evmaki

If nothing else, it seems very unlikely that a post from a random account with no followers or posts would go instantly mega viral without some early boosting from bigger accounts. Network effects.

For what it's worth, this theoretical LLM-based compiler would probably generate LLVM or some other intermediate representation rather than platform-specific machine code.

> attention span

IME waiting for an agent to work through a problem is a detriment to attention span; your mind drifts to other things while you wait. Maybe you can steer several agents in a round robin instead, but then there's a cognitive tax from context switching. Faster models mean fewer gaps in focus.

Right, but that's not the same thing as reporting a benchmark across a test set. It doesn't help me determine how well the model does across a decently-large sample size of commands. It doesn't tell me with what reliability the confidence will be below a given threshold when it should be, above that threshold when it should be, etc.

False positives are definitely relevant and worth measuring - natural language interfaces always have a discoverability problem, i.e., users not knowing what actions the system does and does not support. If the frontend of that system lacks the ability to reject unsupported commands, weird stuff happens.

Nonetheless, this is very cool work! If I can offer a small suggestion to the team at Cactus, it would be to evaluate your releases on some usability criteria (including false positives). Any serious integrator or adopter of these models would want to have that information available.

The industry has pushed socially disruptive technologies in several waves (mobile phones, algorithmic social media, short-form content) with seemingly no buy-in from the greater public, nor any meaningful consequences for the ills imposed. Many are now looking at our current crop of tech leaders and billionaires and maybe correctly detecting a bit of indifference to the grievances of the masses of normal people who have been forced to live in successively more deteriorated societies shaped by technologies that they've had no voice in shaping.

AI is just the next wave, and the impact is more tangible than ever – it literally takes your job, and it's being pushed on you by enormously wealthy people who don't understand you, your life, and what's important to you. The sad thing is, AI can be beneficial to people if wielded in the right way, but we are in a polarized environment where productive conversations no longer feel possible: you're either an AI bro or a luddite. I think anyone (myself included) who has spent time developing B2C products that incorporate AI quickly discovers just how touchy of a subject this is, and it's due imo to the sins of the accelerationist crowd that never wastes time understanding the needs and perspectives of normal people.

I would love someone to play devil's advocate against this perspective:

While these tools stand to enable the democratization of productive capability in software engineering and other tasks (creating a renaissance for solopreneurs, let's say), what seems more likely to actually happen is that entrenched capital will become the only player with real access to this "knowledge as a utility" (was it Altman who called it that?).

We already see this playing out in two fronts: 1) the gradual reduction of services and 2) the DRAM market, where local-first tools (i.e., potential disruptors of the emerging "knowledge monopoly" created by the big AI firms) are being stifled by supply shortages. How many promising small-to-medium-sized competitors are being snuffed out of existence (or never starting) due to the insanity of the DRAM/storage/CPU (soon) markets?

The currently-subsidized access that we have to the big Opus-like models will, in parallel, be gradually be taken away until only the big players can afford it. And in the end what we will have is hyper-productive skeleton crews at a few consolidated firms performing (or selling expensive access to) basically all of the knowledge labor for society, with very little potential for disruption due to the hardware and "knowledge" scarcity engineered (in part, maybe) by this monopoly.

Not necessarily a closely held belief – just a hunch – which is why I want to see what parts of the picture I might be missing.

Extremely bad stuff here. Can't believe it's been 7 hours now and you can still pull up people's complete prepared tax returns right from a Google search. This should be a business-ending breach of trust and good practices, but I worry there's probably a lack of regulatory might or will to make anything happen.

Disappointing to see my alma mater gradually self-sabotage into irrelevance.

> My Echo, that I use solely to voice activating lights and switches, is now an ad machine

I've been wondering if it is even possible for a publicly-traded company to deliver a voice assistant product without these incentives involved. I have to imagine the UX of these devices would be much different if they were built by a private company without the same market pressures. It would need to be self-contained and local, so that the infrastructure burden (e.g., data and AI in the cloud) wouldn't create a need for subscription service or data collection revenue to cover the cost.

Some of that is probably because students at elite universities come from families who understand exactly how to navigate meritocratic systems. Parents who know you need a tutor to ace the ACT and an essay editor to polish your application essays likely also understand that, in some situations, you should get a psychiatric evaluation and disclose any diagnoses so you can receive accommodations.

I'm fairly convinced a big part of clearing the barrier to entry of these elite institutions is having a deep understanding of exactly the things you need to do to succeed given the structure of the system and the nature of the competition. Students at "non-elite" institutions are more likely to come from backgrounds where even if you DO have a disability, maybe nobody ever tells you that you can go to the doctor for it, or that something like "accommodations" exist to help you.