1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art.
2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering.
These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things.
AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year.
I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.
Achieve a significant scientific or mathematical breakthrough without human supervision. Domain experts should agree that the new result is truly groundbreaking, and achieving it required fundamentally new ideas — not merely interpolating existing results.
Examples of discoveries that would have counted if they weren’t already made: Relativity (say a derivation of E=mc^2), Quantum Mechanics (say a calculation of the hydrogen energy levels), the discovery of Riemmannian geometry, the discovery of DNA, and the discovery of the theory of evolution with natural selection.
The idea is to test the system’s out of distribution generalization: its ability to achieve tasks that are beyond its training distribution. This is something that humans can do, but no current LLM appears to be able to do.
For recipes I use the Paprika app [1]. I point it at one of these terrible websites and it will scrape out the ingredients and instructions and present them in a useful way.
It doesn’t address the bigger problem but it solves this problem well.
Here are examples of people who were cancelled without even saying anything [1]. One was due to a misunderstanding. Another was due to something a family member said.
I hadn't heard these stories, thank you! Sounds like we need bipartisan legislation for protecting political speech in the workplace, with some sensible limits.
I’m rooting for you. Here’s a thought about a possible trade off between radicalization and engagement. When social media platforms optimize for growth, it makes sense for them to make it as easy as possible for users to share/retweet. It lowers “amplification friction” and allows messages to go viral. The most successful platforms have very low amplification friction, which suggests that low friction is an important ingredient.
What we are learning is that making it trivially easy to amplify anyone’s message enables cancel culture and (I believe) leads to radicalization.
If this is correct, then increasing amplification friction on your platform will lead to less radicalization, at the cost of lowering engagement. My guess is that for this to be successful requires a careful balance of where you land on the higher/lower friction spectrum. Too much friction leads to low engagement which leads to failure. Too little friction leads to uncontrolled amplification which leads to radicalization. So a balance is needed.
Either that, or a totally new idea is needed that turns existing platforms on their head.
Thanks. I think another key part is that social networks get huge. They get thousands of employees, billions in investment, etc. This makes them fragile, and forces them down certain paths. If I stay small then I’m not handicapped by forced expectation of user engagement or growth.
I agree with you about the danger of low friction amplification of messages. My hope is that if users can amplify messages but they get no social credit for it, it will dampen down this behavior.
The suggestion is to use F=PA to measure the car weight, where P is the tire pressure, A is the area the tires in contact with the ground, and F is the unknown: the weight of the car (measured in terms of gravitational force).
I don't think this works. To see why, suppose we make the tires out of a very stiff material. We control the pressure P, but changing the pressure will not change the surface area A. Therefore, by changing P we can set F to whatever we want, which shows that we are not actually measuring the weight of the car. The basic issue here is that the air pressure is not the only thing that is supporting the car.
I don't know how important the stiffness effect is for real tires, but I suspect they are sufficiently stiff that it matters a lot.
I think he nixes your case at the start, when he goes through the sanity check thinking about the flat tire. Also, I think your rigid body case use the walls of the tires to apply force to the care, not the force from the pressure to keep the car static, which is why it fails.
I agree that higher tire pressure results in smaller surface area, but it's not clear to me that the tire itself does not support the car, skewing the result. So I'm not convinced this sanity check is sufficient. For example, as another commenter mentioned, run-flat tires can support the car on stiffness alone.
I agree, the sanity check is not sufficient. It confirms the concept that as pressure decreases, area increases, but is not sufficient to confirm a linear relationship. In the limit, the area clearly does not become infinite when pressure drops to 0.
For the case you suggested above, this is essentially how run-flat tires work. Of course, the sidewall of the tire isn't as stiff as the support ring, but they do provide some support.
He mentions the flat tire, but he ignores the fact the pressure of a flat tire is 0, leading his measuring method concludes that the weight of the car = F = PA = 0A = 0. His measuring method flunks his sanity check, but he never notices.
Let P_m be the pressure recommended by the manufacturer. A better sanity test would be to fill the tires to .75P_m, then to 1.5P_m, and see if the area in contact with the ground has shrunk in half.
With a completely flat tire, the rubber sandwiched under the rim will transfer weight directly from the rim to the floor, so the pressure equation won't apply.
> I don't know how important the stiffness effect is for real tires, but I suspect they are sufficiently stiff that it matters a lot.
It's odd, because as I was reading your comment, I was thinking the exact opposite. I am considering the force it takes to squish a flat tire. A person can squish a (regular car's) flat tire with his/her hands.
My gut-check tells me that the stiffness of each tire can lift less than 10kg/20lbs... multiplied by 4, that still is not a huge contributor to the overall weight.
It’s certainly possible my intuition is wrong. Run-flat tires can support the whole car, but it is possible this support only kicks in at very low pressure.
> “do what the experts say we should, while maintaining a diversity of expert views.”
I don’t think this is an actual strategy. If there is a diversity of views, which experts do you listen to? Also, experts in which field? Epidemiologists have generally recommended very strict shutdowns, but they are not economists and are not experts on the economic ramifications. Some economists agree with strict lockdowns, others do not. So it’s not at all clear what “listen to the experts” means in this case.
The only answer I can come up with for this is a larger team of specialists in the relevant areas combined with a small number of generalists to coordinate between the experts and synthesize the findings.
obviously you listen to the epidemiologist, not the economist. The economist is an expert on the economy and not on pandemics, and therefore will always give advice that is aimed at keeping up the economy and not saving people and preventing the spread of the virus. Its baffling to me that you think an economist has any kind of valid input on this matter. At best an economist could advise you on how to keep the economy afloat under the restrictions the epidemiologists has advised.
We could easily eliminate a greater share of premature deaths if the government sent soldiers to force Americans to exercise at the point of a bayonet. Probably more than will die in this pandemic (~650,000 deaths due to heart disease each year). Does that mean this is a wise course of action? Of course not. The negative consequences in terms of reduction of civil liberties vastly outweighs the medical benefit. The same logic needs to be applied here.
The epidemiologist isn't trained in thinking about the persisting scar on opportunity left by lockdowns. A response to a pandemic that solely cares about limiting lives lost due to the virus stands to inflict massive harm as people lose their jobs and social unrest triggered by the suspension of civil liberties.
Medical professionals are experts in medicine. Not in making holistic decisions about the course of society. They absolutely should have a prominent spot in sharing information with the leaders of society, but their advice needs to be weighed against the costs of carrying out that advice.
Economic problems come with a cost on human life. There are numerous studies and paper that show how bad being poor and unhappy are for a person's health. Why WOULDN'T we consider the economic ramifications?
Maybe we would, but it isn't like there is consensus on economist side. And it isn't like not having a lockdown is good for the economy , because that has clear economical consequences too:
>> At best an economist could advise you on how to keep the economy afloat under the restrictions the epidemiologists has advised.
> Why WOULDN'T we consider the economic ramifications?
He's not saying that. He's talking about who should be giving the marching orders. Let me put it another way: in a war, the generals decide what equipment the military needs and the economists figure out how to produce it. You don't have the economists saying: the economy is good at making buses, it makes sense to us to weld extra armor to them rather than to design a tank from scratch, so go fight the war in armored buses.
But before you go to war, the leaders listen to a diversity of opinions. Could diplomacy work? Could sanctions? What about an alliance prior to war? Could we use covert methods? The problem here is that we waged war without having that discussion. We went straight to the Generals (in our case, epidemiologists) without getting the opinion of the diplomats, allies, covert ops (economists, labor groups, civil rights groups) etc.
> But before you go to war, the leaders listen to a diversity of opinions. Could diplomacy work? Could sanctions? What about an alliance prior to war? Could we use covert methods? The problem here is that we waged war without having that discussion. We went straight to the Generals (in our case, epidemiologists) without getting the opinion of the diplomats, allies, covert ops (economists, labor groups, civil rights groups) etc.
You're leaning a bit too hard on the analogy: you can't negotiate with a virus. The pandemic is more akin to an attack by an irrationally implacable enemy with a couple months advance warning of the threat at the border. In the analogy, the policy options are: resist, Y/N? If Y, then how effectively?
When a country is attacked, does its leadership typically first consult with its economists to determine if resistance is cost effective vs. just letting the enemy take territory or kill citizens with little opposition? Usually the generals evaluate what they can achieve, and if success unachievable, then alternatives are considered. Surrender is always an option, but it's usually towards the bottom of the list.
> When a country is attacked, does its leadership typically first consult with its economists to determine if resistance is cost effective vs. just letting the enemy take territory or kill citizens with little opposition?
Yes, countries very often let the enemy take territory or kill citizens because resistance wouldn't be cost effective. All countries of course try to project the image that they wouldn't, that their territory and the lives of their citizens are priceless. But border skirmishes happen all the time and the vast majority of them don't lead to war.
People's lives and livelihoods are strongly coupled to the economy though. Heavy economic damages result in skyrocketing suicides and homelessness. It's not like shutting down the economy only hurts "gluttonous corporations" and "greedy capitalists"
in a world where losing a job can be just as disastrous to one's health as disease, you really don't think their opinions are valid whatsoever? not everyone has large savings or the ability to work from home.
If Sweden has a significantly higher percentage of the population infected (as they claim) then it doesn’t make sense to compare death rates at this point, because it may be that these other countries will reach the same numbers (infection rate and death rate) later. This is a likely outcome because Sweden’s healthcare system has not been overwhelmed, so it’s not obvious that their policies will lead to excess deaths in the long run. The thing to compare is the final death toll (as well as economic damage), and we don’t know that yet.
Why do you think Norway will eventually approach the same number of infections as Sweden? Norway only has a few hundred active cases left, and is testing 2 times as much than Sweden. They are on their way to normal life in a few weeks. If new outbreaks occur, they are well prepared to isolate them.
You can still compare it to countries like Vietnam, that, at 10 times the population, with a direct border to China and being the first country in they world to have the virus spread outside China, has managed to keep the infection to only ~400 of their citizens, with no deaths at all.
> In 100 years, the only footnote for 2020 will be all the deaths and suffering that this caused. No one will care that you were sad because you couldn't see your friends or go do sports.
It's weird. Why do you empathize with victims of the disease but not with victims of financial hardship? Do you not see people suffering when looking at hour-long lines at food banks and historical unemployment numbers?
Perhaps what will be remembered is the pain of those who were plunged into deep poverty in a New Great Depression that will take us years to recover from.
I definitely empathize with victims of financial hardship, speaking as one! I have zero income right now, and I am not sure where I'll land at the end of this. But financial hardship is solvable -- food, housing, etc. can be handed out. You can't hand out extra lives to victims of the disease. The US government is literally printing trillions of dollars.
In my first-world country, most people I know are either:
- working from home, otherwise normal
- got laid off and are receiving government income, which is pretty modest for doing absolutely nothing.
- working with reduced pay/hours, which is subsidized by the government.
Are people starving? Are people dying on the streets of malnourishment? I don't see that happening.
People are dying in hospitals due to a disease. That pretty much trumps everything else that isn't killing people.
I am sorry to hear you’ve lost your source of income.
> But financial hardship is solvable -- food, housing, etc. can be handed out.
That depends on the size of the handout. At the scale we’re talking about, I’ll just say that I don’t think it’s that simple. It is also without a successful precedent.
> Are people starving?
I don’t think so, but we also know that many people in the US live practically hand to mouth. By now, millions of Americans are probably without any savings or income. See the long lines at food banks for evidence. I expect that the longer this goes on, the more Americans we will see become poor, homeless, and find it difficult to feed their families. I don’t think people will starve, but how will this be resolved? Maybe instead of starving they will go to loan sharks and dig themselves into a hopeless financial hole.
I find it disturbing that you are willing to put all of this aside because you don’t know anyone who is experiencing serious hardship. Do you know anyone who goes to food banks? I don’t, but I know they exist and I don’t want to ignore them and say they will be fine because “we can hand out food”.
> At 2% a day cases double every 5 weeks. Would anyone apply this reasoning to any other disease?
I don't know but maybe the flu [1]? I don't think focusing just on the infection rate is useful.
> Classic psychological denial is clearly operating in force.
I think the denial is in thinking that we can beat the virus by extending the lock down for years (you say "might take two or more years"). It is likely that all we are doing is slowing down the spread, and that it will eventually infect most of the population, stopping only when we reach herd immunity. I say this is likely because this is where we are headed unless we come up with a vaccine or treatment at an unprecedented speed -- not something I would bet on.
If this is indeed where we are headed, it may be better to open up as much as possible short of overwhelming the healthcare system. Note that in many places, the healthcare systems are significantly below capacity (e.g. [2]).
1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art.
2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering.
These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things.
AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year.
I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.