discreteevent

> The real world is robust. It's okay for money handling code to have bugs.

This is true. The world will go on. But your business will lose more money than it gained by not paying attention to the code. It will lose money because it will have to compensate customers or lose customers. That's how the world maintains it's robustness.

> You can judge ideas independently of where they came from (and you should).

You can but in practice nobody does this because they don't have time. For example, once you have investigated ideas from a crank a couple of times - you don't do it again. Life is too short.

By how things work, I mean the truth of how things work. The truth is that he didn't mean to abolish the police. But you repeated that as if it was true. You spread the "viral stuff" and then in the next comment you say that it's a "fact" that the viral stuff could sink him. Your words are all over the place - post truth. The reason this is a problem is that the truth is out there and it bites hard when the post truth people govern based on fairy tales.

> Anyone who thinks like you do will get voted out with extreme prejudice.

> I know. Doesn't change the fact he said it and went viral on social media

These are post-truth comments. You don't care about how things really work, you just care about winning over the other post-truth incompetent. It doesn't matter if you are right or left, this stuff is what is sinking the world.

> That probably means a test suite that is at least twice the size of your code base.

If you've got a test suite that's twice the size of the code base then those tests are almost certainly tied to implementation details and will make the code a lot less like clay.

Where I work we make real hardware and software that are used by real people doing real jobs every day. We use AI but in that environment someone who made Jackobriens comment would be seen as an idiot, someone who doesn't have a clue how to build software with real users that has to work with few bugs and be maintainable.

But there are so many people who make statements like his that maybe we should assume that some of them are not idiots or bots. If he's not an idiot it means that he's working in an environment where that kind of statement is paying off. So it could be, for example, that he doesn't really have profitable customers. His main 'customers' are investors who are clueless, or who know that they are clueless but don't care because they are going to move it on to a greater fool anyway. Or that because there aren't any customers, the only thing they can measure is 'productivity' in terms of 'number of unused, unprofitable and unsustainable features'

> Also, Codex App Server is amazing.

Hey, account created 39 days ago. Did you really have to tag that on after all the other stuff? Could you make it any more obvious?

That said this thread is hilarious because it's just an open ai sales manual debating with an anthropic sales manual. It's funny, but it's not, because the truth is that you people are just shitting all over the commons. Someone needs to kick you out but that's not going to happen here.

> If his claim is correct, and 99% of people are NPCs incapable of any meaningful thinking, that makes the 1% that actually does all the thinking of human civilization very valuable.

That's like saying if 99% of birds don't have huge colorful tails that makes peacocks very valuable. In each case it may or may not be true but you are just correlating. (i.e. It's possible that intelligence just isn't as valuable as 'intelligent' people think it is)

> everything that was bottlenecked on "sort a list" is unbottlenecked, and other parts of the process become bottlenecks instead. Thus, the demand for non-sorting tasks grows.

Your assumption here is that the other parts of the process are intelligence. In the real world they usually are not e.g. raw materials, politics, zoning, manual labor, clinical trials, traffic, energy ... And usually those things are such huge bottlenecks that Amdahl's Law renders the speed of delivery of the intelligence part irrelavant.

I had a book of his short stories (Once in Europa). Very grounded writing.

Good examples. We don't know what human intelligence, understanding or consciousness is but we do know what all of those examples are. And we do know what an LLM is. Like you said, it's a data processing machine and we know what algorithms it uses. It's more productive to discuss it in those engineering terms because we've done plenty of data processing, statistics, control systems, curve-fitting etc. before. There's no need to make this jump to consciousness/magic except for marketing or fantasy purposes.

It's worth noting that the context here is a system that was translated by an LLM which is the ideal use case for it. 90% of the thinking had already been done by developers of the existing system.

> they got into math for the love for mathematics rather than the love for tenure

They got into math for the love for mathematics but if they couldn't make a living from it (tenure) then they would have done something else just like everybody else who is not a starving artist. So, no, they won't celebrate it and neither would you if you were honest. (note also that starving has a short time limit before you die so "if all of it leads to some form of superabundance" won't work in that circumstance)