This seems way more accurate. Up until early 2026.
Though it has bizzare fixation on geopolitics and China which it severely understimated. It's pretty obvious that China is going to outinnovate and outcompute US companies quite soon. Even if just because they care about higher education, providing enough electricity and letting smart people do smart things instead of randomly muzzling them with bans and export controls and coddling them with financial protectionism.
Rewrites in Rust are kinda impressive. This language with its move semantics and close ownership tracking is very different from every other language. To create a rewrite in it, you have to rearchitect the code. There is not as much freedom there when it comes to where to keep what and where you can pass what as it is in other languages.
He doesn't believe that unit tests are complete waste of time. Just a relative waste of time. He doesn't mind AI agents writing tests. It's just mostly waste of time for humans. Because the value you get for them is not worth developer time in most cases. It's worth agent time.
It's curious how so many people get triggered by a smart person saying what he believes to be true. Yes, he is pretty amazing. Yes, he is rarely wrong. No, it doesn't affect you or me in any way because he is not in competition with you. Go do something else if you don't enjoy his takes.
I don't get many programmer influencers in my feed that deal with newsworthy relevant stuff. Theo is the least wrong and most humble one in my perception.
> > I think there's very little evidence for that.
> The evidence is literally every other evolved form of intelligence.
Not really, even harsh environments don't really select for intelligence. Neither does predator-prey dynamics. There are very few significantly intelligent species, and except for octopuses they are all social.
> Do recall "the environment" also includes other intelligent agents an animal needs to compete with.
If you include members of its own species in "the environment" we don't have any thing to discuss, because I fully agree that "the environment" understood as anything external to the individual can trigger the development of intelligence. Because it's trivial to observe that it did.
My claim is more informative (if true), that for the development of intelligence the environment must include populations on individuals living in close proximity, social, interacting a lot, where the strongest evolutionary pressure on a given species is the species itself. That doesn't seem to be true for most octopus species today. As an exception to the rule, their intelligence is interesting. I personally believe it comes from the same source as every other intelligence. And as the living space for octopuses expanded, they became more solitary. Maybe there's something general about this too. That with sufficiently intelligent species (perhaps if the intelligence can't rise anymore due to physical limitations), the other individuals present such a high danger that the species must spread apart and become more solitary. Maybe humans reached this stage already and spread apart, but as they ran out of Earth, they were forced back into old, more social mode, just now on the planetary scale. There is evidence that humans in Europe lived in way smaller groups and used to be way more murderous and cannibalistic not that long ago.
> Basically all octopuses are solitary and die after breeding.
That fits. There's no point in extending the life beyond reproduction if your kids are gona kill you anyways.
> You're proposing that one group of octopuses developed social behavior and multiple breeding, then had a bunch of descendants who went back to exactly the normal octopus behavior.
I'm not proposing that at all. What I'm proposing that all ancestors of octopuses were social and could breed multiple times. However, because of the proximity they became their greatest evolutionary pressure for themselves as they got more intelligent. Eventually they spread out due to some environmental change and their social behaviors and multiple breeding atrophied due to danger from other members of theirs own species, that now could just be nearly completely avoided. And that's the case for nearly all descendant species except this special one for some local environmental reason. This species shows us that social octopuses are (and were) a possibility.
What you consider normal octopus behavior is as normal as eyes of a molerat.
> many people realised that it is possible to run a serious open-weight model yourself, as long as you can get the hardware to support it
That's not realistic. You'd need non-consumer hardware for a frontier open-weights model. And even if you had such hardware for free. Electricity to run it would cost you more than a sub.
> Intelligence is plenty adaptive when you're just trying to outsmart the environment.
I think there's very little evidence for that. Environment is just very slow when compared to outsmarting members of your own species that you tightly share the living space with. I don't think you appreciate how abnormal is high intelligence. How pathological conditions must have been to trigger development of something that bizarre and costly. This must have been run-away self-reinforcing feedback loop. We know of many such loops between predators and prey and none of them look strong and fast enough. Where we find intelligence, it's almost always tightly connected with social behaviors. It would be exceedingly strange if there was a true exception.
> The notion that this is a "living fossil" is... pretty wild. It's genus octopus.
I didn't mean that literally. What I meant was that the common ancestor of this octopus species and others might have been more like it, social, not like the rest. Maybe this species preserved of what normal octopus behavior used to be. If the solitary life became more evolutionarily favorable after the development of intelligence most descendant species could have switched.
> You find yourself in need of extraordinary evidence.
Yeah, maybe at some point we'll discover a huge collection of beaks in some under-ocean sediment and it will become obvious. Ocean floor is not really that explored.
> I’m not willing to spend the time digging through this to figure out what’s needed
That's the neat part. You don't... need to do this yourself nowadays. AI agent is perfectly capable to figure out any new open source thing that pops up daily now. You can just give it the link to the repo and say "Set this up for me. I wanna play with it."
Though it has bizzare fixation on geopolitics and China which it severely understimated. It's pretty obvious that China is going to outinnovate and outcompute US companies quite soon. Even if just because they care about higher education, providing enough electricity and letting smart people do smart things instead of randomly muzzling them with bans and export controls and coddling them with financial protectionism.