Dam, I really thought this would be much more interesting than it is

People have been doing some cool stuff for like a decade with giving dogs buttons to use human language, something they can seemingly get decent at communicating effectively with if they can get around the pesky issue of not having the sophisticated vocal machinery needed to produce recognizable phonemes, through the power of a good interface for them, even if the output is discretized to the level of words

I thought maybe this would be about creating a way for a dog to create stuff said dog might actually want or enjoy via the more powerful lever of effective long-context natural language processing that came of a similar tokenization approach - which can even sometimes churn out working code - that we have now

Instead it seems to be an exploration of how the capabilities you can produce from essentially random noise from this technology is less distinguishable from the result of thoughtful input than I might have hoped. Still interesting, but way less so

Are you disappointed that the LLM generated random games, or are you disappointed that the dog didn't actually care about the games?

Neither are that surprising to me, tbh.

The LLM being able to generate random games is kinda expected behavior. It's trained on sequence probability distributions that include the code for a great many games and nudged toward doing so by the human user. I'm disappointed that the dog is basically used as a noise generator here. A process driven by the desires of the dog in a meaningful way would be more interesting and at least seems somewhat plausibly technologically feasible, and the article's title kind of implies it. I am especially disappointed because what most excites me about new technologies is applications that were not possible before its invention, which this seemed like it could be an example of

Weird all these companies struggle so much to support remote services, ssh has been working for me pretty seamlessly for like the 20 years I've been using it and has allowed me to remote-control any computer I own with relatively reliable authentication (with some hiccups that tend to be patched pretty rapidly when found) throughout that entire period. I hear tell it worked even before I was using computers professionally, too

Yeah but this is from an AI company so its mad different

Yea I've noticed that most things made by a company are worse and less reliable than things that are free and maintained by volunteers

This has always been the case, for pretty much everything. There's a reason the world's infrastructure runs on FOSS.

SSHing into a terminal with your phone is terrible UX. Very low bandwidth. Voice input into a native app is not. We are not talking about fine grained control of your system by running explicit commands. We are talking about programming in plain English.

Lol. I've been looking at this stuff wondering what the hell I was missing and what it was trying to solve.

I was starting to think I've really fallen behind or something. I feel relief AND horror.

Keypairs are fairly easy to use if you're on a reasonable unix-like OS and if you're not then frankly nothing is easy to use. Unfortunately this does mean that your statement is true for the majority of devices people use to access social media

Yea, the pervasiveness of this analogy is annoying because it's wrong (because a compiler is deterministic and tends to be a single point of trust, rather than trusting a crowdsourced package manager or a fuzzy machine learning model trained on a dubiously-curated sampling of what is often the entire internet), but it's hilarious because it's a bunch of programmers telling on themselves. You can know, at least at a high level of abstraction, what a compiler is doing with some basic googling, and a deeper understanding is a fairly common requirement in computer science education at the undergrad level

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you need or should need a degree to program, but if your standard of what abstractions you should trust is "all of them, it's perfectly fine to use a bunch of random stuff from anywhere that you haven't the first clue how it works or who made it" then I don't trust you to build stuff for me

I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis.

I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again

To "decenter [one's] self worth from [one's] job" would presumably require the fact that one's "access to basic rights is intermediated by a corporate job", no? This is a policy problem that needs to be solved by collective action, not a mindset problem that can be solved by personal growth

No you have to decenter yourself from your pay to achieve it. People accept things like cutting of medicaid because they see their job success as a moral success. There's a lot you can do to start being the good in the world that doesn't require Washington's permission.

I can't parse what distinction you're trying to draw here. When I say "collective action" I mean exactly things like exerting political pressure toward objectives like expanding rather than reducing healthcare coverage provided by governments, such as medicaid. The notion that solutions that involve changing the policy of governments "require[s] Washington's permission" seems to reject the notion that we exert power collectively via democracy, but your proposed example of what someone shouldn't accept suggests that this is an issue of how people fail to see the value in exerting said power, for which the prescription would presumably be doing so? I don't understand what you're driving at or even why you think we're in disagreement

Sorry I think you're completely right, I'm frustrated that collective action here is so hard to come by. I think that we feel really isolated because we don't see ourselves as part of a larger whole and becoming less isolated involves leaving behind this identity tied to our economic output.

One is an operating system maintained and run by a diffuse community of people, (albeit a flavor of linux with the explicit backing of at least one large company), whose primary goal is to create and maintain a functional operating system that can be used by many people for many different purposes. The other is a product whose primary goal is to convince investors that the company is on a growth trajectory that will continue into the next quarter by extracting value from that product's customers. We've now seen decades of data that suggest disparate results stemming from these priorities in a lot of contexts. I think viewed through that lens, the reason is obvious and was inevitable over time no matter what your threshold of "sucks" is, so long as it has something to do with the thing's function as an operating system

I feel vindicated by this article, but I shouldn't. I have to admit that I never developed the optimism to do this for two years, but have increasingly been trying to view this as a personal failing of closed-mindedness, brought on by an increasing number of commentators and colleagues coming around to "vibe-coding" as each "next big thing" in it dropped.

I think the most I can say I've dove in was in the last week. I wrangled some resources to build myself a setup with a completely self-hosted and agentic workflow and used several open-weight models that people around me had specifically recommended, and I had a work project that was self-contained and small enough to work from scratch. There were a few moving pieces but the models gave me what looked like a working solution within a few iterations, and I was duly impressed until I realized that it wasn't quite working as expected.

As I reviewed and iterated on it more with the agents, eventually this rube-goldberg machine started filling in gaps with print statements designed to trick me and sneaky block comments that mentioned that it was placeholder code not meant for production in oblique terms three lines into a boring description of what the output was supposed to be. This should have been obvious, but even at this point four days in I was finding myself missing more things, not understanding the code because I wasn't writing it. This is basically the automation blindness I feared from proprietary workflows that could be changed or taken away at any time, but much faster than I had assumed, and the promise of being able to work through it at this higher level, this new way of working, seemed less and less plausible the more I iterated, even starting over with chunks of the problem in new contexts as many suggest didn't really help.

I had deadlines, so I gave up and spent about half of my weekend fixing this by hand, and found it incredibly satisfying when it worked, but all-in this took more time and effort and perhaps more importantly caused more stress than just writing it in the first place probably would have

My background is in ML research, and this makes it perhaps easier to predict the failure modes of these things (though surprisingly many don't seem to), but also makes me want to be optimistic, to believe this can work, but I also have done a lot of work as a software engineer and I think my intuition remains that doing precision knowledge work of any kind at scale with a generative model remains A Very Suspect Idea that comes more from the dreams of the wealthy executive class than a real grounding in what generative models are capable of and how they're best employed.

I do remain optimistic that LLMs will continue to find use cases that better fit a niche of state-of-the-art natural language processing that is nonetheless probabilistic in nature. Many such use cases exist. Taking human job descriptions and trying to pretend they can do them entirely seems like a poorly-thought-out one, and we've to my mind poured enough money and effort into it that I think we can say it at the very least needs radically new breakthroughs to stand a chance of working as (optimistically) advertised

My days of not believing people's gushing praise about "just works" about any proprietary technology are certainly coming to a middle

It's so funny watching the proprietary OS folks despair as their software falls to pieces to make shareholders richer, meanwhile my Linux distro has "just worked" since 2007. You don't have to keep running on this treadmill, folks.

The delusion of the “Mac just works” crowd is only matched by the delusion of the Linux “year of the Desktop” crowd.

They share the same trait of “it works on my machine, I like it, therefore it’s my identity and everything else is wrong”

I use Linux regularly as a second OS for more than 15 years. Driver compatibility improved, software design and quality didn’t, in fact it suffers more or less the same problems of other mainstream OSs.

Linux on the desktop has been winning because the others got bad at a faster pace, I’m not sure there is anything to be celebrated.

It's probably not worth it to say more than that my experience simply differs from yours. I've found it incredibly unproductive to quibble with people who have jumped to the conclusion that some difference of opinion must stem from some kind of identity-justification/confirmation bias delusion out the gate. This seems to be the most common mindless kneejerk criticism people jump to these days when they're engaging not with the person they're talking to, but a strawman or stereotype they believe that they conceptually represent, which in turn seems to be the most common failure mode of internet argumentation in general. It's interesting to see how the real phenomenon of confirmation bias and some relatively well-respected theories about opinion-as-identity have jumped from psychological literature to being basically pervasive thought-terminating cliches. But I like writing out my thoughts so... against my better judgment I'll write 'em out here. As a treat

My experience with the linux ecosystem overall, which seems consistent with that of the person you're responding to from what little information that post gives, has been of consistent improvement over a long timescale with an increasingly capable stack of open-source software whose exact pieces have shifted with various community and maintainer dramas and the natural process of the birth of new projects and death of old ones over time. I've found that I have my preferences within that ecosystem, like I settled on archlinux as a distro about ten years ago and haven't really seen a strong reason to switch, despite periodically working with other popular ones in the course of a career as a software engineer and researcher. I have strong reasons to prefer a modular, composable operating system that I control, so I wouldn't consider using proprietary software if there's a working FOSS alternative. This is a bias for sure! But I find my frustration with these things has decreased in aggregate over time, even as I've changed tools and suffered switching costs for it numerous times, and dealt with the general hostility with which a lot of manufacturers seem to view open-source software running on their hardware, and their attempts to make this more difficult. However, the aggregate experience of proprietary software users seems to have significantly degraded over the same period. They generally insist that this is still worth it to them over doing what I do, and again I've been in enough dumb internet arguments to know that it's not worthwhile to do more than gently suggest that alternatives exist and may be worth trying unless I know them personally.

I do get a window into proprietary ecosystems nonetheless, because I still don't feel I can replace the use cases required of me on mobile phones with an open-source alternative yet, and have seen my frustrations steadily increase over time with both these and SaaS products that I've been required to use for work. I also got frustrated enough with game consoles that I've entirely switched over to using PCs, running linux, for any games I want to play. At every turn, I have found that while computers are always error-prone in some way or another, and using them extensively will result in some frustration, this is significantly less when I have more control over the computer, and has become less rather than more frequent as open-source projects mature. I can not only observe that my own experience with proprietary products has followed the opposite pattern, but that more and more people talking about tech companies with scorn rather than effusive praise, yelling at their phones, and the public discourse adopting terms like "platform decay", "enshittification", "tech rot", etc all suggest that this is a general trend rather than my biases

Again, your mileage may vary, but I do find it odd that you are so immediately dismissive of this perspective, accusing a pretty innocuous comment about it of reactionary identity-defense basically immediately without engaging at all. If you're inclined to listen to a zealot like me at all, I would only urge you to consider why you have assumed this so quickly, why you are so adamant that this is the only sort of person who could form such an opinion