marstall

how do you define the specialists? a prompt? what do you mean by using protocols as guardrails? Also, can you give me a TLDR on how these voice interfaces work? What kinds of problems are you solving, and how, in an ELI5 way. I might be a lot dumber than you give me credit for!

i've been using Cascade (a third party harness) since the 3 week period in 2023 when it was hot. I think it's called something else now. Devin? Things got confusing there for a second and I stopped paying attention.

Anyway very happy with it, I use it as a plugin to RubyMine and Webstorm.

One of the primary advantages is being able to choose your model - and it often has free deals for newer models that are running promotions. Whenever I switch to Claude Code it seems clunky. Would rather use Claude with Cascade.

is it just for coding? the docs don't mention code, just "agents"

"force phone providers to collect identity information from ordinary people before they can acquire or renew service with a phone carrier."

don't see the harm in this? isn't this already the case for 99.9% of phoneline havers already?

I'm the creator of a newsletter using AI to make the science behind a rare disease, Kabuki Syndrome, more accessible.

In this blog post I walk through the steps I took to translate scientific papers into sparkling prose that maintains tight links between generated sentences and the passages they're based on, and touch on some of the broader issues related to what an editor is in a publication that is AI-generated, and why I think rare disease reporting is a uniquely appropriate and ethical use of AI!

Philip Ball helped me understand this in his book "How Life Works." He makes the point that you can't understand language by understanding letters. Walking up to someone and just saying "L" won't have any effect. And given just an understanding of the alphabet, you would never be able to use that on its own to understand a whole book, you have to move up. The whole has its own kind of existence. I think about how hard it is for one individual to influence a culture. You kind of have to speak and operate at the highest level to change things. I know that's super vague but those are just the terms I've been thinking about it in.

yes it all comes back to iteration, the original "vibe coding". for me, programming has always been about making it up as i go along. like an artist starts with one stroke, i started when i was 10 years old typing '10 print "hello, world" 20 goto 10' and i've never really stopped programming that way 47 years later. For me programming is the same as refactoring, they both happen in a continuous Zone throughout the day. The idea of spending this big period at the beginning Defining the Architecture then letting AI fill in the blanks makes no sense because I only know what the architecture is, what the product is, as part of a process of typing all day for days and weeks and months, that never ends.

i've actually been wanting something like this.

issue seems to be there is way off the site? top story about thinking machines has no way to click through to original link AFAICS

I've been reading "Elusive Cures" by Nicole Rust, about the failure of neuroscience to cure major ailments like schizophrenia and alzheimers, despite decades of work modeling neurons and other brain systems (costing far in excess of $500M).

Here are some thoughts that that book sparks ...

"the whole is other than the sum of its parts" - someone, based on Aristotle. The way Nicole Rust puts is that the whole->part relationship is one way. In other words, you can determine the parts from the whole, but not the whole from the parts. A cell is a complex dynamic system with many overlapping and interacting feedback effects and diverse homeostatic drives. Its state emerges into its own entity that, once formed, bears only a tenuous relationship to its parts.

Understanding of our bodies and minds may be more tractable at more common levels, levels where the life system is at (whole), not where it was (parts) is where I think she's going: language, art, kinship, etc. But I'm not done yet.