Recent submissions

Comment · 29 days ago
Silicon Valley has plenty of safety-related companies, engineers, and cultures. Medical devices, biotech, chip and hardware, aerospace, and even new companies, like Waymo, have deep safety-based products and cultures. The problem in this case is actually quite specific to frontier AI labs. They have been pushed by market forces and a lack of regulation and skip well-known safety practices.
Comment · 1 month ago
The assumptions we made about code always led to the biggest issues. If you assumed a junior engineer, or even a senior engineer not familiar with the local practices, would not make certain mistakes, then those mistakes always slipped through. If anything, the AI makes us be _better_ reviewers, since we need to check more of our assumptions at the door. I used to check the compiler assembly output, in case I could optimize it either by hand, or by changing my code to use a do-while instead of a for loop. I don't do that anymore. The same thing is happening with AI-generated code. I used to have to check it all very carefully, and regenerate code when the AI chose to add a whole new mechanism to the code base rather than re-using an existing mechanism, to keep the code solid. That happens less and less, and soon, it won't make sense to read over the code at all. Maybe in some specific circumstances that will be necessary, but less and less overall. And that's ok. We have moved to higher and higher levels of abstraction over the decades that I've been coding, and each time we can take on bigger problems and invent new things.
Comment · 2 months ago
Will this targeted approach be beneficial to other cancer types? Is there any data or theory about this class of drugs as a more general therapy?
Comment · 2 months ago
I suspect the net result will be that more Pro $100 subscribers upgrade to $200/mo. If you explicitly do simpler stuff with Opus, you generally have enough Fable time for most programming and planning tasks.
Comment · 2 months ago
A product is much more than the software and its reliability. The business side is just as big of a lift. You need to build a business, not just a product. A business includes understanding the value proposition, not just a potential solution in the form of a tool. It includes understanding how the software fits in to the target customer's workflow, and how it provides real value. You need to be able to communicate that value proposition to the customers, investors and your employees, amongst other stakeholders. Later, this transforms into understanding the sales cycle and how to use marketing to grow your users. The business side has always been the hard part. Software was always easy to build. The hard part is knowing what to build that really provides value.
Comment · 3 months ago
Perhaps also a bit of ageism. Always hard to prove. Often implicit.
Comment · 4 months ago
Of course Solopreneurs were a thing long before AI. It just takes special people. I think the assumption of this article is that there may be a larger array of people capable of running their own business with the aid of AI. I'm similarly leery of this for the same reasons covered in the post. Solopreneurs were generally technical people who had been forced to learn the business side after playing a senior role, generally a CTO or CEO, of a previous startup. They are "full stack" founders, who have deep understanding of the entire business stack, both on the business and technical side. These special people will likely be supercharged by AI, which they can intelligently direct to offload much of the grunt work, both on the technical side, and on the business side, especially for marketing.
Comment · 4 months ago
I mean, it is possible, that, after verification, credits are added to the Fable usage from your existing subscription plan. Maybe not. But maybe yes. No way to know. And, remember, when Fable was first released, they announced that it was only going to be on the existing subscription plans for a short period.
Comment · 4 months ago
The Lance Armstrong defense
Comment · 4 months ago
The insecurity of this administration is screaming
Comment · 4 months ago
Perhaps they are adding security controls to bring Fable back online? One can hope.
Comment · 5 months ago
It seems as though the leaks are always in the Russian section? Perhaps this is why. Humans are the weak link. Damn breathers.
Comment · 5 months ago
I mostly agree. I'm curious to hear more details about why you think AI cannot replace middle management?
Comment · 5 months ago
I have 35+ years experience as a manager and engineer at large enterprise tech companies (what the kids now call FAANG, though some of the company names were different back then), and was a Founder, CEO and CTO at a $7M VC funded company and several other "differently-funded" startups.
Comment · 5 months ago
Harsh take: AI should replace most middle management. It is the easiest part of an organization to replace. The people making things should mostly communicate about company strategy, cross-team issues, and job requirements with an AI. There should be a handful of high-level strategy on top of the AI. The AI should have access to all the documents for the company. The middle management should be put in a spaceship along with HR and sent off to another planet so the people who build things can just get stuff done. This will never happen.

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