ragequittah

Again if you can't find 100 things an LLM is better than you at in an afternoon I call you a liar. Just because it's different in kind doesn't mean we can't marvel at how insane it is and give it credit for what it can do that we obviously can't. I feel the same way about an octopus and I equally can't tell if an octopus is less intelligent than us just because it doesn't have the capacity to do exactly what we do.

What an odd bar. People need to be involved because we haven't built the proper amount of robotics to create a data center from sand yet. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we could given enough effort and the current set of technologies though. I actually hope I'm wrong because the implications are terrifying, but I think most people are vastly underestimating just how far this technology can go. But the thing is we won't be limited to just this technology for very long. It will keep advancing as it continues to teach us new math, science, chip design, whatever else.

* results may vary depending on your specific definition of AGI.

I like the way Kevin Roose put it: if you were to bring Astra or Opus 5.5 back to 2017 and show it to the leading AI researchers at the time and ask them if it were a form of AGI what would they say? The goal posts shift too fast to keep up with. Some people still worried about it counting Rs in strawberry as the models are making progress in frontier math and physics.

My take is that most art, prose, and code was really bad before AI too. Now there's just more of it good and bad. It's like hating that YouTube exists because cable TV was so good. Now anyone with a camera can make and upload whatever nonsense they want but in the end lots of very good content was made on top of the huge pile of rubbish.

Video games are a perfect example of how innovation all but stops when a few companies have access to all of the resources. Companies like EA, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard all make mostly hot garbage these days because they 'innovated' themselves into making the same 4 games over and over. It's happening with movies too where everything is either a sequel or a remake because recognizable IP has been deemed more important than making something actually good.

Video games have always been about copying the other guy and making it better though. Blizzard famously akways just made the best parts of all other games in the genre packaged up with cool looking cinematics. Every single FPS borrows from every other FPS any time something new comes along. And thankfully when Nintendo tried to stop it with Palworld they (mostly) got egg on their face.

The one famous example that did stick that I can remember is warner bros patented the nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor. Nobody can use that actually rather cool idea until 2036 and it hasn't been used in a decade now. Real cool stuff and definitely pushed the industry forward.

>But "sudo make me a sandwich" style of vibe coding is just removing the obstacles to enshrining ambiguities and bad decisions in code.

I'm of the opinion that if you think it will stay this way you haven't been paying attention. "sudo find me a security flaw" already embarrasses top security researchers who have been working on the same code for decades. "sudo decompile this program/firmware/game" is doing absolute wondrous things right now even if there are still some flaws. If it can do these things better / significantly faster than humans already, and if it keeps improving at the rate it has been "sudo make me an operating system" that spits out something actually pretty good is probably within a decade.

There's a reason why enterprises don't give you an admin account on Windows. Sure damage can still be done, but the blast radius is highly reduced. It was like the first rule I learned about Linux back in the day: don't ever log in as root, don't even bother enabling it. Hell it's not even a good idea to do it on an offline computer cuz you might accidentally bork something yourself. The barrier of at least a password to install system level software or delete critical files is a good one to have.

Such a wild take to me. I install an entirely different operating system on my phone (graphene) which also advises me not to root because it's stupidly unsafe to do so. I also don't log in as root on linux, nor do I log in as an administrator in windows. None of these are sane practices to anyone worried about security.

I can root my Android phone and have in the past, but I have absolutely no desire to do so now because it adds almost no functionality in exchange for a very large security risk. I consider rooting my phone in the past quite a foolish move by someone who didn't know better.

Wait until you see how the Apollo lunar modules and such maneuvered in the 60s. This is pretty much all 60s and 70s tech we've seen before. Except it was much more impressive in the 60s on the moon. And I guess if you want cold-gas propulsion not chemical NASA Skylab is the way cooler actually practical example.

Do we not see a path forward where the humans are further informed, don't need to do so much heavy grunt work, and thus can think on deeper questions? I really don't see the final outcome being knowledge work for humans completely disappearing. In fact having something that potentially can do it better and faster will make keeping up with that knowledge all the more fascinating won't it? This whole conversation feels like what someone with an abacus would say when they saw the first digital pocket calculator.

I think when the open source models catch up (likely soon) we'll long for the days when companies could control it like this. I could easily see a teenager with openclaw and a single prompt causing millions of dollars in damage. Multiply that by the number of stupid people in the world and we have a problem.

I too remember when we started colonizing Mars back in 2021. And that time I called my neighbor's Tesla robotaxi to drive me around in 2020.