v64

Those who haven't read Mythical Man Month are doomed to repeat it. I don't recall anywhere in the book where it states that the problems described in its essays don't apply to you if you're working with dozens of the most intelligent engineers in the world who can produce code in hours instead of days.

I was discussing this with someone else and used the analogy of nuclear energy. Although nuclear plants are highly complex and use forces that have only been understood for the last hundred years, at the end of the day it's still boiling water to create steam to spin a turbine, and nothing about nuclear innovation can engineer away the laws of thermodynamics.

Agents have and will continue to drastically change how we develop code, but it's my belief that drastically changing our software practices to speed up development just means we're going to hit engineering limits faster, rather than being able to overcome those limits entirely.

You're wrong, it's much more than half.

And the response back will be "If you could've asked the AI, why did you ask me then?"

In some cases, it may even be the appropriate response. Interrupting somebody to ask something that could be cleared up by an AI is in the same ballpark as asking them something that could be cleared up if you read the docs.

> By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone.

Like anything else, it depends on what you're working on. For small personal projects I agree, but in maintaining large scale business applications with millions of lines of code, I am still having to guide the models to reuse existing code and to be more flexible with their data structures to accommodate changing business requirements in the future.

They only see a snapshot of the world the application exists in due to their ephemeral nature, and until that is overcome, they will only be able to learn general principles and not the particular nuances of your codebase that only arise from observing how the users use it on a daily basis.

Not a comment on this link in particular, but just a general observation from my experience.

One should be skeptical of the demos they initially see at model release, as there have been instances of some being called out as AI generated video or work that took days and millions of tokens and not a one shot as claimed.

The first few days Astra was out, I attempted to reproduce a few of the demos I saw on twitter, and it was clear Astra had a distinctive style and certain limitations when working in short sessions with tools like Blender that could distinguish genuine demos from bs for retweets.

People putting out these demos should share their sessions to really show what was going on, and I invite people to test models and try to replicate what they see and draw their own conclusions.

The US Constitution has a whole bit about forbidding cruel and unusual punishments.

I have visual aphantasia but not aphantasia of any other senses, so I can assure you it's not a semantic misunderstanding. I play piano and can hear tunes in my head and use what I hear to play it out on the piano, like playing by ear but without actual sound. And I simply don't have this same ability with visualization.

However, I do visualize in my dreams, so from my own experience, I suspect that aphantasia is not a complete inability to visualize, but rather an inability to visualize intentionally. When I'm very sleep deprived or on psychedelics, my ability to conjure mental images changes, not necessarily to full visualization, but at higher levels than in normal life.

Memento mori

I live here and use Dallasian myself

Those problems are because of the tobacco. Zyn packets et al are just nicotine, and nicotine itself has not been shown to be a carcinogen.