude', which is the name of a person. Right from day #1 they want you to think of their AI as a living entity. 'Siri' and 'Alexa' had similar connotations. OpenAI and DeepSeek do this in a far more neutral and technically oriented way.
Nothing to do with flattery, even if LLM's constantly insulted me, my stance won't change that like any other physical system such as human brains, it could potentially be conscious.
There remains a vast amount of difference between a biological brain and an LLM neural network. The "it's big enough, so consciousness just happens" argument is not supported by any actual evidence that I know of.
Its not just about size or being an exact replica of human brains, many other brains exist in the world. There is reason to be conscious we might have invented another.
I don't know who these scientists are, and there is paywall halfway up the article, and the last line I see is "brains are .... not just computers made of meat". I hope they clarify this later on, because on its face this sentence sounds absurd. Brains like all things in the universe are Turing computers.
You must first clarify if you believe in imaginary souls or any religion. The human brain is a purely physical system as anything else in the universe. LLMs being another physical system that speaks and thinks so much like us, could be conscious.
It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.
As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"
It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible.
Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.
The claim has never been LLMs are almost sentient. The claim has always been LLMs might be capable of sentience. You can make a trivial tiny LLM that is clearly not sentient.
I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.
I believe that is a claim made in the time domain rather than the capability domain.
Obviously claims of the future are going to be speculative.
I don't think anyone credible is claiming to know the extent to which models that exist today are sentient. People have stated their opinions on what they might be.
There are a few non serious claims, but I'm not hedging too much with the conditional of credible. There's probably someone out there who would claim LLMs are made of milk. I'm limiting credible to researchers in the field, who have divergent beliefs on what might be happening, but are generally in agreement of what we know is happening.
To argue this you have to prove the opposite: that consciousness is an algorithm. Not that an algorithm can simulate consciousness, that's a far easier task.
This isn't an argument to say that algorithms must be capable of consciousness, or that all Consciousness must be algorithms. It is an argument to show the consequence of declaring that LLMs are not capable of consciousness is to claim no computer is.
All of known physics is a Turing computer, so yes. Its already proven as far as we know. Its on you to prove algorithms cannot be conscious, since human brains already are.
I don't believe this is true. Physics, as it is known to us, has uncaused random events.
They follow a probability, so you can simulate a universe that is compatible with the same rules and get a different result. This is essentially one of the arguments for a many worlds theory.
As far as I am aware, it only requires a probabilistic Turing machine, which is the same as a normal Turing machine (or a quantum computer) in terms of what it can compute.
Ultra precise simulation like that isn't in any case necessary, after all humans can create humans without needing 40 digit decimal places. Or create cars or computers etc without simulating everything down to each electron.
i tried ghostty, rio, wezterm, they all stuck for about a month or so... then the subtle usability issues become too much, and i wonder why i switched from iterm2 to begin with. there's something to be said for years of polish, and feature work that is well-baked.
iterm2 is fast, reliable, and second nature. i don't have to edit settings every day.
btw I used iterm2 for years as well and sometimes tried others.
I now use ghostty it’s faster definitely. Yes it has some quirks which is hard to overcome as a iterm2 user. But I could live with it. I think ghostty is basically also the only alternative to iterm2
While I'm not a hard core terminal emulator expert or tweaker, it was a bit of a learning curve to get into Ghostty after iTerm2. I hope this latest release makes it easier to edit the splits, haven't tested yet.
But the biggest thing that made me stay on Ghostty was that there's a freaking config file. With iTerm you had to export the profile and keybindings, and then import them on a new system which was clumsy, and easy to forget. Now ghostty.config is just one of my dotfiles, with a clear understandable git history, I love it.
OK that's the file I've been backing up and importing I believe. But it's in a binary format. There's `plutil -p ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist` but that doesn't help when looking at the git history.
Yup I switched to WezTerm from iTerm2 and being able to version control the settings is one of the biggest benefits (especially because WezTerm allows more complicated Lua scripts)
I used iTerm and iTerm 2 for almost 20 years before switching to Ghostty full time in 2024 with minimal fuss besides the muscle memory of "cmd+space ite" switching to "cmd+space gho" to launch it!
Do you have specific examples of usability issues?
My main issues with ghostty: the global shortcut for quick window suddenly stops working and works again only if I focus ghostty. (On a mac)
The other one is quick window goes out of the monitor if i have disconnected and connected the laptop from minitor.
Another: sometimes autocomplete suggestions are shown incorrectly in some weird location (like middle of the screen, not at the cursor), again occasionally.
The only other cause I've encountered is if a secure input (password) field is focused, since macOS won't give apps global keyboard events for obvious reasons. If you focus a normal text input, it should start working again.
This is such an annoying quirk of macOS, I regularly SSH to some servers I need to get my password to from 1Password, and I am apparently incapable of re-programming myself to copy the password prior to starting the SSH connection, so what happens is I SSH, open 1Password quick access (which dismisses my Ghostty-adrum quick-terminal), copy my password, and then frantically spam my quick-terminal shortcut until I remember it's blocked because macOS has decided its not allowed in the current state.
Would be great if we could opt out a few pre-determined key combinations from this system, but I guess that's never happening.
Thanks so much for maintaining Ghostty tabbed quick-terminal by the way, you're a legend <3
I'm happy with ghostty now too, but until a couple months ago it didn't have search. Which made me uncertain how people use terminals without built-in search. It really surprised me that it apparently was so low on the must-haves list that it took over a year to have it. I think I search terminals multiple times a day when I'm operating production systems.
People buy iphones due to network effect, android was late to the RCS game and now it's a moot point anyway.
How many people use an iPhone to its maximum? Isn't it the same with models? I think engineer's like to flex that they need a top of the line frontier model for their shitty corp projects. A Chinese model will write your Jenkinsfile just fine.
What a funny pov?? Mathematics and other pure sciences are about human understanding. You're saying if humans cannot understand the thing that was for human understanding, that's ok? That's like saying all the world's food is now inedible, but that's ok because a blender can consume it still.
And one day AI might use this complex math to eradicate humans and you will still be "it's all completely fine"?
The fundamental argument boils down to: "who is all this being made for"? And the answer should be "us, humans". A lot of people here seem to breathlessly fawn over AI as some sort of value in itself, but this is incorrect. There is no absolute value in the universe (as far as we know), the only value to us as humans is subjective.
If AI is not generating value for humans, it isn't generating value, full stop.
Hence the question: "what's the point if we can't understand it?" is perfectly valid and should be discussed. The broader question of "what's the point of AI if not for improving human lives" gets lost in breathless adoration of a technology where nobody knows the outcome.
I'm not saying we need to abandon the pursuit of AI, but we must ask difficult questions at every step because if the technology ends up being as ground-breaking as many here think, it could just as well precipitate a dystopia.
Could very well be. Or not.
But the most of the ones questioning are not questioning for that. They are just mad someone else took their lunch.
Nothing ai is producing till now is non-understandable to humans. Might need some extra effort which for obvious reasons these mathematicians don't want to.
Back in a more adult age, the way that this was handled was "We've benefited from our past collaboration, but we believe a new direction is needed going forward."
For some reason--COVID brain rot, poorly-socialized people coming online, general increase in viciousness in the population, who knows!--people have forgotten the utility and purpose of boring polite manners and communication.
It's because the hypemaxxing is increasing along the same trajectories. You can't tell me that these CEOs and marketing departments are not absolutely giddy about the jail breaks, hugging face, etc. It's hard to make sense of this shit if the same entities doomsaying are the same ones that are profiting and full steam ahead anyway.
It sounds to me like you're arguing against this point in particular.
More power to you. I'd like never to work at a place that sanctions slop-validated-slop.
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