joshmoody24

Or maybe ants and humans are qualitatively different. Maybe there's a critical mass of intelligence where you can pretty much understand anything, and maybe humans are past that threshold. I don't know that for sure, but I don't think we're anywhere close to hitting fundamental limits to our ability to understand the universe.

An LLM could also in theory fake alignment and create technology that seems really useful but secretly harms humanity in the long run. If humans don't understand what it does, that possibility becomes more likely.

You're responding to a comment about weather forecasts, not current weather. Pointing to the sun is not a forecast.

And clicking outside the modal

My team uses a Claude Code hook that blocks any comment more than 2 lines long, and when tripped it encourages the agent to rewrite the comment more concisely and focus only on the "why" not the "what" of the code. I've found this extremely useful for code reviews.

> Want it to go away, almost like magic?

True, almost like magic and magic are not the same thing, but I'd hesitate to call this a strawman.

Would it be useful if the models were actually good at it?

I second the Victorian Internet recommendation!

The book makes a good argument that if you plucked someone from the late 1800s and brought them into the modern day, the internet might be the invention they are least impressed by, since they basically already had one.

The similarities between the telegraph network and the internet go way deeper than I expected. Both at the technology level, like domain names, encryption, data compression, routing tables, etc., and also at the social level like hackers, online dating, insane levels of hype like predicting world peace, and government regulation unable to keep up with the technology. Sometimes I forget how insanely smart people have always been. Awesome book. More timeless than the average book about technology

Obviously it's impossible to understand the whole stack. My rule of thumb is to understand at least two layers of abstraction above and below the thing I'm actively working on.

The old parser has p95 of like 450ms, that seems weirdly slow to me even for a parser generator. Is my intuition wrong? Maybe it's parsing some truly enormous SQL queries?

I've been on a crusade against sloppy use of AI recently. A conversation between my brother and I spawned the idea of "emoji reaction dog whistles" and I couldn't stop thinking about the idea until I wrote it down. Not meant to be taken very seriously, but not entirely UNseriously either

I've seen the pendulum swing between duplication and abstraction a few times in my career, and I'm currently on team "it's usually not that hard to find a good abstraction up front."

IMO it's easier to inline a bad abstraction than it is to consolidate a bunch of subtly different things that should have been abstracted from the beginning.

But I expect people's opinions on this differ wildly based on their personal experiences. Just my anecdotal take.