Also none of Aristotle’s exoteric works is extant. All we have are dry, boring lecture notes. Cicero said his public works were a “golden stream of speech” and its all lost. So I don’t see how you’d build an artificial Aristotle when we don’t have any of his polished works meant for the public surviving. Plato would be a better option, since his entire exoteric corpus is extant.
I must have missed the brief somewhere, but there was/is a very clear trend to replace the default male pronoun for gender neutrality with the female pronoun she. Just recently I noticed this in Judea Pearl’s Book of Why. When and why did this start happening? It feels so forced and unnatural. You can sense he’s trying to kiss someone’s ass or appease an authority. At least mix it up a bit at best if you truly give a crap.
I feel like there are clear signs, but either people have cognitive blind spots or are just obstinate. For example, you hear people complain that they've been for a bajillion interviews and still don't get hired (hint: the problem is you), or they're always single even though they go on countless dates (hint: the problem is you) or they're overweight and can't lose weight no matter what they try (hint: the problem is you). Maybe an inability to introspect yourself in an objective way? Maybe a deep seated belief that the problem cannot actually be _you_, it must be an external factor, so you seek that. Maybe you're not being gaslit, maybe the ever-present smell of shit really does emanate from under your shoe.
I don’t actually even know what people are hinting at when they say that LLMs replace the need for building custom models. Regression models? People are using LLMs instead of say building a Bayesian hierarchical model? That’s not possible. Time series modeling using an LLM? Also ridiculous. Recommender systems? Ok maybe, still utterly ridiculous and abysmally slow.
For anything NLP sure, it definitely wins. However, I’ve just recently used some big fancy OpenAI model to actually just label thousands of text data for me, just so I could build a classifier with CatBoost. Guess what, inference speed is at a guaranteed sub 100ms and it costs $0 in tokens. The”AI Engineer” solution here would be just run every classification request through an LLM.
AI Engineering is going to have the same problem we had when Data Science as a term arrived and you had every Statistician saying they’re just re-inventing everything that exists in statistics, poorly.
You're right. For years the real impediment to "AI" products at many companies was the sheer crappiness of ML frameworks which were built by and for grad students, not professional engineers.
When LLMs appeared it was just so much easier to use then as an uber model and leave behind the training and inference infrastructure (if you can even call it that).
Now that LLMs can code I expect we'll be coding up custom model pipelines more and more... but only when we stop subsidizing LLMs.
Like, bro, do you think 5.x is a drop in replacement for 4.1? No it obviously wasn’t, since it had reasoning effort and verbosity and no more temperature setting, etc.
There’s no way you can switch model versions without testing and tweaking prompts, even the outputs usually look different. You pin it on a very specific version like gpt-5.2-20250308 in prod.
In The Laws you find: strict supervision of marriage age, mandatory procreation windows, state monitoring of reproduction, penalties for bachelors, public scrutiny of household conduct, drinking regulation, limits on wealth and inheritance,
formal theology enforced by law, criminal penalties for impiety, special prisons for “atheists”, etc. it goes on and on. The Laws makes The Republic look like Disneyland to be honest.
Not sure how that's possible. Laws may have a lot of strict marriage laws, but in Republic there is no marriage, the state assigns you sex partners in a rigged lottery, and requires the participants to be wearing masks so they can't form anything like an emotional bond. Really.
Absolutely nuts, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I could list several anecdotes here where Claude has solved issues for me in an autonomous way that (for someone with 17 years of software development, from embedded devices to enterprise software) would have taken me hours if not days.
To the nay sayers... good luck. No group of people's opinions matter at all. The market will decide.
I wonder if the parent comments remark is a communication failure or pedantry gone wrong, because like you, claude-code is out there solving real problems and finding and fixing defects.
A large quantity of bugs as raised are now fixed by claude automatically from just the reports as written. Everything is human reviewed and sometimes it fixes it in ways I don't approve, and it can be guided.
It has an astonishing capability to find and fix defects. So when I read "It can't find flaws", it just doesn't fit my experience.
I have to wonder if the disconnect is simply in the definition of what it means to find a flaw.
But I don't like to argue over semantics. I don't actually care if it is finding flaws by the sheer weight of language probability rather than logical reasoning, it's still finding flaws and fixing them better than anything I've seen before.
I can't control random internet people, but within my personal and professional life, I see the effective pattern of comparing prompts/contexts/harnesses to figure out why some are more effective than others (in fact tooling is being developed in the AI industry as a whole to do so, claude even added the "insights" command).
I feel that many people that don't find AI useful are doing things like, "Are there any bugs in this software?" rather than developing the appropriate harness to enable the AI to function effectively.
I think it’s just fear, I sure know that after 25 years as a developer with a great salary and throughout all that time never even considering the chance of ever being unemployable I’m feeling it too.
I think some of us come to terms with it in different ways.
I used to sometimes get stuck on a problem for weeks and then get a budget pulled or get put on another project. Sometimes those issues never did get solved. Or have to tell someone sorry I don't have capacity to solve a problem for you. Now a lot of that anxiety has been replaced with a more can do attitude. Like wouldn't being able to pull off results create more opportunity?
All these so-called safe jobs still depend on someone being able to afford those services. If I don't have a job, I can't go see the vet, the fact that no one else can do the vets job is irrelevant at such a point.
I would like to know if there's some kind of inflection point, like the so-called Laffer curve for taxes, where once an economy has X% unemployment, it effectively collapses. I'd imagine it goes: recession -> depression -> systemic crisis and appears to be somewhere between 30-40% unemployment based on history.
reply