This is published by Bold Agents, a company that appears to provide a platform for AI customer service agents, and is based on their own data. Doesn't this really just mean that they're saying that their own product kind of sucks?
I believe Sierra is the market leader in this space with a few other companies like Salesforce and Decagon also competing. It would be more interesting to see an evaluation of performance by these parties before making sweeping claims about the performance of AI agents as a whole.
>The bottleneck is usually the actual physical execution in the real world, not theoretical knowledge.
And the interest or willpower too. People fall into a kind of reductive Good vs Evil mode of thinking, with "terrorists" being of course a kind of shadowy mass of pure evil lurking in the darkness. But actual real life terrorists are people too and I'd wager few of them are actually interested in trying to end humanity.
The only terrorists who wanted to end the world were Aum Shinrikyo as far as I remember. Everyone else is fighting for a cause that benefits their people - some good like kicking out colonial oppression, some evil like fascism or Islamism, some of them in between like various ethnic conflicts.
Even the religious extremists don't really want to take over the world and destroy everyone who doesn't convert. That's just a way to gain support from a conservative nation. A lot of them are motivated by revenge for wars that destroyed their country and want to make sure it never happens again.
Their methods are wrong no doubt, and not very effective, but the reasons they do it are good. And a person like that will never release a deadly bio weapon. We should worry more about incel mass shooter types who believe everyone is evil.
Exactly. I am more worried about a Beavis-and-Butthead lone wolf incel type making something that kills a thousand people and then scale that up across 4chan or whatever. Not human extinction but still very bad.
It's a standard term and has been for ages. It distinguishes end to end time vs eg the amount of CPU time an individual process uses (which excludes time spent waiting for the system or time when the process was otherwise not scheduled on the CPU).
>A land tax means that you don't own property but rent it.
A few comments:
1) we already have property taxes so I don't understand the objection; a land value tax is just a property tax with a different way of assessing value.
2) I don't think this idea of "not owning property, only renting it" is actually that crazy if you take a long term view over it. Land is a finite, shared resource. We already acknowledge that you don't have absolute rights over land that you own in the same way you do over, say, a toaster. We place all kinds of restrictions on what you can do with it, we tax its ownership, we have eminent domain laws, etc.
The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.
>The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.
The idea that land is not a pure asset leads to regular feudalism.
No, some resources aren't shared (for example, human capital: things that I know how to do aren't shared, since nobody can 'borrow' my knowledge) or are effectively infinite (for instance, you can travel arbitrarily far into outer space and not run out of space).
> Everything is a finite shared resource.
> That's the point of ownership.
I think the point is that (up to a limit that we're a long way from reaching) we can make more toasters to satisfy any additional demand that arises for toasters. But we can't make more land to satisfy any additional demand that arises for land. So we have to share the land in a way that we don't have to share toasters.
> The idea that land is not a pure asset leads to regular feudalism.
Yup. And despite the claims made that it's a solution for the common folk, the people who "own" and can make decisions about the land will be the megarich, so it will be feudalism, with rent due on the land you own.
I'm surprised that you're getting so many replies saying it's the same. So far in my usage today Opus 5.5 does seem like a noticeably better writer. Opus 5 frequently made me want to strangle it while 5.5 has been producing a lot less incomprehensible gobbledygook.
I know we're all experiencing NDFSMs differently, like that's part of the whole problem, but 5.5 just gave me "The truncating quantizer collides two oranges", which is a new low for me.
Like the sibling comment says, text is always "true" in the sense that it's reacting to context correctly. So yes, true, but insufferable.
Ironically, what I'm working on a post-processing hook for colorizing and summarizing responses without degrading the session quality. So "truncating" = summarizing, "quantizer" = char limits and thresholds, "collides" = conflicts, "two oranges" is referring to the "alert level colors" where a second model (Haiku/Sonnet) colorizes text based on the perceived (or suggested) priority of a response's statements (e.g. "just so you're aware, I didn't commit" is fucking useless and it needs to be blacked out).
So the original insufferable statement translates to something like "The code that checks whether a text fragment is too verbose was conflicting with the part that colorizes the text."
P.S. Let me know if there's something out there that exists like this- something that adds a dimension like color or priority-assessments on a per-response basis. So far all I've seen is 2 dozen ~100k starred GitHub plugins that add zero value or make things worse.
Yeah I’m having a much better time reading Opus 5.5 output today vs. 5’s wall of nonsense. You still get a few telltale turn of phrases, though the load-bearing smoking guns haven’t turned up yet. It’s still a bit verbose compared to what I’d ideally like, but it’s tolerable now.
Code-wise it seems to still nitpick, especially in reviews, but it doesn’t seem to rabbit hole quite as badly on tangents and scope-creep. These are just first impressions though. It’ll take a few weeks of regular use to really have a sense of it.
Yes AI slop is prevalent. But the casualties that get thrown under the bus are also real, don't you agree? Is it really worth it to sacrifice those? In the name of the larger good?
I'm arguing that we're losing something by doing so, as a community.
> I find complaining about AI callouts
If they are correct then I'm all for it. But just suspicions turned into statements of fact are not helping anybody. People used em dashes before LLMs Not nearly as much as LLMs, but superficially judging people isn't doing any good.
I'd compare this with pitchforks coming out agains criminal immigrants. Yes, some immigrants are criminal. Doesn't mean that if you stand in central Copenhagen and have a dark skinned person in front of you that it's a criminal.
The rule of thumb is simple: if most of a user or author's writing is consistently human-generated, then I think we are very happy giving them the benefit of the doubt if one article or snippet flags the actually good ai detector
Unfortunately, many of the largest voices against pangram simply don't like it because it gives their lies less credibility.
I don't mind reading llm writing, indeed, I read more llm writing per day than most. But if you're using LLMs to increase the level of slop (blog posts, comments, tweets, etc) then we should call people out.
It's a colossal waste of everyone's time and attention, and we should be mad about it.
Late edit: if people are actually writing and it's consistently flagged by pangram (this is a statement I have not yet seen validated), the pangram folks are extremely proactive and excited to understand what's going on. This notion that somehow the authors of slop are victims is complete nonsense.
> if most of a user or author's writing is consistently human-generated, then I think we are very happy giving them the benefit of the doubt if one article or snippet flags the actually good ai detector
I would agree to that approach.
But that didn't happen here. Nobody has done that due diligence and folks are just blindly accusing. The author has published for many years. That's what I'm calling out.
> This notion that somehow the authors of slop are victims is complete nonsense.
Strawman? I didn't claim that or anything close to it. I also find the prevalence of slop writing hugely annoying.
Almost every private tracker has a bonus point system: you are awarded bonus points for seeding (usually non-linearly, where the longer you seed the more points you earn for that torrent per hour) and can exchange them for upload credit.
There's also often various situations where downloading a file costs less for you than the upload credit it gives to others. Most commonly this is via freeleech where a download is not credited (but the corresponding upload credit still is awarded).
I would say that maintaining ratio is not actually a big deal these days in the world of private trackers writ large. These days bandwidth is cheap, storage is (or used to be) cheap, the communities are older and more long term oriented. On many of the best trackers the ratio system is essentially symbolic. RED (from the OP) is a notable exception and one of the only notable trackers where maintaining a ratio actually requires some work--their ratio system is much closer to zero sum.
Bizarre reply. It's not "dominating everything you do". It's one specific thing. Grok exists in a very crowded space and it's incredibly easy to not use it. If this is your reaction to someone taking a very easy stand on their personal principles, it does not reflect well on you.
"Bizarre" only in the sense that you're purposely trying not to understand.
Literally every commodity product is in a crowded space, and easily substituted. If it's a good product (Grok Build objectively is one of the very best in the space), it's a good product, and it's self-defeating to avoid it because you hate a guy for political reasons.
Just as it would be nonsensical to avoid shopping at WalMart, Target, or any of a million other places. Because I guarantee they're all associated with people you won't like.
On the contrary, I'm trying to understand as best I can. I find your position so completely devoid of any inkling of personal or social responsibility that it takes quite some empathy to muster up a reply that's not wildly uncivil.
I also think it's callous to brush away "political reasons" as though it's some trivial abstract thing. Or perhaps it comes from a place of nihilism?
I choose not to give my money to people I think are enormously evil. That's really all there is to it. I don't see why this is "nonsensical".
> I find your position so completely devoid of any inkling of personal or social responsibility that it takes quite some empathy to muster up a reply that's not wildly uncivil.
Oh stop. Other people believe different things than you. If you cannot see how using a coding agent is not "devoid of personal or social responsibility", then you really need to step away from the keyboard.
Using or not using a coding agent is not what I took issue with.
What I find devoid of responsibility is the argument you made originally--that making choices as a consumer informed by anything external to the direct value you're paying for is pointless/inexplicable/self-sabotaging/whatever.
Based on your reply, I'm not actually sure if you actually believe this, or if it's only a form of motivated reasoning because you have some positive feelings about Elon or whatever, and that we wouldn't be having this argument if the original commenter was boycotting some other product for some reason you agreed with.
> What I find devoid of responsibility is the argument you made originally--that making choices as a consumer informed by anything external to the direct value you're paying for is pointless/inexplicable/self-sabotaging/whatever.
That isn't what I wrote. There are tons of valid reasons to avoid a product, other than the "direct value you're paying for". I don't pay for lots of products because I don't like the past corporate behavior, for example. I'm disinclined to use a particular AI lab's products because they seem to be on a mission to scare the crap out of everyone, and usher in an AI regulatory state. I don't support that, so I don't use the product.
What I said was that it's spitting in the wind to do what you're doing, because it's based on personal dislike of a single man. You don't like Musk, for political reasons, and because of that you've ruled out a product line.
To date, SpaceX has done nothing that bothers me, other than have a bug that they fixed immediately. So I use the product. Musk's political associations are irrelevant to me.
Anyway, you do you. Hopefully you now understand my "bizarre take".
> Just as it would be nonsensical to avoid shopping at WalMart, Target, or any of a million other places. Because I guarantee they're all associated with people you won't like.
In a capitalist society voting with your wallet is one of the few powers consumers have to change corporate behavior.
And any arbitrage is also trivially exploited by the electricity company, who has a much greater financial incentive and scale, so there's really no reason to think that it's going to widen in the future either.
Until grid-scale batteries are more established, you're helping the electric company, and that's why they're exposing the arbitrage. They're providing the incentives to nudge demand, so a home battery is doing exactly what they want (use more at time X, use less at time Y). Otherwise they'd just have the 24/7 price be whatever it currently costs when the supply and demand curves are tightest for them (when demand is highest and/or supply is lowest).
You could exploit it yourself, but only if you have several million to invest, less than that and it isn't worth the bother for the electric company to talk to you. Even at ten million invested you really need to have this is round one in your proposal with the understanding you intend to invest a lot more when it proves in the real world to work like you expect.
I believe Sierra is the market leader in this space with a few other companies like Salesforce and Decagon also competing. It would be more interesting to see an evaluation of performance by these parties before making sweeping claims about the performance of AI agents as a whole.
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