What an impoverished way of looking at relationship. I’m not surprised Boz wrote this one—someone with a reputation of being high friction and being hard to work with.
I couldn’t imagine thinking of relationships so transactionally, like every moment I spend with someone is just increasing or decreasing my score with them. There is very little room in this tersely communicated philosophy for intimacy and vulnerability, and in fact, the “hard feedback” he mentions can only be delivered successfully within the context of a trustful relationship.
It can be an exhausting way to view relationships, but I think it’s true. I’d argue there also is plenty of room for intimacy and vulnerability when it’s genuine. I think people appreciate these traits when they are genuine and appropriate, and prefer it to a fake aura of confidence
Yes, viewing relationships transactionally is not good for either participant. But I think you have taken a rather distorted view of the article - and there’s a more charitable way to view this than a brutal utility optimization:
> someone comes with a question and leaves feeling small, they’ll stop asking. If they bring you a hard problem and you meet it with curiosity, you’ll get more of those. If you always solve things for people, they’ll outsource their judgment. If you always critique, they’ll start hiding the work.
I take this as a reminder that my off-hand remarks to people can really make a difference. I don’t think that is “impoverished” at all.
It’s always important to remember what your position is when making off hand remarks.
An off the cuff comment to a friend or a colleague where you are both equal in stature/responsibility - probably fairly harmless. But important to also remember that you often don’t know what someone else is going through.
An off the cuff comment when you are the CEO or CTO to someone junior - potentially catastrophic for them.
> like every moment I spend with someone is just increasing or decreasing my score with them
This is more of a statement about the other person, especially if true, than the person trying to estimate the score, who is just trying to model their world as accurately as possible.
If you don't like it, the only thing you can do is try to be more complicated than a single score yourself.
If it is in fact a good model of most human, then there is nothing you can do to change it, and being angry at the person who made you aware of the model doesn't help either.
This is the rule - with the notable exceptions being the people that that society lionizes as “good” or “empathetic” or “kind.” For example MLK, Fred Rogers, Steve Irwin, Bob Ross etc…. these are people whose avatars demonstrate relational capabilities that transcend transactional.
In day to interactions with people in modern industrial society, 99% of the interaction is transactional by default. However if you look around you’ll notice that again the plurality of relationships are transactional at their root.
This is in contrast to transcendental relationships, like the achievable ideal relationship between parent and child, between siblings or romantic partners.
This is especially true for people who got into a position of power via “climbing the ladder”
The ladder in this case is made up of other people that you step on in order to get to the next rung in the ladder.
Transactionalism is ultimately the foundational basis for capitalism and our existing social order globally, and unfortunately also the root of all evil.
Right, but Linus also has an extremely refined mental model of the project he maintains, and has built up a lot of skills reading code.
Most engineers in my experience are much less skillful at reading code than writing code. What I’ve seen so far with use of LLM tools is a bunch of minimally edited LLM produced content that was not properly critiqued.
This looks more worrying than impressive. It's long files of code with if-statements and flag-checking unicode bit patterns, with an enormous number of potential test-cases.
It's not conceptually challenging to understand, but time consuming to write, test, and trust. Having an LLM write these types of things can save time, but please don't trust it blindly.
I see dividing the tests and code into two different changes is pretty nice, In fact I have been using double agent thing where one is writing tests and other is writing the code, solves the attention issue also. Although the code itself looks harder to read, but that is probably more on me than Claude.
I have a weakly held conviction (because it is based on my personal qualitative opinion) that Google aggressively and quietly quantizes (or reduces compute/thinking on) their models a little while after release.
Gemini 2.5 Pro 3-25 benchmark was by far my favorite model this year, and I noticed an extreme drop off of quality responses around the beginning of May when they pointed that benchmark to a newer version (I didn't even know they did this until I started searching for why the model degraded so much).
I noticed a similar effect with Gemini 3.0: it felt fantastic over the first couple weeks of use, and now the responses I get from it are noticeably more mediocre.
I'm under the impression all of the flagship AI shops do these kinds of quiet changes after a release to save on costs (Anthropic seems like the most honest player in my experience), and Google does it more aggressively than either OpenAI or Anthropic.
This is a common trope here the last couple of years. I really can't tell if the models get worse or its in our heads. I don't use a new model until a few months after release and I still have this experience. So they can't be degrading the models uniformly over time, it would have to be a per-user kind of thing. Possible, but then I should see a difference when I switch to my less-used (wife's) google/openAI accounts, which I don't.
Only tangentially relevant, but I’ve dealt with mouth and gut microbiome issues my whole life, the latter exacerbated by a strong antibiotic I had to go on in mid 2017 for a super resistant staph infection. L Reuteri supplementation and “L Reuteri yogurt” was one of those alternative methods I read about (though I’m skeptical that reuteri is the dominant strain in this “yogurt”)
Doctors don’t really care to look at these kinds of issues. It took years of suffering and autoimmune issues (particularly muscle spasms and joint pain) alongside gut problems before I demanded a gastroenterologist test me for H pylori and SIBO: I was positive for both.
H pylori was a painful treatment process, but I cleared it after one round of quad therapy. SIBO on the other hand, a condition I think we hardly understand, has been hard to deal with. Many rounds of rifaximin with very minimal relief and no real answer as to how to deal with it.
Doctors are hesitant to help, so I’ve resulted to a lot of personal experimentation to deal with it. The only thing that ever worked (and it’s just anecdata so unsure) was sulbultiamine supplementation, but I can’t actually get that anymore and normal thiamine doesn’t help.
This is all to say: I think microbiome is supremely important to health, very few things seem to really impact it, and doctors are hesitant to deal with these systems at all. I’m sure FMTs will become much more popular for a variety of conditions, but it seems like it’s a real risk where not only might someone else’s microbiome not be a fit for your physiology, but you could be inheriting a variety of risks the donor is susceptible to but you are not.
I am not a doctor and much of what I’m saying may be wrong. Don’t quote me please.
Japan seems to love creating fat soluble forms of thiamine. I've been experimenting with a form of thiamine called TTFD. TTFD is synthetic, there's a natural form called allithiamine, derived from garlic. There's also another form called benfotiamine. All of these are fat soluble and highly highly available forms of thiamine. TTFD in particular is associated with paradoxical effects where a person can have a temporary worsening of thiamine deficiency symptoms when first consuming TTFD. Thiamine is generally considered very safe, but these supplements are pretty hefty doses, so I would suggest treading lightly.
There's also some thinking amongst some doctors that sub-clinical thiamine deficiencies being more common than most doctors realize [0] [1]
[0] Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition
> Doctors don’t really care to look at these kinds of issues
Perhaps for good reasons?
The science is messy, there are few proven interventions and every woowoo worrywart will be pestering their doctor. Your doctor is in an unenviable position.
With doctors in New Zealand, my one trick is to find good specialists and pay them privately.
I believe that a GP only helps point you in the right direction. Our public health system is mostly too overloaded to help (unless you have a critical problem and your GP helps you get in a queue).
Not sure what helps in other countries.
But I 100% agree that you need to take responsibility for healing yourself. Only you have the motivation, and the context and experience to judge your own problems -- however one needs to take care not to get caught in irrelevant or misleading deadends (especially when mislead by corporations or alternative woowoo freaks).
> Doctors don’t really care to look at these kinds of issues. It took years of suffering and autoimmune issues (particularly muscle spasms and joint pain) alongside gut problems before I demanded a gastroenterologist test me for H pylori and SIBO: I was positive for both.
I went through a similar post-antibiotics gut nightmare. There are good doctors and there are bad doctors and like everything, there are fewer good ones than bad+average ones.
Seems like you got testing and treatment eventually, I'm sorry it didn't work better; I'm replying less for you and more for anyone who encounters similar. Shop around for your docs!
I got tested very quickly for both H Pylori and SIBO in 2019 on doctor suggestions, I'd never heard of either. Sounds like this was probably around the same time as you went through this based no the antibiotic course that messed up your gut being in 2017).
I went to three doctors in six months, the one that did the testing was the second one. The one who was confident in their knowledge but didn't do anything, including the testing -> immediate no-return-visit from me. The one who said "we don't really know how this works" but also didn't do anything -> no return visit, but appreciate the candor. The one I went back to is the one who said "we don't really know how this works, but let's test for these other things we've learned more about recently, and let's also try some experimental/off-label things." I was actually negative for both of those things, so there was even more random stuff beyond that, but the only one the doctor I liked was really resistant to was a poop transplant, though personally... seems like the only known way to repopulate some of the shit, pun intended.
Can you actually provide any proof, even top-line stats from GitHub or other software forges that show the productivity boost you’re claiming?
It’s not up to the skeptics to prove this tech doesn’t work, it’s up to the proponents to show it does and does so with a similar effect size as cigarettes cause lung cancer.
There are a tremendous amount of LLM productivity stans on HN but the plural of anecdote is not data.
Certainly these tools are useful, but the extent to which they are useful today is not nearly as open and shut as you and others would claim. I’d say that these tools make me 5% more productive on a code base I know well.
I’m totally open to opposing evidence that isn’t just anecdote
I think it’s pretty obvious that is the OP automates this manual part of their workflow that it will improve their iteration speed. The thread root is just saying stop copy and pasting and use the built in tooling to communicate with the LLM apis
They aren’t responding to thread roots extended comment, just the first part about the tone and rhetoric of AI proponents. Your comment isnt really a response to anything in their comment.
It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization within software during these nascent moments of LLM deployment. Software engineers seem totally resigned toward reduced salary and employment instead of just organizing labor while still in control of the development of these systems.
I really don't get it -- is it that people think these technologies will be so transformative that it is most moral to race toward them? I don't see much evidence of that, it's just future promises (especially commensurate with the benefit / cost ratio). When I do use this tech it's usually edutainment kind of curiosity about some subject matter I don't have enough interest in to dive into--it's useful and compelling but also not really necessary.
In fact, I don't really think the tech right now is at all transformative, and that a lot of folks are unable to actually gauge their productivity accurately when using these tools; however, I do not believe that the technology will stay that way, and it will inevitably start displacing people or degrading labor conditions within the only economically healthy remaining tranche of people in America: the white collar worker.
I've been writing software for 30 years, a part of it had success in the sense of being widely known and adopted for a long time. Writing software is difficult, consumes time and is difficult as you get older to focus the needed time away from other matters like a professional life and family.
With LLM, my productivity suddenly went up x25 and was able to produce at a speed that I had never known. I'm not a developer any more, instead feels like project manager with dedicated resources always delivering results. It isn't perfect, but when you are used to manage teams it isn't all that different albeit the results are spectacularly better.
My x25 isn't just measured on development, for brainstorming, documentation, testing, deployment. It is transformative, in fact: I think software is dead. For the first time I've used neither a paper notebook nor even an IDE to build complex and feature-complete products. Software isn't what matters, what matters is the product and this is what the transformation part is all about. We all here can write products in languages we never had contact with and completely outperform any average team of developers doing the same product.
Replaces the experts and domain specific topics? Not yet. Just observe that the large majority of products are boringly simple cases of API, UI and some business logic inside. For that situation, it has "killed" software.
You'd be surprised what you can do with Claude Code. Pick any mature programming language, including niche ones like Ada and treat the project seriously. Write detailed agent files, features spec files, start from the bottom with CI/CD and set up a test suite, coding guidelines, static analysis. Be careful to create a consistent architecture and code base early.
You'll get a lot further and faster than you'd expect.
Things will probably plateau as you master the new tech, but it's possible you'll not write a ton of code manually along the way.
Oh, your general software development experience should help with debugging the weird corner cases.
I imagine it's really hard to do this with 0 software dev experience, for example. Yeah, you'll build some simple things but you'll need and entire tech education to put anything complex in prod.
That is correct. I'm able to steer the project and find many of the issues because of experience. Also, it is indeed a new tool so is necessary to change our own mentality about the way how code is created (generated). In overall it is fantastic despite the occasional frustration when the computer hangs (too many compilers at the same time) or when AI gets lazy and tries to avoid implementing what it was asked.
Using Claude code Pro with a maxed subscription and ChatGPT Codex with the business subscription.
The code is written in Dart and never wrote a line of DART in my life, I'm a veteran expert around Java, C++. The reason for choosing DART is simply because it is way readier for multi-platform contexts than Java/C++. The same code base now runs on Linux, Android, iOS, OSX, Windows and Web (as static HTML). Plus the companion code in C++ for ESP32 microcontrollers. It also includes a CLI for running as linux server.
Don't ask me for a hard analysis and data proving x25 performance increase, what I know is that an off-grid product was previously taking me two years of research/effort to build in Android/Web and get a prototype running. Now in about a month went far above all previous expectations (cached maps with satellite imagery, bluetooth mesh, webRTC, whatever apps) and was able to release a product several times per day that works as envisioned. Iterating quickly and getting direct feedback from users.
IMHO, Codex is far superior at the moment for complex tasks, Claude is cheaper and still good enough quality for most tasks. In addition to keep several terminals with tasks in parallel, this gives me time throughout the day for other tasks with family/friends and a lot of motivation like a coding-buddy to try different routes and quickly implement a prototype instead of always being alone doing this kind of work. For example, it added an offline GPT bot but wasn't what was needed so could quickly discard it too.
These tools get lost on API implementations and the documentation folder is mostly there to provide the right context when needed. I've learned to use simple markdown documents with things to keep in mind like "reusable.md" or "API.md" to make sure it won't reinvent them. Given my experience, there are parts that I'd implement with higher quality on my own, the trade-off is that I can't touch the code by myself now. One of the reasons is that it would make more difficult for these AI to work since my naming and file structure would make it difficult for the AI to work with, the other reason is because I don't want to waste a full day on a single problem like before. As the product grows more stable is when more attention is given to the finer details. On early stages, that type of quality is still more than good enough for me.
You can try the Android or Linux versions if you are so inclined. Never in my life would I ever be able to build so much in 5 weeks.
Would you describe this product as a whole application suite (blogging, calendar, commerce) plus its own backend infrastructure that is capable of serving these apps to the public internet and functioning offline via ad-hoc wireless peer-to-peer, with a cryptographic layer providing identity, security and censorship resistance, and that runs on phone, laptop or raspberry pi?
Quite ambitious.
Is this an LLM hallucinating? taking a break from coding? or leaking your personal desktop session?
I've answered in more detail on the other reply below on the conversation. Thank you for spotting that.
> Would you describe this product as a whole application suite
The rabbit hole goes even further. The reason why callsigns are used is because geogram can happily communicate using radio-waves on walkie-talkies without internet at all. On the previous iterations (before AI) it was sending free SMS using walkie-talkies and satellites (APRS), this current incarnation should soon be doing the same things too. A presentation from two months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb_VUSaNw8k
This is a niche app, written for our community in Portugal to connect with each other.
Would you say you’re able to draw a diagram of the application architecture out of your head or do you treat it as a black box? Do you need an AI to debug issues or not? In my experience with spec driven development, even if reviewing every single PR, it is hard to develop a mental model of the codebase structure unless you invest on it. It might be fine to treat it as a black box, not arguing the opposite but will all software be a black box in the future?
For a completely new project it is a high risk. While the AI is fantastic at brainstorming and writing detailed architecture, it is difficult to get the "big picture" and even more difficult to verify that it is being done correctly or which things can be improved/reused, because on this situation you don't look into the code.
I don't believe people will spend time looking at the code beyond the small blurbs they can read from the command line while talking with the AI, so I agree with you that it ends being treated as a blackbox.
Did an experiment for a server implementation in Java (my strong language), gave the usual instructions and built up the server. When I went to look into the code, it was a far smaller and more concise code base than what I would write myself. AI is treating programming language on the level of a compiler for javascript, it will make the instructions super efficient and uses techniques that on my 30 years experience I'm not able to pair-review because we tend to have our own patterns of programming while these tools use everything, no matter how exotic they will use it to their advantage.
After that experience I don't look at generated source code any longer. For me it is becoming the same as trying to look at compiled binary data.
Part of being in a union tends to be lawyering up and "nailing down" exactly what everyone's duties in detail and what fair compensation might be, and what terms / conditions might be etc.
Personally I don't think they're a great fit for the software industry where the nature of the job and the details are continuously changing as technology evolves.
But what are you negotiating about? What do all tech workers have in common that wouldn't be better addressed with top level regulations like "right to disconnect"?
The outsized pay for software engineers in the US takes into account a lot of this stuff. Would you trade those 100 things for, say, a salary of $75k a year for a senior software engineer, like they have in Europe?
Meh. The rest of the world also doesn't have big salaries for software devs. The US is the outlier.
It's not just the labor regulations holding Europe back, it's the lack of funding due to not having a unified European digital market.
Netflix Europe needs to have 20+ licensing deals. Selling across Europe at a large scale requires interactions with 20+ legal teams. Language and cultural barriers kill a lot of things.
How do US giants thrive in Europe, then?
Because they come in directly giant-sized based on growth in the US. They either ignore European legal compliance until sued or pay peanuts for them to handle all the legal aspects.
All those sorts of protections seem like they make sense for every worker rather than being "tech" specific. I do understand that collective bargaining could help with carving out sector-specific deals, though.
I wonder if there is a difference in context that explains why we might disagree. I'm in Australia where I think it's politically easier to "add" broad top level protections for all workers than it would be in the US.
Yeah, the legal framework (Taft-Hartley) in the US is pretty explicit about banning general strikes and solidarity strikes. A union can organize within a single industry but not beyond that.
Before I get into it: what careers do you think are most compelling? Especially if you think all white collar work is going to be undermined by this technology.
I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here:
LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs).
The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications.
For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate.
... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anything that can be described tersely that is novel and therefore valuable unfortunately has very little value practically because the seed of the short descriptor is sort of a private key of an idea itself: it will seed the idea into reality by labor of LLMs, but all that is needed for that seed's maturation is the original phrase. These would be like trade secrets, but also by virtue of something existing out there, its replication becomes trivial since that product's patterns are visible and copyable.
In this way, the only real outcome here is that LLMs entirely replace human labor including decision making or are tools to real human operators but not replacements.
I'm curious how this seed/hash/prompt of an idea relates to ladders of abstraction?
Consider "Uber, but for X"
This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber.
I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ???
Maybe something like (just spitballing)
The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?
Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work?
Hmm
Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?
> Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?
Yeah, this feels right. It's like a process of condensing: new ideas brought to life condense metaphors into more compact forms and so make language more dense and expressive. This idea reminds me of Julian Jaynes's description of metaphor condensation in Origin of Consciousness.
A lot of hard work goes into novel products, but once that work has been proven, it is substantially more trivial for human or machine to copy. Groping around in the darkness of new, at the edge of what-could-be is difficult work that looks simple in hindsight to others who consider that edge a given now.
> The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?
Yeah, I think that naming and grouping things, then condensing them (through portmanteau construction or other means) is an underrated way to learn. I call this "personal taxonomy," and it's an idea I've been working on for a little bit. There is just tremendous value in naming patterns you personally notice, not taking another person's or group's name for things, and most importantly: allow those names to move, condense, fall away, and the like.
I left out a piece of my fragment above wherein I posit that a more constrained form of natural language to LLMs would likely lead to better results. Constraining interaction with LLM to a series of domain-specific metaphors, potentially even project specific givens, might allow for better outcomes. A lot of language is unspecific, and the technical documents that would truly detail a novel approach to an LLM require a particularly constrained kind of language to be successful where ambiguity is minimized and expressiveness maximalized (legal documents attempt at minimal ambiguity). I won't go into details there, I'm likely poorly reiterating a lot of the arguments that Dijkstra made here:
If programmers think they can just learn a trade, they’ll bein for a rude awakening when Elon comes for their jobs next. Optimus will be doing your plumbing by the time you graduate from trade school and get your paper and internships.
Unfortunately, it's futile to try to convince the median HN poster that labor organization could help them. They've drunk the entire pitcher of corporate anti-union koolaid.
People could be directly in the middle of losing their own job or taking on the responsibilities of 5 other laid-off coworkers, and they would still ask "what could a labor union possibly do for me??"
Big tech laid off 150,000 people last year despite constantly beating wall st expectations and blowing more money than the Apollo program on a money losing technology with the stated goal of firing even more people. Totally insane that most people I talk to still don’t think they need a union.
1. Like most labor organizing, I think this would be beneficial for software engineers, but not long-term beneficial for the world at large. More software that is easier to make is better for everybody.
Would you still want to live in a world where your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick, or where overseas Whatsapp calls cost $1 per minute, because they have to be connected by a chain of operators?
2. Software engineering is a lot easier to move than other professions. If you want to carry people from London to New York, you need to cater to the workers who actually live in London or New York. If you want to make software... Silicon Valley is your best bet right now, but if SV organizes and other places don't, it may not be your best bet any more. That would make things even worse for SV than not organizing. Same story applies to any other place.
Sure, companies won't more overnight, but if one place makes it too hard for AI to accelerate productivity, people will either go somewhere else, or that place will just end up completely outcompeted like Europe did.
This would potentially be true for a lot of tech in the last five decades or so. When it gets cheaper to make the things people need and want without those needs and wants changing, you can get away with paying people a lower real wage for the same productivity. Couple that with the fact that the workers themselves also have typically grown more productive from the same tech, allowing companies to undercut competitors and capture more market share until everyone else catches on. I figure capital has benefited enormously from recent tech, very possible it captured the majority of the excess money produced.
I don't think that's possible to analyze for most technologies. How could we determine the effect of, say, OLED technology specifically on workers' real wages across the economy? Even doing the same for a particular seller's margin, say LG, would be difficult and wouldn't tell the full story. If you have an idea of how to do that for something let me know.
We'd probably want to use a measure of worker productivity itself as a proxy for technological improvements and look at various measures like real wages in relation to it rather than restricting our analysis to any one technology.
Small newspapers full of classified ads used to be available locally around the world, creating local employment. Google and Meta ravaged that and sucked the money out to a handful of shareholders and tens of thousands of highly paid tech workers. That's just one market.
> It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization
Never lived in the US, where I assume you are from. It's the same country that contrary to most countries, does not have May 1st as a Holiday. Same country that has states with at will employment, etc etc.
I wish I knew which union to pitch. All I can say is what I know which is if you are dispirited with this state of affairs a great way to figure out where to go with it is to connect with your local democratic socialists of america branch, or maybe the joint union dsa effort:
Yes, labour unions are immoral. Curtailing growth (especially in industries where it can prevent unnecessary death) for your personal needs is plain evil. I say that as someone who is both very stressed by pressure to sustain my family while cushy life is slipping away.
I’ve been working on a product for a little while that Ivan Illich would call a “convivial tool,” one that doesn’t take from the user but makes them more effective, independent, and creative from its use. I’ve been interested in these kinds of tools for a long time, but I feel some sense of urgency in the LLM era, where I’ve already seen peers lose their edge by offloading the cognitive work.
I’ve been interested in these kinds of tools for a while, that actually act as a bicycle for the mind. Most apps forgo the metacognitive and emotional labor that actually helps people learn effectively in favor of gamification because 1. Modeling these skills is hard 2. The first step to building effective learning habits is to restore the so-called “learn drive” which is the love of learning, play, and tinkering that underlies most effective learning and gamification does so but on an artificial level.
There is so much content out there, and a sufficiently motivated person will find it and make meaning out of it. Most people are not motivated and don’t know how to motivate, meander, explore without gritting teeth, and I think you’ll probably just see churn without gamification unless you deal with that side of the process.
Since I've tried to ship such tools before and ultimately failed, I’m explicitly not doing the whole SV fail fast and iterate thing here: I’m meandering, taking my time, letting motivation move me when it strikes versus going for the easiest or most obvious thing.
(also sorry if this is itself meandering: I’m lifting while typing this on my phone)
"Offloading the cognitive work" - maybe some people become less with AI - think of akin to a calculator.
I'm brilliant.
I do math better with a calculator. So does everyone, my brilliance doesn't change that I am human, a calculator will not forget to carry a one to oversimplify, it is smarter to accurate use a calculator to do math problems... is there something wrong with that?
It's probably good for young people to learn to do arithmetic by hand. I think you'd lose some important cognitive ability if you never learned arithmetic other than to punch things into a calculator. Not so much because of arithmetic itself, but because you learn how to do careful step-by-step operations, surely an important general cognitive ability.
Once you can do it by hand, by all means use a calculator for speed and accuracy.
This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?
I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:
1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):
> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.
Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.
2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
>this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts
I think this attitude, that the work the CDC and other boring agencies do is elitist, or that those who defend it are elitist, is the root of distrust. The fact is that these agencies do the long slogging boring work to establish what works and what doesn’t, only to be undermined in social media for clicks and ad impressions.
The CDC had a very good reputation around the world for the work it did. Since covid everyone on the internet is somehow a health expert and the actual people doing the mountains of boring and thankless work are now seen as nothing more than gatekeepers to the social media platforms.
On the recommendation of the CDC, large outdoor events were canceled because of the risk of disease spread. Then came the BLM protests and the CDC said "no, actually those are different." If you want to be a scientific authority, you must avoid saying things that anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit.
As far as I can tell, this is false. The CDC did not offer guidance which said that protests should be treated differently from other outdoor events. If you can demonstrate otherwise, please do so.
>anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit
I’m not familiar with the facts of your anecdote, but clearly the CDC is a government agency and banning protests would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of speech, you would depend on the Supreme Court to get an exception.
It really is amazing that we've decided as a society that government bureaucrats and adjunct faculty are the elites of society while billionaires like Musk and Trump and the children of dynasties like RFK are counter-elite populists.
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.
It is impossible for every citizen to fully understand every scientific issue. Part of living in a society—in fact, one of the primary purposes of living in a society—is having different people specialize in different things, and trusting each other to actually be good at what they specialize in.
None of this implies that people don't know enough to vote.
Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the available evidence suggests that a major part of the problem right now is people's votes being suppressed and people being poorly represented by their supposed representatives (both due to deliberate gerrymandering, and more simply due to the fact that the size of the House of Representatives was capped in the early 20th century, leading to one person representing hundreds of thousands or more, rather than the ~10k or so each they represented prior to the cap).
You don’t think it’s more one party spending 40 years undermining Institutions to be able to gut them starting with Reagan’s “The Most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”? partially caused by the business elite working to gain influence over government since the Powell memo and partially caused by irrational fear of communism via socialism and partially by conservatives never wanting another Nixon and starting their own mouthpiece with Fox News, etc etc?
Reagan's words resonated because the public already believed them. He is not the cause. The public's fear of government power is not remotely irrational. It is the responsibility of the government to maintain public trust, not the responsibility of the public to trust their authority.
The Powell Memorandum (1971) explicitly building the case for business takeover of democracy (by in many ways undermining/sabotaging the public's belief in the United States as a government), for the record, was a decade old when Reagan was in office (1981).
The Powell Memorandum is famous for being incredible explicit, for the scope & scale of how and where it would seek to dominate and control the media and abuse courts, for example. But no, even 1971 was not the first business plot to takeover the government, to foment dissent to try to rip the nation apart & assert a capitalist / oligarchical government on/against these United States.
I agree the government has the obligation to maintain the trust of it's people. But my heavens, it is deeply woefully & sad that there is such a loud angry butter popular political party whose axis is revanchist hatred of the state. It's not grounded, it's not trying for better, it's not honest: it's a constant attack on the USA at all levels, and the party exists only because that is the only message most rich people will fund: the Powell Memorandum style plot to get rid of as much government as possible.
Reagan's words against the government are indeed old ideas. Part of a long scary tradition against the state.
There is no smoke filled room. The government lost public trust by sucking. It turned itself into a bureaucratic hellscape for rent seeking lawyers (of which the number has gone up 3x since 1970). to feed on. Its model of restricting supply of necessary commodities like housing and then subsidizing them has reached its limit. They lost public trust because they don't deserve it.
There's people who want a government, want to do good, want governance.
But if they also have to win the hearts and minds, ongoingly, against an advanced persistent threat of disinformation networks and the most well funded US citizens, working for a Powell Memorandum revolt of the elites, well...
It sure seems like doing governance is much much much harder than it used to be. The enemies of the state are making it much most costly, creating a vast unrest that saps constant energy and attention.
I can't 100% disagree with you. But there's been 50 years of well spoken plot to overburden the government and topple the state's ability to act. Whatever people are feeling today has certainly been deeply shaped by the centuries of the rich & their opposition to democracy & governance. That seems more clear and present than ever, seems so clear that people have been lead so strongly to dissent. We don't have any control groups to assess this by. But pleading that it's all genuine, none of this is manufactured, that it's all objectively deserved: I cannot imagine polarizing yourself so hard as to deny the air we breath, the information environment we've drowned in with Hastert Rule democracy, tiny little Tea Party shenanigans ruling the airwaves (vs vastly bigger No Kings getting barely mentions), and the Grok-goverened brave new X world. The propaganda of dissent and obstruction has been working, and it has fed and shaped and sharpened the crusade against the United States as a competent capable governing entity.
> There's people who want a government, want to do good, want governance.
It makes absolutely no difference what people want to do if they are not effective at it. I just look at the evidence here and the government is much more dysfunctional in Democrat run areas. Here's a Democrat voting economist admitting it: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-sta...
How can you blame the problem on republicans if it is worse where they have the least control? The current governance problems in the US are 100% a self-own.
Why have Americans lost faith in institutions? Because other institutions convinced them to.
Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. This has been an organized effort for decades. It's embarrassing how "out in the open" the endeavour has been the whole time, that it can hardly be called a conspiracy.
Fox News was created because they didn't want another Watergate-level scandal be able to make R presidents lose popularity. It's surprising how effective it is.
There's definitely a Science communication problem because Science isn't about who is saying the things, but facts speak for themselves. The reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of what people say is far more important than who they are or where they come from, or whether they live on the coasts or in the "heartland" or whatever.
It's a real problem that there are a lot of ignorant people in the US that cultivate and defend themselves from the "other"--those elite liberals. They make it about identity and in-group dynamics rather than about facts.
The rest of your comment is just flat-out attack against all institutions and government without even considering whether this evil "bureaucracy" is just another mundane structure to administer the boringness of a functioning government.
> I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
I mean, come on. Trump called COVID a "Democrat hoax" just weeks into the pandemic. Pile that on top of thousands of other lies and anti-science bullshit. Trump didn't build the bus that's carrying us off the cliff, but he and his supporters in the media have the gas pedal to the floor. They love people being ignorant and misinformed, and it's disgusting.
Can you point to prominent examples of it from a nontrivial number of major figures in the actual sciences? (As in, not in pop science, nor media figures merely reporting on science.)
Personally, I've never seen this supposed condescension. I've seen a lot of people claim it exists, but so far as I can tell, it's just a meme, a self-reinforcing narrative. Its only external support seems to be that people are upset that they can't actually understand scientific papers without....spending time learning what the terms mean and possibly getting a background education in the subjects they're talking about.
But that's not condescension. That's just scientists doing science and people expecting everything in the world to be simple enough to be understood in a sound bite.
So...not taking a vaccine because one doesn't like the attitude of people recommending it. Yet the "elites"--whoever the hell they are--have the attitude problem.
Do these people also believe the Earth is flat because Galileo was a poophead?
It's about time we call people who reflexively believe the opposite of whatever the "left" or the "progressives" say by their true names: right-wing reactionaries.
I’ve been working on a learning / incremental reading tool for a while, and I’ve found LLM and LLM adjacent tech useful, but as ways of resolving ambiguity within a product that doesn’t otherwise show any use of LLM. It’s like LLM-as-parser.
While I don’t think proper pluralization is indicative of anything outside of real world time constraints, I am a fan of these kinds of tacit signals.
Last week, my wife and I toured a school for our daughter. The school gave us these pretty notebooks with a blackwing pencil, saying that they “take writing seriously here.” I noticed that the students, however, did not use blackwings but cheap low quality yellow pencils. This signal prompted me to pay closer attention, and I found half a dozen things that affirmed the bad feeling I had about the place.
It’s a simple rule, but in the era where everyone is trying to sell me, I use Bill Hamilton’s Say Mean Do rule from his “Saints and Psychopaths” about finding real spiritual mentors. Broadly: saints say what they mean and do what they say. Unfortunately it’s probably just as hard to find tech companies who are honest as it is to find a true spiritual mentor. B2B SaaS sales cycle is usually just checkbox hunting and CYA.
I couldn’t imagine thinking of relationships so transactionally, like every moment I spend with someone is just increasing or decreasing my score with them. There is very little room in this tersely communicated philosophy for intimacy and vulnerability, and in fact, the “hard feedback” he mentions can only be delivered successfully within the context of a trustful relationship.
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