That is wildly optimistic IME. Frontier models do a great job of sounding authoritative on any given subject. This is not the same as actually having expert-level knowledge and understanding, and the choices the models make when you ask them to implement something can and often do reflect that. There are several domains I've worked in over the past few years where AIs lack even basic knowledge an expert practitioner would have, probably because these fields are too specialised to have a lot of books available or papers published, so presumably there hasn't been much subject-specific content to train the models on.

I don't think it's usually about what AI "did really badly on" at this point. It's more about whether the overheads of adding all the guard rails and then reviewing and correcting all the output end up costing at least a similar amount to just writing the code yourself.

For a junior developer, I'd say frontier models passed their standard some time ago. Today's LLMs routinely write code at the level of a competent junior-mid but with the advantage of an inhumanly broad knowledge base.

For a good senior, I'm much less convinced. The frontier models are hit-and-miss when it comes to writing good test suites, which matters a lot when they rely on tests so heavily to reach acceptable quality. IME, they are still mostly miss when it comes to the business insight that seniors will take into account and design/architecture decisions that keep the code manageable as it evolves. While they have become much better at recognising existing patterns in the code, and I would say they follow them reasonably well the majority of the time now, there are still bizarre anomalies that creep in, and they aren't very good at extending those patterns when necessary.

I think AI advocates also tend to underestimate just how much time it takes to properly review what they are doing. Take a half-day Claude session to implement some new feature. It might take half an hour to give it the initial brief and then review its plan. Make a few edits and it'll propose a new plan that is also long and detailed and has no edit markings to show what it changed so you have to review the whole thing, carefully and in detail, again to pick up the minor changes it also made for no obvious reason. Then you let it start doing its thing. You can't really leave it unattended for long because it'll stop to ask questions. Some of those questions might be whether it can run a screenful of ad-hoc Bash script to make some edits to your source files, because for some reason it decided not to show the actual edits as it usually would, so now you have to figure out what all the sed incantations are actually going to do while looking at those files in another editor or just trust it and then review all the changes properly later anyway. Sometimes it decides to change its plan mid-flight, but not always in a good way, and if you interrupt it to apply corrections or redirect, you break the neat plan flow it was in. Then you get to the end and you can finally see how everything it has done fits together, and you still need to review everything with the same care as you would with a junior developer's code and probably apply a few fixes where it's come up with weird names or not quite followed a pattern or imagined some instructions that were never there and made other changes in other parts of the system that should be out of scope.

If you read to the end of that last paragraph, you know how I typically feel at the end of a half day working with an agentic UI. And the thing is, I do those sessions as experiments fairly often to keep up with progress, but a lot of what I do is still written by hand, which gives me simple, objective data to compare the two ways of working and see whether the AI tools are really making me more productive once you take everything into account.

Currently, based on objective data comparing similar fully completed development tasks like for like, I still outperform agentic workflows using frontier models by about 25-50% on average, and I don't have to pay anyone extra fees to do that, and subjectively I also find it more engaging to work that way. So I don't really buy the hype about AIs making us all orders of magnitude more productive unless you're happy to YOLO everything forever and take the much-discussed risks that comes with.

Personally, I think the optimum use of LLMs right now is probably not to use them for the whole coding workflow like that or rely on agentic tools, but to use them for tasks like answering quick questions about the existing code, doing research like a fancy search engine, writing a first draft of some boilerplate, and writing quick and dirty throwaway code for experiments, one-shot tools and the like, where you don't really care about the quality as long as it gets the job done and you will see immediately if it has in fact got the job done. For these things, the LLM can read and type faster than me, and that's useful.

Aren't they all privately owned? Anthropic, for example, is based in California. As a customer or taxing authority, that's all you know. Your jobs may be handled by DCs in Texas, Virginia or Washington State. But all those states know is that a power and water bill was paid. And they can tax that, but Anthropic's revenue is booked in California. As are the wages paid (and income tax collected) to its most valuable employees.

There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

A bit of income from the construction activity. And then from the revenue of half a dozen techs working in a basically empty building, swapping out bad hard drives and power supplies. Otherwise, it's just bits going in and out. Good luck counting those bits as they cross state lines.

Tokens are bought and redeemed a long distance away from these DCs. So they appear, at the state level, as huge operating expenses with no offsetting revenue.

The proper response to being in an area where datacentres are crowding in is "lobby your elected officials to increase property taxes and not give out tax increment financing deals". Tax everything, and tax it well. They'll stop building new datacentres in your area, and the ones that are there will (unless they were given a long-term sweetheart deal beyond your already-low tax rates) start being cash cows for your area.

Original sin?

So, add game software latency to that refresh figure. It isn't a 200/60 difference anymore. It's perhaps a few percent. Or not at all if the game engine incorporates timing to keep game playing equalized.

Anecdote: Back in "the old days", a display card manufacturer came out with a cutting edge 60 Hz card in a world of 45 Hz hardware. Game players were elated. "It's so much better. No more headaches due to flicker. Etc." Except that it was discovered that the display driver configuration panel loaded the same parameters for 45 Hz and 60 Hz. Discovered, I think, by people configuring Linux X11 displays with hand-edited XF86Config files. Suddenly, the gaming BBSs were full of people complaining of the same headaches. Pretty much the same as the guy who "cured" an office co-workers WiFi sensitivity by covering the flashing lights on the router. And, "My guitar amp goes to eleven."

You are faster because the display driver box says 200 Hz.

That would be sort of like emerging from your fallout shelter after a civilization-ending thermonuclear war. By then, what's the point?

And that's on the police department's IT/HR divisions. But, having permission (even as an active duty officer) goes with restrictions on the use of Flock data. No stalking ex-wives, etc.
Problem is: He's not necessarily bound by department policies as an ex-employee. Or that's the way he is behaving. What are you going to do to him?* Fire him? He's already gone.

*Interesting and somewhat scary stories about military people with security clearances. And what they (think they) are allowed to discuss once discharged. Too long for this thread.

Really, you don't see any difference between Elon Musk and, say, John Stankey? Is John Stankey actively transforming the US into an autocratic fascist-adjacent state?

Would you buy from a company called Plantations Inc which proudly advertises that all of its products are made by daily-whipped slaves? Are there no limits to how self-focused you are in your consumption?

It's one thing to say "this particular issue isn't mine, so I'm only going to think amount myself". It's an entirely different issue to have no moral bounds.

... have among the fastest reflexes (the fastest?) of all mammalian species. It could be evolutionary, as a survival need. It also could be a matter of reduced involvement in abstract thinking. When you've got to evade a threat or pounce on your dinner, you move. Now. But many animals with what we would think of as reduced reasoning powers share this advantage over homo sapiens. Including our close relatives, the great apes.

I always keep this in mind when getting into arguments over monitor refresh rates. The average person cannot percieve motion at the rates some people claim. But that may be incorrect for those with lowered prefrontal cortex functions.

I fully well expect this to be modded Troll. Possibly within a few milliseconds.

This headline sounds like something you'd hear coming from a news report on a TV in the background near the start of a horror movie.

Low band spectrum is also useful for rural cell sites. Widely spaced base stations, good penetration through trees, etc. Could be that Musk wants to monopolize rural telecommunications, so he's buying up all the possible competition. That's the market which Starlink was supposed to serve (it's not very good for high density urban areas).