I submit that there is a difference between me and a corpse. Or between a steak and a cow in the field.
"Well, okay, you're just (living) flesh on bones." There's a difference between me and a zombie (or, if you prefer, brain-dead me). There's a difference between me and lab-grown organs [1], or even between me and my kidney cut out of me.
> It’s not even an interesting question.
Consciousness is an active area of research (ergo, interesting enough for some people to devote research to it): biologically [2] and philosophically [3].
Unless you enjoy nihilism, there are some serious problems with materialism (that is, matter is all that there is), which we are encountering. There are also some philosophical problems with it; a cursory search turned up this journal article [4].
The point is that if we're simplifying LLMs to being "just" a bag of math and can discard because of that, then humans are also "just" a bag of meat and can similarly be discarded. Somewhere in that bag of math, LLMs take on properties that some people find hard to simply dismiss because it is based on matrix multiplication. It's an oversimplification, and if you oversimplify, you lose resolution.
> individual contributors are evaluated by their execution on deterministic tasks.
Ha! Apparently the author hasn't been asked "how long will it take to code this?" yet... And isn't a common developer complaint that management does not know how to evaluate them, and substitutes things like how quickly a task gets completed, with the result that some guy looks amazing while his coworkers get stuck with all his technical debt?
> My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process.
Your capitalist side needs to read some Deming. "Your system is perfectly tuned to produce the results that you are getting." Obviously, then, if you want better results, you need to improve your system.
Also "the product" is ambiguous. Is it the overall product, like how the product sits in the market, how the user interacts with it to achieve their goals, the manufacturability of the product, etc.? That is Steve Jobs sort of focus on the product, and it is really more of a system (how does the product relate to its user, environment, etc). However, AI doesn't produce that product, nor does any individual engineer. If "the product" means "the result of a task", you don't want to optimize that. That's how you get Microsoft and enterprise products. Nothing works well together, and using it is like cutting a steak with a spoon, but it has a truckload of features.
I think adding new features is exactly the sort of place where AI is terrible, at least after you do it for a while. I think it's going to have a tendency to regenerate the whole function(s), but it's not deterministic. Plus, as others have said, the code isn't clean. So you're going to get accretions of messy code, the actual implementation of which will change around each time it gets generated. Anything not clearly specified is apt to get changed, which will probably cause regressions. I had AI write some graphs in D3.js recently, and as I asked for different things, the colors would change, how (if) the font sizes were specified would change, all kinds of minor things. I didn't care, because I modified the output by hand, and it was short. But this is not the sort of behavior I want my code output to have.
I think after a while the accretions are going to get slow, and probably unmaintainable even for AI. And by that time, the code will be completely unreadable. It will probably make the code written by people who probably should not be developers that I have had to clean up look fairly straightforward in comparison.
Skill issue. If you just one-shot everything, sure, you'll get a messy codebase. But if you just manage it like a talented junior dev, review the code, provide feedback, and iterate, you get very clean code. Minus the arguing you get from some OCD moron human who is attached to their weird line length formatting quirk.
Wow, 48k for $14000. Now you can get a MBP with a million times more memory for $3500 or so. Whereas that CPU was clocked at 1 MHz, so CPUs are only several thousand times faster, maybe something like 30,000 times faster if you can make use of multi-core.
I think the reason that I like dark mode is that I have had floaters in my eyes since at least age 14. They stand out against a bright white window background, but I don't notice them at all on a dark window with light text.
Or maybe it's just because that's how IBM PC DOS, BASICA, etc., as well as the VT100, VT220, VT300s that I used did it.
(Also, I think displays should paint with light, and having a white background is painting darkness on a computer screen. It's particularly bad for presentation slides. A light background just screams "PowerPoint presentation".)
Not to disagree with you, but in the case of Civilization, I do find it addicting in both senses. It is one of two games that I just cannot play, because I will be up until 3am playing. (Puzzles and Dragons was the other one, I think I had to uninstall it the day after I downloaded it)
I think the article's theory on why people plow is wrong: it is not to let the soil hold more water, but to get rid of weeds. I know someone who did no-till for a while, and he found that you have to spray with glyphosate to keep the weeds down. Eventually the weeds that had evolved to be glyphosate-resistent spread to his area, and he had to go back to regular plowing. He said that the no-till really improved the soil, though.
I think no till makes most/only sense for intensive market gardening.
Where you're weeding by hand or in greenhouses and maybe applying a recurring layer of compost and maybe cover crops to prevent the soil from being bare.
You're already complaining about the price of food, when farmers are barely breaking even on it.
You won't pay ten quid for a sustainably-farmed chicken, and I bet you're really really not going to pay ten quid for one single hand-grown ecologically-neutral farmed carrot.
And if you are, I've got some carrots for you right here. Discount if you order them in multiples of ten.
Weeding actually seems like a fantastic usecase for those humanoid robots like figure, unitree, atlas etc. it’s easy and accurate plant recognition is mostly a solved problem.
Yeah but they’re never going to be as versatile as a humanoid that can identify one, move the crop gently aside and rip it out of the ground. I’m sure the lasers fail pretty quickly after the plants are a few inches tall due to lack of visibility.
I spent a while learning English change ringing, on specially mounted church bells. It is basically an exercise in combinatorics: the "change" is applying the pattern so that the bells ring through all possible sequences that the pattern can do. At first it sounds like noise, but after a couple of years, you do start to notice a certain musicality to it. As I understand Schoenberg, one of his ideas was that you cannot re-use a note until all the others have been used, which is essentially the same requirement that change ringing has. (The bells are heavy and are swinging through their full arc, so you cannot change their order very quickly.) After realizing this, I listened to some Schoenberg and found it much more listenable than I did in college.
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