Based Hopac enjoyer. I built the Spiral's language server using it. I have to admit though that these days I just use native .NET channels for all my message passing needs.
I vastly prefer cml, but hopac has a lot of missed opportunities. I vibe coded my own language on top of c# that has a cml that is much more integrated with the language (and no other constructs are available :)). Being able to use events for things like reading from ports, so that you can select over reads and only the winning read actually takes anything from the port is more than nice to have. Or having STM that can be run as an event, so that you can choose over a transaction or a timeout in extreme congestion. Since it is composable, you can abstract away a lot of the details behind simple function calls.
I am kind of curious if it becomes faster when moving to dotnet11.
Currently I am using the regular Claude extension with VS Code, but one of my friends is working on a new harness called NodeCode that doesn't require regular compaction, so I'll be trying it out as soon as I can get some time to do it: https://nodecode.ai/
I am always doing everything alone, so I am liking the LLMs a lot. My own code is very good, but nobody but myself cared about that. Even the one job that I got which allowed me to gather the capital needed to move into trading feels like complete luck. This is a new golden age for entrepreneurs and apocalypse for wage workers. Nobody whose status depends on his own productivity would complain about it going up sharply.
Probably the LLMs saved me because deep down I knew that my own power by itself wouldn't be enough to let me do what I really want, but right now the future does seem bright.
I think you’re heavily miscalibrated. Anyone can use LLMs, the floor has risen drastically. What supposed productivity you achieve, every one else can because there’s 0 skill to using LLMs, this is probably a much darker future ahead for you than the rest, you’ll have to keep constantly agent maxing to try and outcompete millions of other humans doing the same.
LLMs are constantly driving off the cliff. Constantly. They require some actual agency steering the ship.
This idea that there is 0 skill to using them is the opposite: it requires far more skill because the human has to manage the whole building all at once rather than focusing on putting up one beam at a time, one rafter at a time. Your responsibility is totally different. It has to scale far higher!
Many devs have had strong leads that do the ticket work, that figure out what to do. It's unclear what role there is for those folks now.
I'm not sure this is credible. Using AI very much seems to be a skill with its own craft and best-practices. I could imagine a similar argument was made by painters about photographers. Yet, we believe good photography takes skill.
Anyone can do work on their own car. It's not especially hard.
But a professional working on their own car knows tricks and has tools / ways of working that a regular person doesn't have access to.
You can tell the difference in the result if you know where to look.
Sometimes it matters: the way you change some components matters - and while you're there with half the engine bay cleared, you can fix a few other things that usually fail in this specific model.
Sometimes it doesn't: oil change is hard to fuck up, but not impossible.
The the things I've made with agents aren't hard to do for anyone, but I can claim that I can pick up any of my projects 6 months from now and confidently add features without worrying about stuff breaking or the agent doing crazy crap - because I build the limits into my projects by default.
People are afraid to do work on cars (and mains wiring, and plumbing) because even though the work is relatively simple the consequences for fucking up are so severe (severe damage, injury, death, etc). That's most of the reason they pay someone else to do it.
For the vast majority of software that isn't the case at all.
Most people don't understand computers and do not even know what is dangerous and what is not. They won't suddenly become vibe-programmers lest "AI deletes all of the personal photos and will send them somewhere".
No need, I still have vibe coded stuff from the times before monthly plans for Claude and Codex over a year ago. I can jump into most of them and just start adding stuff without any major issues - they have better test coverage and CI than many projects at my day job :)
It's surprisingly easy to do that shit properly when budgets and time aren't an issue.
If not all agents are equal and require calibration, then it seems like people can specialize, so you're only competing with other specialists in that area (and not necessarily trying to out-compete).
lol wat? there is a very clear gap in output between what a good swe can produce with ai versus a bad one, let alone a random person who doesn't even know what javascript is.
The intelligence of LLMs is a mirage masked by their utility. It makes more sense to assume that ML models not fitted to a particular game would be bad at it than otherwise. If you're relating how good a human with inate capabilities of the modern LLMs would be, then yes, it might make sense to assume that they'd be good at anything, but that isn't the situation in reality.
> It makes more sense to assume that ML models not fitted to a particular game would be bad at it than otherwise.
No, it doesn't make sense. GPT-6 Astra solves ARC-AGI-3, which consists of a large number of small games which the LLM doesn't know and which it has to solve on the fly with a limited number of turns.
If I were an artist, I wouldn't really care that a machine took over the role of drawing lines on paper, and as a programmer, I don't care that the machines are taking the role of writing code.
The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters.
I've been doing quant research for the past year, and the amount of time (and tedium) LLMs have saved me is huge.
LLMs aren't even AI, if this amount of disruption is causing difficulty, having actual AI will give these people breakdowns.
"I am not <this thing>, but if I were, I'd have <this opionion> about it." isn't a terribly convincing argument. Opinions (good ones, at least) are shaped by experience - what experience is there to shape your opinion on AI affecting art when you aren't an artist?
Are those important questions that need to be answered? Rather, you should be asking whether you could use backprop and NNs to create something other than text predictors. What have LLMs changed about your conception of intelligence?
As far as I can see, none of the hard problems of intelligence that we had a decade ago got touched. What LLMs ultimately changed is the way I see language. I've underestimated its power, and I will admit, the companies making these models went far further than I could have imagined with them.
But intelligence and AI have a high hurdle to clear, and it won't be done with LLMs.
Revealing the secrets of intelligence will involve new concepts and understanding that that we don't have now. LLMs will be helpful with the plumbing and as replacement for natural evolution, but not so much natural intelligence.
Consider that maybe AI should mean AGI. That was what its original meaning was supposed to be, and calling generative models AI is watering down the original term and accepting the frame of the LLM makers.
What's really disappointing about current LLM models isn't that they aren't useful, but that they really tell us much about intelligence at all. The techniques used to make LLMs aren't generalizable at all, and I cannot use them to solve problems of interest in the real world.
That wouldn't be the case with real AI. I want better methods and algorithms that could live up to the expectations, and I am sure we'll get them at some point even if we don't have them now.
The history of AI is people deciding that it really means AGI but then getting enamored with some method of the time and calling it AI, before going back to the original meaning. We're just living through the latest iteration of this where LLMs mean AI, and we're forced to invent the term AGI for what used to be AI.
I'll admit that to the people who don't know how LLMs work, which includes most investors, the lie seems very plausible so of course the CEOs running the companies are going to frame it as such.
AI has included everything from neural nets to video game NPCs for as long as I'm aware of. What else is the broad umbrella term? We have to have one. And for anything else, you need to be specific about its properties anyway. In particular, usage of "real AI" is nonsense without a more precise definition.
It isn't nonsense. If AI was such a broad umbrella term, why would companies be tripping over themselves to use it? If it meant video game NPC level of intelligence, nobody would be in a hurry to adopt it. It's very clear that when Nvidia or OpenAI use the term AI, they really want you to think these LLMs are actual human level intelligence. That is why they are doing it.
When I use nonsense like "real AI" I think you very well know what I mean, and don't find it in any way confusing or ambiguous.
Everyone thinks they know what "real AI" means, but they usually mean some mishmash of "general intelligence", "human-like intelligence", and "deserves moral rights", none of which firmly imply each other but which they'll often freely equivocate between. If you mean something more specific than this semantic disaster zone, say that instead.
AI company marketing usage only indicates they're trying to take advantage of this confusion. They're bullshit artists who are trying to make sales, not communicate.
Fun story, but I really wish OpenAI got its act together and started making actual AI breakthroughs instead of funneling compute into LLMs. I'd really like some new algorithms to get me excited about the field again. Kuddos to them for making LLMs really useful, but this is not the ride I wanted to get on.
This is the internet, so I cannot tell at all whether you're being sarcastic or not. In my view, what LLMs should get us to reconsider isn't whether there is more to intelligence, but whether there is more to language. It's the latter which I underestimated.
Dumb people aren't going to be doing the work of the smart people ever, no matter how tech evolves. The actual implication of AI being on the level of sentient beings instead of hyped-up token predictors is that the era of humanity is over. If AIs were literally capable of doing what CEOs want them to, we'd have far bigger problems to deal with than employment.
People often want to share their seeds so that players can play the same game they did. If there was an interesting series of results for example, which gave you a good set of cards.
Minecraft does this too with world generation for example.
> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
You could clock out, but I don't think the top performers ever stop thinking about work. Everything you've written here has to be wrong.
Depends on the work. I've worked places (military intel) where you leave work at work, simply because it is impossible to take work with you home. Some of the people I worked with said that was exactly why they chose that line of work - so that they never had to think about work when they came home. Some of those were also top performers.
But I also knew other top performers that basically had geopolitics as their hobby, and would study OSINT (open-source intelligence) when they came home.
And obviously there are many other professions where you can do really well, and don't think a second about work when your day is over. Really depends on how your work is structured!
Some people are naturally talented at things. It’s no different than an average athlete who works extremely hard and an elite athlete who puts in half the work but still outperforms the average.
I think what he meant was that you can take a group of people and train them for a sport. Some of those people (genetically elite athletes) will improve very quickly with minimal training, others can do massive amounts of training and never reach beyond a certain level.
Yes, this is what I mean. It's not that talent doesn't exist, but it's never the case that people on the top of their domain work less hard than others. In fact, it's the opposite. People don't have talent, the talent has them.
I promise you top performers aren't always thinking about work. There is proof in going detached from work problems and doing other things can help produce novel solutions. Same principle as getting a good night's sleep vs cramming the night before a test. Your subconscious does a lot of lifting. Never being able to put down work is just anxiety masked as dedication, in my book.
The job market is somewhat of a crapshot. A dice roll if you will. I got rejected from all kinds of place before I got a highly paid one from a Reddit post of all places. I got rejected from all kinds of places that only paid like 1/2 or 1/3 of what that job was paying, and I wasn't even looking for it at that time. It's been over for over half a year, and I wouldn't be able to replicate that sort of performance at will. Though at this point, I am not even looking for one and just working on my own projects since I have a lot saved up and barely spend anything.
One thing that I understand at my age of nearly 39 now is that success comes pretty hard, and luck plays a large role in it. As programmers all we can do is build and develop our skills, even if the world doesn't validate our efforts.
You're asking yourself what you are doing wrong, but you should be asking yourself what your goal is and focus on that. Is it really to just work for other people?
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