I’d be curious to hear how you end up liking it.

As someone who spends a lot of time on the command-line, I’ve generally preferred MacOS over Windows as my not-Linux OS. But my impression is that for people who like the Windows or Linux GUI, MacOS is a bigger (and less pleasant) change.

And even on the command-line, MacOS is a different *nix distro and makes seme pretty weird choices (launchd, plists, /etc is actually /private/etc, …) whereas you could have vanilla Ubuntu inside WSL2.

Yeesh. What’s the girlfriend getting out of all of this? Seems like a lot of work to run someone else’s life in addition to your own.

The theory is that the new hire gets better over time

It always amazes me how few people get this. Have they only ever made terrible hires?

The way that a company makes big profits is by hiring fresh graduates and giving them a cushy life while they grow into good SWEs. By the time you’re paying $200k for a senior software engineer, they’re generating far more than that in value. And you only had to invest a couple years and some chump change.

But now businesses only think in the short-term and so paying $10k for a month of giving Anthropic access to our code base sounds like a bargain.

Executives are mostly irrelevant as long as they’re not forcing the whole company into the bullshit.

I’m seeing a lot of this, though. Like, I’m not technically required to use AI, but the VP will send me a message noting that I’ve only used 2k tokens this month and maybe I could get more done if I was using more…?

More as an alternative to a search engine.

In my ideal world, StackOverflow would be a public good with a lot of funding and no ads/sponsorship.

Since that’s not the case, and everything is hopelessly polluted with ads and SEO, LLMs are momentarily a useful tool for getting results. Their info might be only 3/4 correct, but my search results are also trash. Who knows what people will do in a year when the LLMs have been eating each others slop and are also being stuffed with ads by their owners.

Coding junkie is where you sneak away from your friends and code a few lines in the bathroom

We’re talking here about garbage code that we don’t want. If the choice is “let me commit bad code that causes problems or else I will quit using computers”… is this a dilemma for you?

It does seem silly, but it’s perfectly aligned with the marketing hype that the AI companies are producing.

The disconnect is coming here:

I just don’t see the line where any of that is impossible. It seems inevitable

I agree with you that robots building robots is not impossible. I disagree with you that it’s therefore inevitable. I strongly disagree with you that it’s therefore inevitable in the immediate future.

The people cheering are just honoring Charlie’s legacy.

Come on. Obama’s continuation of presidential power-creep is not what enables Trump. Trump getting elected, taking over the Supreme Court, getting elected again, having all the billionaires lick his ass, etc is what enables him.

If you wanna lay it on Obama, blame him for not taking the right wing seriously enough and going after them at the local level where they had been building strength for the past 50+ years. Or for not betraying all his moderate-conservative supporters to implement some seriously progressive policy.

This, but in a hopeful voice instead of sarcastic 🙂

(Being surrounded by people who think more progressively will tend to shift people’s views)

OK, cool. That definitely helps things.

I think where we’re disagreeing is that I think in a capitalist society the promise of money will inevitably corrupt the government (because it’s made of people). Maybe it can be avoided if the government performs additional regulatory action to stop anyone from getting too wealthy, but that sounds like beyond the limits that you want to set for government.

Without force

Whoah, whoah. Why’d you rule that out?

Your business plan: quality goods at reasonable prices. My business plan: hire some goons to kill you and take your stuff.

Historically, this has a lot of precedence.

Do you already know some French Canadians? The best and most fun way to learn a language is by talking with people. If you know someone who speaks a language you want to learn and they’re willing to struggle through talking with you, pick that language.

In an unfettered marketplace, what stops a dominant player from introducing fetters?

When I read your message, I get the impression that you think of “The Government” as this independent actor. I see it as a system that is primarily controlled by wealthy people. Either directly or through their funding advertisements (including astroturfing/bot-farms) to promote what they want.

So the larger companies do get government assistance… because they are the government. And this isn’t some kind of weird coincidence. It’s fundamental to capitalism’s operation. You can’t have a system that’s based on capital and then have it be unbiased towards entities who have vastly more capital!

Their “real” job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.

Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it’s invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of “he’s not working very hard so he doesn’t deserve the money.”

socialized capitalism

I think I understand your complaint, but I’d say “free market” rather than “capitalism”. But regardless of what we call it, it doesn’t actually exist unless you have a more powerful external system regulating it.

Start with a truly free-market capitalist system. One company manages to temporarily pull ahead (through luck and skill). The rational thing for the company to do isn’t “make better products” (that’s hard) but “destroy competing companies” (much easier). And the end-product would be that the company becomes a government so it can force consumers to pay.

So I’d argue that socialized capitalism (which I’m picturing as a socialist system that permits certain specific free markets and handles the fallout of business failures) is what you actually want.

Capitalism is when there’s an owner-class controlling production via capital. It doesn’t really matter what they’re producing or at what cost or who’s consuming.