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Excuse me for veering off topic but I saw this, was intrigued (I used to live in Lyon), browsed some of your previous comments here, saw the book Carmilla, which I'd never heard of, and am very happy. I will be reading J. S. Le Fanu, and am stunned to learn of him. Cheers!

Ah, ok, you must be using agency in some new way I'm not aware of.

Can you clarify what exactly you mean then when you say that "AI" (presumably you mean LLMs) has agency, and that this sets it apart from all other technologies? If this agency as you define it makes it different from all other technologies, presumably it must mean something pretty serious.

It is not "an agent" in the sense you are implying here, it does not will, want, plan, none of those words apply meaningfully. It doesn't reason, or think, either.

I'll be excited if that changes, but there is absolutely no sign of it changing. I mean, explicitly, the possibility of thinking machines is where it was before this whole thing started - maybe slightly higher, but moreso because a lot of money is being pumped into research.

LLMs might still replace some software workers, or lead to some reorganising of tech roles, but for a whole host of reasons, none of which are related to machine sentience.

As one example - software quality matters less and less the as users get locked in. If some juniors get replaced by LLMs and code quality plummets causing major headaches and higher workloads for senior devs, as long as sales don't dip, managers will be skipping around happily.

That's the thing, you don't have to say it, sort of by definition. It's always implied, as is its opposite. Imagine a video or article or whatever, titled:

"How to get a Mediocre Job and live an Unremarkable Life"

Where the content of the article or video was, simply:

"Be born a human. You'll have a 99.99% chance of succeeding!"

It'd be pretty grim, it'd last about 15s to read or view, so no-one makes that video. Instead, they make videos about becoming pilots at 21, or owning your own house at 23, etc.

It's hard to accept these percentages as real, because it's about the opposite of what is presented on the content farm platforms, and that's partly as I said the fact that the story is too grim, but also the fact that the "unremarkable" people are not the ones producing "content".

HN in the Common Era 2025:

"If you don't have rich parents, an alternative is to get a high-paying job".

> He spends months chiseling each essay

I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it sure is intense.

Successful people outgrowing their jodhpurs and losing their reason is a thing, sure, but that does not apply in this specific case. Tech writing is still writing, my friend.

Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?

I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be exquisite.

Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's glorious.

Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have their work cut out for them with those two already.

You mean, the CEO is only pretending to make the decisions, while secretly passing every decision through their LLM?

If so, the danger there would be... Companies plodding along similarly? Everyone knows CEOs are the least capable people in business, which is why they have the most underlings to do the actual work. Having an LLM there to decide for the CEO might mean the CEO causes less damage by ensuring consistent mediocrity at all times, in a smooth fashion, rather than mostly mediocre but with unpredictable fluctuations either way.

All hail our LLM CEOs, ensuring mediocrity.

Or you might mean that an LLM could have illicitly gained control of a corporation, pulling the strings without anyone's knowledge, acting on its own accord. If you find the idea of inscrutable yes-men with an endless capacity to spout drivel running the world unpalatable, I've good news and bad news for you.

I have never seen anything resembling emergent behaviour, as you call it, in my own or anyone else's use. It occasionally appears emergent to people with a poor conception of how intelligence, or computers, or creativity, or a particular domain, works, sure.

But I must push back, there really seem to have been no incidences where something like emergent behaviour has been observed. They're able to generate text fluently, but are dumb and unaware at the same time, from day one. If someone really thinks they've solid evidence of anything other than this, please show us.

This is coming from someone who has watched commentary on quite a sizeable number of stockfish TCEC chess games over the last five years, marvelling in the wonders of thie chess-super-intelligence. I am not against appreciating amazing intelligences, in fact I'm all for it. But here, while the tool is narrowly useful, I think there's zero intelligence, and nothing of that kind has "emerged".

It might be the ultimate irony if we were training them. But we aren't, at least not in the sense that we train dogs. Dogs learn, and exhibit some form of intelligence. LLMs do not.

It's one of many unfortunate anthropomorphic buzz words which conveniently wins hearts and minds (of investors) over to this notion that we're tickling the gods, rather than the more mundane fact that we're training tools for synthesising and summarising very, very large data sets.

Have you considered throwing your thoughts down in longer form essays on the subject somewhere? With all the slop and hype, we need all the eloquence we can get.

You had me at "probablistic regurgitation of tropes", and then you went for the whole "grainy facsimile" bit. Sheesh.

I wonder if we'll look back on this period in a couple of years and feel a nostalgic fondness as we think of the fateful moment when people working in software were forced to pull the wool from their eyes and look at the fact that businesses really, really, really dislike losing huge amounts of money paying people to make the software their businesses completely depend on.

I mean, I'm guessing that's true. It'd make a lot of sense if they vehemently disliked that. It's hard to make sense of it all otherwise, really.