Wow, that was. impressive :-)
A few random thoughts I had while reading this, in more or less the order they appeared:
1. The relation/connection between optimization and the hedonistic treadmill
2. That this combination of enthusiasm, curiosity, intelligence, rigor and inventiveness/creativity would be exactly what I would look for in a technical co-founder
3. What other parameters that we don't know about or are in a different dimension than those mentioned here (ingredients, amount, time etc.) would also push the needle?
4. This is why we can have nice things :-)
I think the great advantage of AI in software is that it enables you to create code faster. I think that the great disadvantage is that it tempts you to create code incredibly faster.
If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails
Forget AI, if you could time travel and just bring an iPhone back to the late 70's it would look like a science fiction fantasy. An alien artifact.
It's interesting to wonder if the next 50 years of computing will be the same. Will a device from 2075 make what we have today seem like primitive toys? No doubt we'll have full blown AGI by then, which may be the major difference, and we'll (or rather our kids) will look back with nostaligia on these LLMs which seemed so revolutionary at the time, but severely limited and flawed, just a hint of what is going to come.
The LLMs are the philosophical "box of all conversation" trick, that's not intelligence, it just went from a neat philosophical device to explain why Turing's test doesn't do what you think intuitively it would do to a real world thing that is a mix of fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem.
Ah, yes, the program that's "not intelligent" yet somehow turns in gold-medal results at international math and programming competitions designed to identify and test the smartest human students. Is that sentiment supposed to make us feel smart?
If anything, the closest thing we have to Byte in 1975 is /r/localllama in 2026. Believe me, there was no shortage of old men in 1975 who didn't get it, either.
I think that is a valid opinion, but don't think there is any conclusive evidence to make it a valid fact (while of course not disagreeing with "fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem" part). Would be happy to learn otherwise.
I think what the parent comment was hinting at is that there is no absolute separator between a non-adult and an adult. It is a thousand different things and the type of game you enjoy playing is not necessarily a good indicator on its own.
I've heard many stories of parents that have their toddlers locked up in a room crying while mom is working and dad's home playing CoD.
The line is just obvious if you just use your head. Video games in particular has a serious mind-altering affect on men. (It's actually very similar to porn and both have been discussed on the internet at great extent).
You already stated the reason you think why so many people are in total denial. If indeed the reason is indeed a sense of threat to what people take themselves to be then I would be very surprised if the response would have been any different. Whether this indeed is the case is what remains to be seen. I for one do believe there is something different going on here than yet another technological advancement, but again - time will tell
"In an ideal world, I'd want xAI to emulate the maturity Anthropic showed here: affirm willingness to help defend democracies (including via classified/intel/defense tools), sacrifice short-term revenue if needed to block adversarial access, but stand firm on refusing to enable the most civilizationally corrosive misuses when the tech simply isn't ready or the societal cost is too high. Saying "no" to powerful customers—even the DoD—when the ask undermines core principles is hard, but it's the kind of spine that builds long-term trust and credibility."
It also acknowledged that this is not what is happening...
The very fact that people are arguing with a non-existent author signals that whatever generated the content did a good enough job to fool them today. Tomorrow it will do a good enough job to fool you. I think the more important question is what this means in terms of what is really important and what we should invest in to remain anchored in what matters.
This got me thinking: I am not about to fight windmills and the future will unfold as it will, but I think the idea of "LLM as a compiler of ideas to high-level languages" can turn out to be quite dangerous. It is one thing to rely on and not to be able to understand the assembly output of a deterministic compiler of a C++ program. It is quite another to rely on but not fully understand (whether due to lazyness or complexity) what is in the C++ code that a giant nondeterministic intractable neural network generated. what is guaranteed is that the future will be interesting...
The way I'm keeping up with it (or deluding myself into believing I am keeping up with it) is by maintaining rigorous testing and test standards. I have used LLMs to assist me building C firmware for some hardware projects. But the scale of that has been such that it can also be well tested. Anyway, part of the reason I was so much slower with python is I'm an expert at all the tech I used, spending literal years of my life in the docs and reading books, etc., and I've read everything the LLM wrote to double check it. I'm not so literate with go but its not very complex, and given the static nature, I just trusted the LLM more than I did with python. The react stack I am learning as I go, but the tooling is so good, and I understand the testing aspects, same issue, I trusted the LLM more and have been more productive. Anwyay, times are changing fast!
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