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> TigerBeetle is not a general database

TB is… extremely forthcoming about this. They’re very explicitly building a specific sort of distributed state machine for high volume transaction data.

If they were building something else they’d end up with a different design. And I suspect a lot of TigerStyle would still apply if that other thing we’re interested in performance or correctness.

And no coordination with the camped protestors who’ve been occupying Placa Catalunya for weeks now.

A professor two decades ago, one with dozens of Nature pubs, told me that Nature was all about having a pretty picture.

I’m not saying it’s a totally internally consistent perspective. It’s just a model of justifying without anthropomorphism.

“You feel for the lamp because you are crazy. It has no feelings and the new one is much better.”

I suppose there’s also some de-anthropomorphized version oriented around not poisoning training data (or, alternatively, the real world) with instances of AI abuse. I believe there is ample evidence that AI detect and categorize this behavior (an AI “pain vector”) and respond to it. It would be bad for AI development if that paradigm were entrained.

As I write this it’s very hard not to feel like a psychopath.

I feel like that’s part of their point. It’s not that they’re separating from society, they’re preparing for a future when society collapses and it’s relevant to live more off the refuse.

Probably some kind of agricultural taxation scheme from 2000 bce or so.

Or Fisher in the 1930s with data driven linear didcriminants.

A huge amount of math unlocked the minute mathematicians started taking complex numbers seriously. Ideally they would be an earlier discovery, I agree!

I've been spending the last couple months working on a Markdown-like lightweight document format. (Short pitch, it's like Markdown but with natural extension points built in and far less subtlety).

A huge part of my goal is to write a "spec" of the format. I want it to be good enough that users can legitimately file bugs against my primary implementation for not following the spec: it is the source of truth about the language.

So, of course, I find it really interesting to discuss the grey space of "shrug, maybe this is correct". This whole process has been driving me to (a) make the language itself resilient and permissive so that it has _some_ answer for nearly all documents and (b) to constrain the output of the system such that it throws away as much information as possible, enabling us to make claims about semantics more confidently.

I don't know if I'm going to succeed at all my goals. This is sort of a small project and definitely far simpler than, say, a web browser. At the same time, it's very hard to narrow in on what it is, really, that I want such a spec to say.

To be fair, that wasn’t my issue. I don’t find it annoying. I find it misleading and nigh fraudulent.

I think it’s because it’s reasonable to believe that the human author had no meaningful contribution. If he’d written “by Claude with direction from me” then I’d feel more comfortable. If he’d hand written in his own voice a methods section that laid out exactly how he prompted the LLM then I’d have no trouble digesting.

But to take ownership over words and thought in this way reads as nearly fraudulent to me.

I think the point was that Claude’s output can be somewhat easily and compellingly measured using this technique and its kind of massive (and human attributed).

I appreciate the connection to artists guiding their teams. I think that's a good analogy.

At the same time, when Koons or Chihuly or Cummins sign their work I do have that expectation that they guided the piece in a meaningful and material way or that the people who built it did it in such a way that owes lineage and authorization to the style Koons/Chihuly/Cummins developed. If I asked one of them about their work and it was clear that they had become so disconnected from it that they couldn't be seen as the authority on it, that they'd delegated that away, then I'd also feel them signing it had a mark of dishonesty about it.

To that end, I genuinely don't know Mr. Gomila's engagement here. Worse, it, to my ear, very clearly is written in a style that's extremely reminiscent of LLMs. In that way, it directly invokes that feeling of inauthenticity when he claims authorship.

This reminds me of academic writing there there's sometimes a convention in author lists that the first author(s) did more of the work and the last author(s) were the PIs and guides. This anchors the work amidst all the authors, at least loosely. I understand that if I want to ask a question about the details of the procedure I can reach out to the first author and if I'm trying to understand the larger research objectives of the lab I can investigate the last author.

Personally, I think I'd feel more comfortable with this piece if it were attributed in that style.

Or, again, if this is genuinely work done in the majority by Mr. Gomila and the writing feels LLM-derived for some other reason then it's merely an unfortunate side-effect of this writing register.

I'm not able to judge this for content, but it feels frustrating to read something so obviously Claude-authored as being written "by" Jude Gomila. It's interesting to see the (presumed correct) reduction in this bound and this presentation is pretty compelling. I learned a bit about the Polymath 15 project from this post and I enjoyed that a lot.

That said, I have no idea what contribution may have been done by Mr. Gomila or not. I don't know if I can ask him for more details. Even if he wrote the whole thing (and either has deeply internalized Claude's voice or had it edited and rewritten by an agent) it's difficult to believe that he's the sort of expert I'd expect of someone who had actually done all this work.

This is basically the same feeling I have about vibe code contributors.

Increasingly, I've begun to think of LLMs as sources of really interesting random objects: large pieces of "reasonable thinking" conditioned on a task. It's not that these are correct, in general, but instead they're a concentrated form of random search where that "randomness" is very likely to follow plausible, human patterns.

You can toss it at a task with a suitable machine for transforming that raw material into action and it'll rattle through and sample "plausible human behavior" at that endpoint.

There are more clever ways to use it, but a general tool here is to upgrade any sort of stochastic search to use this new form of random sampling. It'll be way more efficient, properly conditioned, because it just won't visit implausible things nearly as often as competing random sources.