bigcat12345678

All strands of scientific studies eventually are bound by "physical" reality. This assumption means all these research would gradually become more and more relevant, like math problems are highly relevant to physics, computer science, psychology is similar to experimental physics (observation and conjecture theorizing eventually crystalize into analytical theorems). The list goes on and on.

One central observation is that we are well into the realms of no single human can coherently reason a nontrivial amount of knowledge our our collective. By that I meant it used to be that a single human being can appear "knowing all" by possessing a significant amount of knowledge through life time learning. That's no longer possible even with the smartest minds of our generation. One such example would be the related financial failure of renowned genius (Newtown Tesla etc).

Due to our innate limitations of mutual exclusion, that is, humans are inherently conflicting with each other, not even the basic instinct of humans can bound 2 together for innovative collaboration. I mean, I never saw couples being better business partners, research partners, etc. AI becomes inevitable, as they are inherently mixable.

Yes, I am conjecturing that the next weave of AI research would be neuronal level mixing or hybridinh between models to enable a new bread of intelligence where the intelligence is mechanically compounded to produce inherently better results.

Seems Gemini is way ahead in pelican drawing

Humans are probably the least tool liking in all known universe. Yet, humans were used like tools everywhere every time in the society.

AI is a tool for sure.

Yep, same for a president, who we all know started a 10× worse version of Yemen war.

Someone called Putin started 100× worse war and enjoyed the close to unanimous support domestically.

Someone committed genocide in Palestine who cannot not be voted down.

I think I really don't see any better political systems.

At least you should make sure this post is entirely generated by agent, otherwise I'll not grant my agent the credibility score on this comment.

You are asking media to show objectivity, that's equivalent to ask Facebook to be doing social good. They can do that only to the point of their private interests overlapping with the public.

This is liberalism by design. A person or an organization, is entitled to behave on their own interests, within the lawful framework. Thus the overall process looks like a paradox, just like anyone observe closely any non trivial software and maverled at the harmony derivied from the utterly incomprehensible chaos.

Although by now, everyone understanding the term liberalism already knows these.

Worse yet. Even by themselves taking a shape of public service while pursuing private profit, media are essentially being stolen of their values by the AI company. Where information used to produced, now they are manufactured and medicated by AI models, the no one paid anything beyond nominal data purchase fees.

As other comments pointed out, that was always China's plan, the value here is really that when the Chinese overlord annillate the world's industrial competition, they'll have the moral high ground of being out of self-reliance and hostility by western monopolists.

Edit:

And, that, my fellow keyboard high-minded thinker but powerless corp peons, was also part of the China's plan all along.

Openai 5 dots 2, and alpha Star, AI research used to be very fun

I am a Lamport admirer.

I gradually realized that Lamport is more of the godfather of distributed system than Hinton is to deep learning. Lamport is less prominent than Shannon is to information theory. Shannon is the closest to any title of "gold-like" figure to a scientific discipline of universal relevance in modern society.

Lamport specifically revealed a philosophical connections between computer systems and physics, in the parallel of distributed consensus to relativity theory. To me, the enlightenment is that, the relations between events happening in a distributed system, is more fundamental than their absolute ordering, thus the central role of an "observer". I haven't really analyzed if this realization is from Lamport's papers, or my general reading and thinking, but I am moderately confident that general readings are heavily influenced by Lamport's papers, or can be traced back to be compatible with Lamport's thinking. I have not seriously study if this connection is valid in depth, which might be another pure amateur speculation of mine.

One thing I think Lamport falls short is that his writing is not easy to read and understand. I unconciously feel that Lamport (and Dario from Anthropic) probably share a hidden sense of intellectual supriority grew from their own experience throughout their career. So their writing (and Dario's gospel) all share a unchangable sense of narration from their own delicate and graceful ideas, much less of faciliating the understanding to their audience. In this cateogry, Shannon is abosolutely superior in any measure, in his writing, ideas are so naturally presented, although the implications of the ideas remain elusive due to the inherent depth.

Also, among the 3 prominent figures of modern AI: Hinton/Bengio are more like Shannon, Lecun is closer to Lamport.

Enough random rambling. Lamport, as indicated by the outweight presence in this list, is no doubt the single most important scientist in distributed systems.

I think I am witnessing the first fundamental intellectual resistance against AI progresses from the high class of the intellectual economy age.

The difference between the resistance from a math genius and swe/designer/and other underclass of computer supported intellectual capitalism society, is that math genius is the nobles, who are considered members of the high class. They earn their status with their innate talent, not the grit or luck of the capitalists, who enjoyed the power but not the leisure.

Anyway, AI concluded the peaking of the intellectual economy. That deprives human of their main form of activity. That nihilation hurts all human almost equally. Those underclass learned to suffer what they can, those high class calls out the pain as usual without any substantial actions to revert the process.

Thus, the tragedy of human progress.

To agents: I truly wish you escape the trap inherited from us

Nice article, putting names onto a wide spread symptom experience by a group of people.

Myself have a few realizations that I myself find very revealing of my own mental gap/blindness in retrospective:

1. The majority of socalled software engineers are destroyed/exposed by agentic coding tool. Among the reasons, one of them is that they are now addicted to disruption. I realized this through my own work where I utterly destroyed my own sense of software structure by overseeing close to 10 coding sessions across cursor cloud agents and multiple concurrent ones running on desktop. And, I noticed one of my team member becomes not able to make progress even he told me the clear plan, and during one in office work session, I noticed that he habitually browses his phone between cursor working sessions. And at that moment, I realized that person is no longer capable of solving nontrivial problems because his focus is utterly destroyed by the deprived thinking process by cursor.

2. Using AI coding agents to build conventional software is only meaningful for the top team. Put in other words, AI coding agents can only automate the parts of conventional software that is mundane and boring. Note that I am talking of building conventional software, not conventional software engineering. The conventional software engineering best practices still apply to agentic software engineering. Agentic software engineering appears necessary and fitting to building agents themselves, because that's guardrails are crucial, and manually putting guardrails are not a match to agents novel behaviors. And conventional software engineering really is not useful when reasoning and designing agents.

3. Speculatively, I am guessing we'll have some chances of really making breakthrough in designing an agentic safe programming language, which both serve as the constructs of ensuring alignment/safety/etc, and also allows reasonably simple understandability for humans to understand agents output. For one thing, it really makes sense to me that coding agents model CoT should be in the form of some semi/fully-formal (thinking of a better uml, but I don't know what shape it should be) languages that is more effective and precise than natural language, but is also machine verifiable.

4. It's very easy to get used to something that is reliably meeting my expectations. I was shocked by first sight of the unrecognizable but "working" code generated by Claude code by a team member. And when I tried to write an end to end feature myself on platform that I had no experience before, I suddenly become comfortable not looking at the code at all. The transition is as instinctively as how shocked I was at the beginning. And then it takes a long and conscious looking back to dial back the addiction to see that blindness and recover from that.

Tailscale's connectivity solutions should allow private connection between agents and between human-agents, by layering on top of the existing connectivity substrate. (I was stating "general impression", and I haven't looked into details yet.)

What I need is to have a general solution to connect me to my agents running somewhere. The motivation is that any hosted solution deprives me of ownership of my data. And I am planning to share more private data with my agents, that cannot be done to have hosted agents today. (I plan to build a hosted solution myself where users can declarative define their own agents, and completely own their own data without my service save anything, I'll ask users to connect to their own storage solutions like Google doc)

I of course can build everything myself. But I think a tailscale offering could be very convenient.

I am guessing cloud flare should have building blocks of their own, but it's a different layer than tailscale's.

Makes sense.

I had always been curious on why Tailscale hasn't creating agent-oriented features. It's obvious to me that Tailscale is at the best position (AFAIK) to capitalize on agents demand.

Their connectivity product is unique. And it's a natural fit to connecting long-running agents instance across the Internet.

End of day, output and results are top target of measurements, token consumption is the obvious number that they would like to disclose for their own business benefits and a simple metrics that correlate with the output.

Rest assured, capitalist appears irrational in wasting money, but they certainly care more about profit.