Every time I visit a third world country it looks much better than ten years ago.
In Europe it's the opposite. It's evolving backwards outside of the tourist hotspots.
>It usually takes me two or three iterations to get there though.
That's the whole problem with AI imo and I think the slot machine analogy is mostly right. It's just not predictable whatsoever and then you won't even be able to review all of the thousands of lines of code that you generate. You never know what you get and this has some serious safety implications that are not acceptable. Yes, it's fine as chat to just generate some snippets here and there that can be easily reviewed. Agentic coding is horrible imo.
?? The chinese are openly calling what they do inspired by the british empire. The turks want to restore their empire. The iranians are in it for the very same reason. This seems very wishful thinking. Not that empires are not zero sum and perfectly dreadfull, but i would call believers in the western alternative limited to europe, japan, sk and canada right now.
I’ve been building a small physical robot arena that anyone can control through a web browser.
There are real Raspberry Pi-powered rovers with cameras, a physical arena, charging stations and cargo modules. When you drive a rover on the website, you’re actually controlling the real robot in my workshop in the Czech Republic.
> in the US, public health messaging stated the opposite, in order to keep as many masks in supply to healthcare workers despite a major shortage of masks
It doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. Programming can still be a challenge with LLM's, but everyone is panicking and skipping the research portion.
I don't like it when people take mumbo-jumbo that can't be pinned down, or measured, or even agreed upon, and try to insist that we should base decision-making on it. It's literally just vibes with extra steps.
The "far more important and consequential" thing you're touting is your ability to make decisions based purely on vibes. And not even consistent, broadly agreed-upon vibes like "murder is pretty bad". It's vibes of the most vile variety: "sentience is what I decided sentience is".
An average internet user is sentient, but a 1996 Nissan ECU isn't. Why? Because I said so. Tremble before my might!
Agreed. In the infosec community it is well known that OpenAI and Anthropic did not hire many security engineers or researchers pre-April 2026. It seems pretty negligent.
There has been a crazy hiring push from both companies to poach security engineers/researchers from Google, Apple, and Meta since Q2/Q3, but the response was incredibly delayed. Many talented security engineers/researchers I know at Apple/Google/Meta (including myself) receiving these offers are worried about taking them due to the risks of criminal/personal liability and the more likely risk of tarnishing their careers.
That relies on anyone being able to lever a "punishment" against an AI or its operators.
Which, in turn, requires that AI oopsie to be survivable.
AI capabilities are rising over time. If there is a limit to just how far they can rise, we're yet to find it. So, a sufficiently advanced "AI oopsie" can solve the AI crime accountability problem for good. Probably not the way you would have wanted it to.
I still rely heavily on plan modes, first to think through product design from the 3-sentence descriptions handed to me as super-complex feature requests, and second to implement the technical requirements I want to build.
Way before AI, I think the first idea, while sparked by inspiration, has always created a local minimum and suggested that something could be done around a problem, but it was rarely the best idea. I think the speed at which the models can turn a bad idea into code will lead to bad, design across systems and interfaces.
I am also very pedantic about how the data models get implemented, and I want to be sure that things are built in the way I want them to. I'm also very pedantic about how specific if statements and dicts are created, and again, the models make it easy to do things a shitty way. These are hard-learned lessons of several decades of shooting myself in the foot and locking myself into less-than-ideal design patterns.
I spent two days going through designing and planning for the LLM to build the actual feature in less than 2 hrs; once it's set, it's lost. It has made testing go very quickly and i am deploying a very complex feature and high risk feature in a 4 days when without the models it would have taken probably 4 weeks to get right.
There is no "proper definition" - or even one that everyone would agree upon. There is no definition of "sentience" that I could operationalize and put into a sentience-o-meter to reliably measure just how sentient a given rock, GPU or an internet user is.
I could try to put together benchmarks to estimate an AI's cyberwarfare capabilities, or instruction-following capabilities, or reward hacking inclinations. As noisy indirect estimates, of course. With philosophical mumbo-jumbo like "sentience", I don't even get that.
Interesting times! What a time to be alive! This is the device I have always wanted! Founders are living in the future! This is Star Trek level! Drop whatever you are doing right now and join this movement!
Or will it be the cumulative total of various advances?
I've equated Claude Code, or Codex, to the looms that made fine fabric more affordable during the Industrial Revolution; life-changing, but not society-changing. Neither the steam engine nor the automobile.
Perhaps I've answered my own question in that it's the LLM technology itself that equates to the steam engine, and it will power superfarm analogs that have yet to emerge. I'm still curious what you think they will be.
"Sentient" is an ill-defined philosophical term that should be considered harmful in technical materials.
But what is clear is that AIs of today are already fairly unpredictable. Most of them aren't capable enough to make that into a major problem. Most of the unpredictable AI weirdness ends in "AI fails to do its job" rather than "AI does something dangerous".
Most. Even today, we already have notable counterexamples.
AIs get more capable over time, so if the intrinsic safety doesn't improve? Expect more of that.
> I've been friends with Jack over 15 years now so I'm inclined to take him at his word
That's all I needed to hear to completely disregard your motivated reasoning.
Edit: I've hit the rate limit, but I'd like to disavow the bad-faith accusations made against me and my account in the replies to this comment.
Second edit: I am not trolling. Why should I take your opinion on LLM code generation seriously when you have been friends with the founder of Anthropic for well over a decade? Obviously you are not in a position to make a rational evaluation of this technology.
And a human is perfectly controllable if you keep him in a sealed metal box with no access to food or air.
It's only by allowing a human out of the box that you make a human dangerous. So: don't do that? Duh. So simple.
The obvious problem is: the same exact things that make a human dangerous make a human useful! You can't reduce human risks to zero without reducing human utility to zero.
An AI given the same exact instructions and tools can go and complete a task you wanted it to. Or it can get sidetracked into breaking out of your sandbox and hacking Pentagon. No way to know in advance.
Today's AIs are still not capable enough to be high risk, even if they go off the rails. But AIs get more capable over time. Potentially to a vastly superhuman degree.
If AI is as powerful as an atomic bomb why could it only manage to kill a couple hundred Iranian school girls? Surely a truly society-shifting technology could manage to execute 1000 innocent children at least.
This incident feels like a marketing stunt. Any company with the skill to build a frontier-level model, also has the skill to contain it until it is ready to share.
Yeah, sure, it's controllable. Because humanity has famously solved the crime accountability problem back in 1902, and no crime has gone unpunished since.
AI is perfectly controllable in a magic fairy land where nothing ever goes wrong. I can't help but notice that we aren't actually in that land.
I would think though not the direct exposure alone? Maybe its also euipment and food/drink getting hot in a workhorse plane? Needs geiger counter direct sampling
