They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

They were invited to join at the end of the cold war, and they kinda did, or at least they made advances in that direction. But I think Russia just didn't have the institutions in place to be able to follow through, and China did just enough to gain some advantage from free market reforms without also implementing the social freedoms that we thought would inevitably go along with it. You're talking about a society (Russia) where their cultural belief could be summed up as "endless suffering" and another society (China) where it's very low-trust. It was our folly to think you could build a western-like liberal democracy on top of non-western ideas.

I don't think we've used Airbnb, but we've used VRBO many times and they *always* require you to clean the place and take out the trash when you leave. Was this not a standard thing in Airbnb?

That's a pretty non-nuanced view of history. The reason that we had so much explosive growth in the west since the end of WW2 was because the US setup a system of international alliances and a rules-based world order with the goal of containing Russia and China. The sheer number of people who were lifted out of poverty over the last century specifically because of that is mind-boggling. But of course the game is still the game, and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US. No, the US is not a saint, but we can't forget that their actions during and after WW2 definitely made them and their allies the "good guys", at least until the end of the cold war, and I would argue even through the first gulf war, where the US military actually stopped the invasion of Iraq specifically because they didn't want to exceed the UN mandate. The thing is, we got used to it. We believed it was the new normal. Fukayama wrote a book called The End of History, and people believed it. He was wrong. But the reason he was proven wrong was specifically because Russia and China refused to see the obvious benefit of a rules-based world order, and refused to get their house in order. Russia's government is essentially run like the mafia, and China manipulates its currency, corrupted the WHO, and both of them installed a dictator for life. And when the American people became disillusioned, they elected their own leader in the image of Putin and Xi. That's how we got where we are now. I'm over-simplifying, for sure, but "US bad too" has never been an adequate explanation.

This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.

Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.

This is fair, but that really just reinforces the point that the article makes. Solo dev is currently different, team output is limited by other factors than pure code output. I've worked on games with literally hundreds of concurrent programmers, and even when you're using something like Unreal Engine and your team is small ( 20 people), you've effectively got all the engine team at Epic generating code for you on a relatively regular basis.

It may indeed be possible for AI to actually make teams faster at some point (even in the nearish future), but right now, it's just more code, which isn't always the best solution.

One of the big problems with this is that it effectively changes the job description of programmers to managers.

You're not just responsible for your own code, you're responsible for telling someone/something else what to do, and then reviewing their work, and then integrating that work and making sure it's correct, because if it gets checked in and it's wrong, you're on the hook for it. But you didn't even write it, so it's harder to understand. Most programmers I know are better at understanding the code they wrote rather than the code they read.

Management is not a job for everyone. I've been a senior programmer and a lead programmer, and it is easier to be a senior programmer that writes complicated, essential systems than it is to be a lead programmer that REVIEWS those systems. If you don't want to do that kind of management work and you just enjoy writing code, you should stay a senior programmer, or move up to some other non-management job. But if you're forced to babysit an LLM, you get ALL THE WORST PARTS of being a lead programmer. You only get the code reviews and none of the intellectual stimulation and enjoyment of creating that thing on your own.

At least a couple comments have pointed out that solo devs use LLMs to great effect, and I'm sure this is true. But if you're not a solo dev, the task is so much different. You're trying to integrate with a bunch of other people and other systems and you're on the hook for something you didn't even write, so you'd best spend the time learning what the code says. It completely defeats the point. When I get an LLM to write my powershell scripts for me, it's because I have no interest at all in learning that scripting language. It takes 2 minutes, usually does a good job, and I can forget about it forever. The development model of asking an LLM to write code that you're responsible for that has to intermingle with the code of dozens of other people and agents sounds like a straight-up nightmare.

Solo development is a different job. The tasks you give to AI are based on what you need, and your own mental model of they code they need to spit out.

Large-scale development is different, because people are different. I've worked on 5 or 6 different game engines over the years, and Unreal is the current one that I'm on. Unreal has its quirks. The rest of our game engine has historical baggage that I need to account for. The interactions between systems are more organic, because not everything can be planned in advance. I worked on Assassin's Creed for 3 games (about 7-8 years?) and we carry over the mistakes of the previous games to the next one, because that engine shipped a game, so it's a known quantity. Sometimes if you're lucky, you get to fix some of those bugs, but then the next games get YOUR bugs, etc.

Solo devs ARE doing amazing work with AI, but solo devs *by definition* don't need to understand the code of 1 or 4 or 50 other people. You can't just check shit in on a big team.

Perfectly reasonable study, because small-scale development is not the same. I have to understand the code of 10+ programmers on a regular basis. Our game engine is involved. The only way for me to learn the code is to use it and step through it.

If you're writing apps yourself, AI is great. It's a teammate that follows your instructions and implements the things that you want. You've already got a mental model of what you need, and it gives that to you. Of course it works for you.

Big codebases are just different. Systems are interdepedent in weird ways for historical reasons, or vendor reasons or weird coworker reasons or whatever. It's not the same task.

There's quite a lot of nuance here, I guess, which isn't unexpected. It's quite a useful anecdote. At the very least, we can't just wave it away like it's not useful. It may generate sub-standard paintings or completely miss the point of art, but if it makes your proofs better, it seems insane to not have it help.

Well, wait, I don't think that actually disproves the claim. I'm not saying it's not impressive, I just don't think it's as novel as you say.

When I ask an LLM to write me code that does something 'novel', it usually does quite a good job. I'm just using the freely available models, but they quite competently write code that is not truly derivative of any other code. If I give them some code of my own that has a bug in it, they'll find the bug and patch it, and that bug is, for all intents and purposes, unique.

You're still seeing a bunch of old patterns rehashed--I presume that other proofs introduce infinity families, and they can iterate through inside a clear logical structure to test whether or not something works. Again, this is impressive work, but I'm not personally convinced that this is 'novel' in terms of the broader corpus of mathematical knowledge. It didn't invent a new field of mathematics to solve your problem.

Even if you didn't prompt it, take a look sometimes at the contemplations of the models, if that's available to you. Before the model even arrives in your hands, it's got stacks of prompts giving it meta instructions, and it then generates prompts for itself to check your work. I think it would be interesting if you ran your experiment again on a new account that's fresh and see if you can watch the chain of reasoning. You might be right, it MAY be doing something TRULY novel, but as I've said, I've got my doubts.

Obviously, you're a mathematician and I'm not; I can't tell you that you're wrong about it if you insist that it is doing something new.

I'm certainly not sold on the idea that "government controls AI technology" is better than "bunch of silicon valley bros control AI technology". I don't trust either of them. I would absolutely rather have private development with more strict regulatory oversight, which at least keeps things relatively public and gives voters at least some say. The more groups involved in overseeing what goes on, the better. I get that red tape is out of vogue recently, but I suspect that's only a temporary thing.

I've only used Claude code for a matter of weeks at work. While it's supposed to stay contained in the folder you point it at, I've noticed that it has no problem *looking* outside that folder, and even acting outside that folder if you gave it implied permission. In one case it used the connection string from the application source code it was working on, and the fact that my windows account had read-only access to some tables in the production database, to connect to the database and query tables in order to answer a question it had about the potential ramifications of a code change. The problem is that while we're OK with this particular source code leaving the premises, we're not ok with data from a production database going offsite. In this case it wasn't sensitive data, but after that incident I only run Claude Code from a VM under a user with minimal permissions. Clearly it would have been prudent to do that from the start, but let this be a warning to anyone else who just downloaded Claude Code, turned off the "use my data to train future models" and gave it a go... it will *not* keep itself inside the folder you give it. Put it in a sandbox. I heard a similar story this week from an IT friend who said devs at his company were using Cursor.ai and it was doing scans of the network drives, so they did the same thing and moved it all to VMs.

https://www.photoncrystal.com/... gives a 10 year warranty on workmanship defects, and a 25 year warranty on the rated output (no lower than 85% of the initial output after 25 years). They give less warranty about how the curve looks than e.g. this company for traditional panels, but other than that it seems pretty comparable.

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.