guygurari

Programming brings me joy in two different ways.

1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art.

2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering.

These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things.

AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year.

I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.

Achieve a significant scientific or mathematical breakthrough without human supervision. Domain experts should agree that the new result is truly groundbreaking, and achieving it required fundamentally new ideas — not merely interpolating existing results.

Examples of discoveries that would have counted if they weren’t already made: Relativity (say a derivation of E=mc^2), Quantum Mechanics (say a calculation of the hydrogen energy levels), the discovery of Riemmannian geometry, the discovery of DNA, and the discovery of the theory of evolution with natural selection.

The idea is to test the system’s out of distribution generalization: its ability to achieve tasks that are beyond its training distribution. This is something that humans can do, but no current LLM appears to be able to do.

I’m rooting for you. Here’s a thought about a possible trade off between radicalization and engagement. When social media platforms optimize for growth, it makes sense for them to make it as easy as possible for users to share/retweet. It lowers “amplification friction” and allows messages to go viral. The most successful platforms have very low amplification friction, which suggests that low friction is an important ingredient.

What we are learning is that making it trivially easy to amplify anyone’s message enables cancel culture and (I believe) leads to radicalization.

If this is correct, then increasing amplification friction on your platform will lead to less radicalization, at the cost of lowering engagement. My guess is that for this to be successful requires a careful balance of where you land on the higher/lower friction spectrum. Too much friction leads to low engagement which leads to failure. Too little friction leads to uncontrolled amplification which leads to radicalization. So a balance is needed.

Either that, or a totally new idea is needed that turns existing platforms on their head.

It’s certainly possible my intuition is wrong. Run-flat tires can support the whole car, but it is possible this support only kicks in at very low pressure.

I agree that higher tire pressure results in smaller surface area, but it's not clear to me that the tire itself does not support the car, skewing the result. So I'm not convinced this sanity check is sufficient. For example, as another commenter mentioned, run-flat tires can support the car on stiffness alone.

The suggestion is to use F=PA to measure the car weight, where P is the tire pressure, A is the area the tires in contact with the ground, and F is the unknown: the weight of the car (measured in terms of gravitational force).

I don't think this works. To see why, suppose we make the tires out of a very stiff material. We control the pressure P, but changing the pressure will not change the surface area A. Therefore, by changing P we can set F to whatever we want, which shows that we are not actually measuring the weight of the car. The basic issue here is that the air pressure is not the only thing that is supporting the car.

I don't know how important the stiffness effect is for real tires, but I suspect they are sufficiently stiff that it matters a lot.

> “do what the experts say we should, while maintaining a diversity of expert views.”

I don’t think this is an actual strategy. If there is a diversity of views, which experts do you listen to? Also, experts in which field? Epidemiologists have generally recommended very strict shutdowns, but they are not economists and are not experts on the economic ramifications. Some economists agree with strict lockdowns, others do not. So it’s not at all clear what “listen to the experts” means in this case.

If Sweden has a significantly higher percentage of the population infected (as they claim) then it doesn’t make sense to compare death rates at this point, because it may be that these other countries will reach the same numbers (infection rate and death rate) later. This is a likely outcome because Sweden’s healthcare system has not been overwhelmed, so it’s not obvious that their policies will lead to excess deaths in the long run. The thing to compare is the final death toll (as well as economic damage), and we don’t know that yet.

I am sorry to hear you’ve lost your source of income.

> But financial hardship is solvable -- food, housing, etc. can be handed out.

That depends on the size of the handout. At the scale we’re talking about, I’ll just say that I don’t think it’s that simple. It is also without a successful precedent.

> Are people starving?

I don’t think so, but we also know that many people in the US live practically hand to mouth. By now, millions of Americans are probably without any savings or income. See the long lines at food banks for evidence. I expect that the longer this goes on, the more Americans we will see become poor, homeless, and find it difficult to feed their families. I don’t think people will starve, but how will this be resolved? Maybe instead of starving they will go to loan sharks and dig themselves into a hopeless financial hole.

I find it disturbing that you are willing to put all of this aside because you don’t know anyone who is experiencing serious hardship. Do you know anyone who goes to food banks? I don’t, but I know they exist and I don’t want to ignore them and say they will be fine because “we can hand out food”.

> In 100 years, the only footnote for 2020 will be all the deaths and suffering that this caused. No one will care that you were sad because you couldn't see your friends or go do sports.

It's weird. Why do you empathize with victims of the disease but not with victims of financial hardship? Do you not see people suffering when looking at hour-long lines at food banks and historical unemployment numbers?

Perhaps what will be remembered is the pain of those who were plunged into deep poverty in a New Great Depression that will take us years to recover from.

To be clear, by “This is hysteria” I meant the gp’s claim that every healthcare system is overwhelmed. I was not referring to the general response.

However, see Sweden for a clear counter-example to your claim that the services are holding up because of the drastic actions taken. Their services are holding up with far less drastic measures.