dimbletimbers

Joined 8 months ago

Karma
210
Submissions
37
Member since
Feb 27
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Recent submissions

Comment · 10 hours ago
Yes, but Rex is built on libghostty with the multiplexing and agent integration built in, built by people I trust who don’t let the LLM write all their docs.
Comment · 1 day ago
I prefer the TUI in ghostty and even that’s just a stopgap until superlogical is out of alpha.
Comment · 5 days ago
These days, I constantly find myself filled with a kind of techno-dysphoria, where not only do I not want to use the tech in the way it’s being packaged/sold, but I’m filled with dread and disgust by the idea of people who do so breathlessly anticipate and proselytize its arrival.

The idea that anyone ever read a Gibson novel and thought, “can’t wait,” truly boggles my mind.

Comment · 15 days ago
> But.... That's not knowledge?

Thank you! This is a huge sticking point for me. There is no knowing the code without experiencing the code. If nothing else, you have to read the tests to know they verify what you think they do. Even then, you might know it does what you want, but can’t know it doesn’t do anything it shouldn’t.

There are no shortcuts to true understanding.

Comment · 17 days ago
This is a wildly online take. Humans highly value authenticity and many professional writers still write their first draft with a pen or pencil.

David Foster Wallace famously described writing with a pen and paper instead of a word processor because it forced him to slow down enough to think deeply, which I find very relevant to this whole debate.

There is no substitute for slow thinking. Your brain can’t really “move up the stack” until you understand the layer you’re on. All abstractions paper over important details. All shortcuts are cut short. You cannot produce quality writing without doing the slow, dlaborious work of choosing your own words.

Comment · 17 days ago
I think devs and people on HN way overestimate how much the average person knows about or cares about or desires to interact with a computer. Whatever the job becomes, if you like talking to the computer and know how to get it to do anything besides show an email or youtube, you’re ahead of the curve and can likely stay there.
Comment · 20 days ago
The most passionate, intelligent people 1. aren’t spending a lot of time on smartphones, video games and crypto and 2. aren’t as much smarter or better at predicting the future as the barely above average people who mistakenly count themselves in their ranks like to think.
Comment · 20 days ago
It has been generally agreed since at least Plato that it’s up to people making a positive assertion to present evidence, not up to skeptics to prove it’s not possible. N.B. Russell’s Teapot Analogy.

You have to prove it is/can be conscious, not the other way around.

Comment · 20 days ago
I feel like the AI debate is our last best chance to agree that human values are more important and have higher long-term utility (to humans) than pure financial maximization. I think it’s very very likely that money does not capture or convert to a large subset of morally good choices we can and should make to be happy.
Comment · 20 days ago
I can’t tell if you’re defending this as good or just hypothesizing about the underlying cause but “appeal to nature” is one of the many freshman-level logical fallacies that seem ubiquitous in AI hype circles. Just because it’s what our animal brains do, doesn’t mean it’s going to be good or advantageous to our current evolutionary context.

Our energy conservation system also encourages us to eat as much high fat, high sugar food as we can get down our gullets, but that turns out to be a big problem for modern humans.

Comment · 20 days ago
The blasé attitude with which people talk about “moving up the stack” as if it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s the right thing to do or even an accurate description of what’s happening is easily one of the most disheartening aspects of this whole movement.
Comment · 22 days ago
Doesn’t that always seem to be the problem with the booster rhetoric. The upside is always somewhere in the hypothetical future while the downsides are already being acutely felt.
Comment · 1 month ago
This is another case of anthropomorphic language for AI failing us. Who could be opposed to “learning?”

If I learn from a textbook I stole, some people maybe be thrilled I learned something, but stealing is still a crime and hopefully always will be.

Comment · 1 month ago
A defense of human code review I wish I saw more often, especially in light of the concerns people have about cognitive/comprehension debt: comprehension redundancy. At the end, if taken seriously, at least two people understand how the feature works (even if that number is, on average, trending closer to between one and zero). Ideally at least one of the two also comes away with a better understanding of the wider system and how the feature fits into or stands out from that landscape.
Comment · 1 month ago
That’s a tragically sophomoric take. 'object a has property x' is too generic to be meaningful. “AI has the property of conscious” requires settling the small matter of what the properties of consciousness are. And “behaves like it has property x” is not the same as “has property x.” I may behave like I have a million dollars and have not a cent to my name. Many things evolve to appear like many other things. And I have never seen an LLM do anything at all unless turned on and fed input tokens.

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