Are you confident in putting a timeline on this prediction?

One of the reasons I'm increasingly skeptical of this prediction is that I've now lived past a few of the dates I heard people put on the achievement of this level of superintelligence in previous years.

Where will you?

Why wouldn't you just write the tests against the public api?

This does seem like an abstraction leak though.

The abstraction gets leaky once you expect the distinct NewTypes to adhere to the original inheritance property. I think that's a wrong assumption from the get-go.

OP could just do:

    def foo(val: _A) -> None:
        pass

...and it'll accept both NewTypes just fine. I guess it depends on whether foo is designed to be public or private.

This works but it does not let other modules define such methods.

I don't know who any of these people are. This seems very gossipy.

I generally agree with you (and disagree with the parent comment) that I think this seems like a useful technique. But just note that if someone really wants to break the contract, they can just use the "private" class. Just like "private" members, it is only private by convention.

The problem I have with buy vs rent calculators is that the speculative questions often end up dominating the decision. How much will rent go up in the place you rent? Nobody knows. How much will the value of the property appreciate during the period you own it. Again, this is unknowable. So you put in a range of guesses for these, and you can get it to come out as a good or bad investment depending on what you guess.

My guesses were ludicrously wrong when I did these back in 2018, relative to what has actually happened in both the rental market where I live, and the value of the house I bought. I concluded that the reason to buy was only about the non-financial aspect, and that we'd probably lose a little money all told. But it has turned out to be a six figure win in practice. Rent has gone way up, we were able to refinance to one of these very cheap loans during covid, and the property value spiked around the same time. I never would have guessed any of that. And any of it could have gone the opposite way.

So the calculators were honestly pretty useless. It's all too unknowable.

Yep, it sucks to be at a landlord's mercy to determine how nice the place you live remains over time. Things will wear out. If you own the place, yes, it's expensive to fix that stuff up. But if you don't own the place, you may very well just be stuck with it.

From time to time I drive by the place I rented for quite a few years almost a decade ago now. All the visible stuff that needed maintenance when I lived there is still just as it was when I moved out. Maybe they've fixed up the (worse) interior issues, but probably not.

> Why use Claude then?

I don't understand this question in response to the quote preceding it. He just explained why Claude was useful in this instance.

It isn’t clear from all the quoatage but it was meant to follow my own thoughts on the progression of the piece. (1) There is concern for the future because of AI (2) so anyway we used AI for fun and giggles... No wait, stop. Why enable the training and the development for such a non-essential little thing? If AI is so concerning?

Apparently because the concern is not evenly distributed.

Thank you for the explanation. I understand what you meant now.

I read the point as: if it's an existential threat that you've got principled objections to - why would it even matter that it's useful?

the entire piece is about nostalgia + this tension?

Yep, this is how AI has been impacting my experience at my job as well. For a given time and quality budget, we can now say "yes" to more projects. Often that means holding the time and quality constant and doing things we wouldn't have previously done at all. Other times it means holding time constant and increasing quality by spending more time refactoring, testing, fixing longer tail bugs, etc.