nater5000

This post is funny to me, because I feel it falls well short of what a proper, forward-thinking "AI-native" engineering org would actually look like. That is, the author is presenting this as kind of a radical departure from normal engineering, but I just see it as normal engineering with more AI. I don't see that as AI-native.

To me, true "AI-native" engineering will be one where questions regarding how humans will do things like review code are irrelevant. You explicitly throw away any concept of typical software engineering and, instead, differ to the AI. Your job, as a human, is solely to do what the AI can't physically do. That's not the same as closing gaps between what AI is currently capable of doing and what you'd need it to be capable of doing. It's literally enforcing that anything an AI is able to do is treated as correct in itself, and you, as a human, only support it by being a human.

If that sounds outlandish, that's because it is. We don't have such capable AI systems yet. It's possible we never will. But that's beyond the point. The reality is trying to make an "AI-native" engineering org by just layering AI on top of existing processes and systems is futile. If your expectation is that AI will continue to improve in capabilities at an accelerating rate, then these stop-gaps are pointless. You might as well just ignore AI altogether until it is able to completely take over, because that's the inevitable goal, right?

If you're willing to buy that will be possible, then my guess is that it will occur in the form of small scale startups and actual mavericks rather than someone trying to run an existing business who will simply be too risk adverse to go all in when the time comes. Some guy in his basement is more likely to leverage AI "properly" to build an actual "AI-native" engineering org because that person won't have much to lose.

Duh, the idea that those capable of actually utilizing these models for these purposes weren't aware that they could use these models for these purposes up until Anthropic released a blog post about it is silly. Anybody who is even a bit tech literate has been well aware of this inevitability for basically as long as open-weight models have been a thing.

The timing of all of this is much easier to pin to the creation and proliferation of capable of open weight models. Anthropic calling this out is not the cause for it; it's just an obvious correlation.

>hats off to our new billionaire friend

As if this wasn't coordinated by a team directed by the government of North Korea.

I got more utility from AI within the first week of ChatGPT being originally released than I've ever gotten from crypto, and I've had bitcoin since they were giving it away for free on Tor lol

They're not even remotely close to being comparable.

Honestly fascinating. I almost feel like you'd be better off avoiding any discussion of the fact that this runs on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W because it takes away from the crazy world model capabilities (of course, the fact that this does run on a Pico 2 makes the whole thing much more impressive).

There's gotta be a good way to incorporate this logic into a larger, more "traditional" game in a meaningful way. Seems like an approach for procedural generation that could solve some of the issues usually found with actual procedural generation.

Even more importantly: it's not an either/or situation.

You can love to cook and enjoy every second of it, but sometimes you just need fuel and that $3 microwave burrito is sufficient. Just the same, 99% of your means could be frozen TV dinners, but that doesn't mean cooking a romantic meal for Valentine's Day is off the table.

There's a weird level of fear mongering occurring around AI that it will make you incapable of independent thought if you use it. People will throw around very light research that kind of points in that direction, but they'll never highlight any of the nuances in such an argument. You can use AI and still "think" if you choose to, just like how you can avoid AI and still opt out of "thinking" if you choose to. It has less to do with AI and more to do with the context of the individual using AI.

>is the reason very limited access early

I mean, that's the main reason. How would you expect to see the kind of hype that Claude or GPT can generate when nobody can use it? The hype of those models are primarily generated from people using them to build impressive things and share those results. Can't do that with an unreleased model, right?

Beyond that, it seems a lot of people have learned that these agent leaderboards really don't tell the whole story. They're a good litmus test, per se, and there's plenty of hype being generated around these scores as-is. But anybody using AI in practice knows that benchmarks can only say so much, and one model scoring better than another doesn't necessarily imply that that model is actually better in the ways those people care about. You can see that in this thread as people are pointing out that even these benchmarks seem to suggest that Opus 5.5 is still leading in coding (which is what a lot of people, especially on HN, ultimately care about).

>just not enough publicity or hype as the other labs do?

Well, it's effectively both. Google is certainly not that pressed to generate as much hype as these other companies. They can afford to take their time. It's also worth noting that Google is definitely targeting different consumers, investors, etc., so their strategy will definitely be different.

For what it's worth, I've been using Argon since it's been available in Cursor and I really like it (at least at its current price). I think Google really did close the gap a meaningful amount (maybe not all the way, but enough to prove they're still in the game). Carbon being significantly better while being the same cost is pretty exciting to me. But until I can use it, I don't really care about it.

>I sit in front of the steam shop for an hour almost on a daily basis

I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that you're an outlier lol

>Exclusion from society

We exclude plenty of people from society, at least in the abstract. Someone who simply acts weird can be excluded from society. There are certainly no law which forces people to include them?

>the object of anger at "those darn Luddites"

Again, I'm not sure what kinds of laws could reasonably prevent this. Seems like we're all basically free to criticize one another for personal beliefs. If that wasn't the case, then 99% of social media would be in constant breach of the law lol

>You can't tell an Amish he can't use physical coins

Well, for one, laws protecting the acceptance of US currency aren't specific to Amish people based on their beliefs. It's more about protecting the value of US currency. And two, private companies are allowed to not accept physical currency. Plenty of companies only accept credit card, etc. That's legal. And Amish people wouldn't be able to purchase goods and services from such places.

Of course, the Amish typically don't care about that, because they're not typically in the market for the kinds of goods and services offered by such businesses. In contrast, someone who is happy to consume modern technology accept AI for arbitrary reasons seems like someone who is making interacting with society unnecessarily complicated and difficult.

>Or that his buggy is too slow for the roads (not highways), etc.

Well, as you've alluded to, if we deem that their beliefs would end up causing a significant enough issue to society, then their beliefs don't get to override the rules of society. Amish people are free to use buggies where appropriate because it's not a problem. They are not allowed to use buggies on highways because it would be a safety issue.

Regardless, they're not protected because of their beliefs. They're just operating within the rules of society. You don't have to be Amish to legally ride a buggy on the side of a road. These aren't special protections carved out for Amish people. Which, again, is the point of this discussion:

You stated "We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice," and I'm asking, "Protect them from what, exactly?"

"Exclusion from society" or being "the object of anger at "those darn Luddites"" are not things which laws can generally help with. Anti-AI people are free to not use AI, be vocal about their opposition to AI, and even (try to) exclude those who use AI from society or make them the object of anger with regards to AI usage. All of that is fair. It works both ways. None of it is dictated by law.

Well, my perspective is somewhat narrow (I use it primarily for software engineering and pretty technical data engineering work), so it's possible that Argon is well-suited for the work I do but not for other tasks. I suppose it's just more data points to consider.

For what it's worth: Argon is a pretty good model, and this is coming from someone who just sticks with Opus 5.5 mostly across the board. For the current introductory price, it provides an exceptional value. Looks like they're trying to release Carbon (which is apparently a significant improvement) at the same price as Argon, which would be a crazy value.

It's worth trying if you have easy access to it (we use Cursor at work, so it was just a matter of picking a different model for me). Don't know if I'd go out of my way to get a Google AI subscription for it, but if Carbon ends up meeting these expectations, then it may be worth doing so.

>Federal courts have ruled that humanism qualifies as a religion. As a result, she said, humanists have the same rights as other faith groups under federal law.

Hmmm, sounds a bit ripe for exploitation, no?

>In his interview with RNS, Durman said that being a humanist means being present and paying attention to others. Using AI conflicts with that.

Does this mean I can submit complaints against the companies I work for when I'm being told to respond via email or Slack? This seems pretty far removed from my humanist perspective up being present and paying attention to others, especially when you consider the various automations and abstractions which go into that kind of communication.

Like, I know it's obtuse, but I really don't see a logical issue with someone being a humanist and sincerely believing that communicating in anyway which isn't face-to-face goes against their beliefs. And that's just one example.

>“Substituting automated machine processing for human presence, authentic listening, and personal responsibility in my work directly conflicts with my obligation to uphold human dignity and flourishing as primary,” he wrote in a letter to the University of Kentucky’s Office of Equal Opportunity.

I'm sure this guy is being sincere and somewhat reasonable with his logic, but I know people who would feel justified in pushing this way past AI if they felt it was likely to get them anywhere. Like, how can you not use the same exact reasoning to push against using other forms of modern technology?

>The letter cited Durman’s personal beliefs as well as the 2003 version of the Humanist Manifesto, which details humanist principles and beliefs. Those beliefs include the importance of freedom of conscience and human flourishing.

Hell, at what point is being forced to work in order to survive in completely opposition to this belief system? When can I start saying that my employer's expectation that I'm in the office every day is in opposition to "human flourishing"?

>Durman told RNS his work involves helping researchers at the university with grant applications and that he can do the work without the help of AI. And not using AI won’t affect his co-workers, he said.

We'll see about that. Maybe, right now, this is the case. But even moderate expectation for AI usage in the future makes this suspect. When everyone is getting 90% of their work done completely autonomously through their agents, but they're still waiting on you to respond to an email from a day ago, then will this still be the case?

>For Durman, the accommodation process was much simpler. Durman sent the letter, and then he and Huiskens met with officials at the university. “It was a very collegial meeting, and they found that there was no undue burden to David’s department,” Huiskens said. “They granted the accommodation promptly.”

Well I'm unironically happy that they were able to work this out easily. But I really doubt this will be smooth sailing indefinitely, especially as other roles which are more affected by AI end up being "targeted" in the same ways.

As a software engineer, I dread the thought of working with co-workers who just refuse to use AI based on arbitrary principals. It's one thing for them to reason that they work better without AI; it's another thing to just say that you don't agree with using the technology and everyone needs to accommodate you.

Well I'm sure I haven't said anything that everyone else hasn't immediately thought/posted, but I'm genuinely curious about these things. It seems rather important that everyone is on the same page with regards to what their rights are with respect to choosing to not use a technology like this.

>We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.

Protect them from what, exactly?

Yeah, this is a succinct way to describe a very important dynamic in software engineering that is usually unfamiliar to most inexperienced developers but a central facet of most experienced developers.

Software engineering is almost always a process of iteration. The better you get at iterating, the better you are at engineering. This can take on a lot of forms (my old manager would constantly repeat the mantra "don't let perfect be the enemy of good," which is arguably a recognition of the same dynamic), but at the end of the day, if you expect to "one-shot" a complex implementation and you build a process around that assumption, then you will fail. Almost ironically, the best way to avoid that issue is to assume you will fail (potentially multiple times) and to build a process around that assumption.

Interestingly, it seems like a lot of experienced engineers I work with have just forgotten this concept in the world of AI. They expect AI to just get things perfect in one-shot and are dismayed when it fails. There's a lot of discussion around how we handle code reviews because some developers are just letting AI one-shot a solution then sending it to review. It boggles my mind that competent engineers aren't allowing their AI to fail, so to speak, and are instead wasting cycles trying to figure out how to get AI to produce the perfect solution the first time.

To me, it's obvious that there's just a fundamental gap in alignment that prevents a consistent "perfect one-shot" to probably ever be possible (at least, within the current paradigm of development). I can spend an hour writing a spec and try to include every little detail of context I can think of, but in what world could we expect anyone, let alone an AI, to be able to envision the solution the same way we can? We just lose way too much information through communication for that to ever be possible. Yet I see people very dismissive of the capabilities of AI because it's not literally magic.

Right, so it kind of seems like treating science like a race is the wrong analogy.