I'm no Musk fanboy but I think this kind of maximally cynical take is tiresome. They thought it would work, they expended significant engineering effort and money making it real and producing it and selling it to customers.
The simplest explanation is that they did all that and the market didn't want it. The economics of traditional panels outweighed the aesthetic advantages of tiles and they're pivoting. No conspiracy or fraud need be invoked.
I am confused about why Gary Marcus thinks it's so obvious that Claude isn't conscious. As he points out, Dawkins is just taking a bog-standard behaviorist position: that he can't distinguish Claude from a conscious being just by the behavior here.
Marcus is saying "Well, if you knew they were trained to mimic, then you'd understand it's just mimicry and not real consciousness" The problem with this argument is that we just don't have a good idea what "real consciousness" is. What if, in order to simulate human text prediction with sufficient accuracy, the model has to assemble sub-networks internally into something equivalent to a conscious mind? We could disprove that kind of thing really quickly if we knew how to define consciousness really well, but we kinda don't!
Philosophers are genuinely split on this question, it's totally reasonable to be on either side of this based on your personal intuition. Marcus's position seems to be actually based on his own personal incredulity, despite his claims that understanding LLM training methodology gives him some special insight into the internal experience (or lack thereof) of an LLM.
Sometimes, in the interest of having something rather than nothing, I have to press publish. This entails getting things wrong, which is regrettable.
I will say, that I'm trying to steelman the code-as-assembly POV, and I dont think the exact historical analogy is critical to it being right or wrong. The main thing is that "we've seen the level of abstraction go up before, and people complained, but this is no different" is the crux. In that sense, a folk history is fine as long as the pattern is real
This is an interesting distinction, but it ignores the reasons software engineers do that.
First, hardware engineers are dealing with the same laws of physics every time. Materials have known properties etc.
Software: there are few laws of physics (mostly performance and asymptotic complexity). Most software isnt anywhere near those boundaries so you get to pretend they dont exist. If you get to invent your own physics each time, yeah the process is going to look very different.
This just doesn't explain things by itself. It doesn't explain why humans would care about reasoning in the first place. It's like explaining all life as parasitic while ignoring where the hosts get their energy from.
Think about it, if all reasoning is post-hoc rationalization, reasons are useless. Imagine a mentally ill person on the street yelling at you as you pass by: you're going to ignore those noises, not try to interpret their meaning and let them influence your beliefs.
This theory is too cynical. The real answer has got to have some element of "reasoning is useful because it somehow improves our predictions about the world"
Skills wont use less context once invoked, the point is that MCP in particular frontloads a bunch of stuff into your context on the entire api surface area. So even if it doesn't invoke the mcp, it's costing you.
That's why it's common advice to turn off MCPs for tools you dont think are relevant to the task at hand.
The idea behind skills us that they're progressively unlocked: they only take up a short description in the context, relying on the agent to expand things if it feels it's relevant.
What Stripe did for payments, Pylon is doing for the mortgage industry: We're taking a sleepy industry with backward technology and re-building the stack from the ground up. We're first-principles thinkers, and our team is small, talented and ambitious.
I'm hiring generalists who love coding and want to build something beautiful in an industry where technology written in the 90s is the norm. We're Series A, well funded, and we have traction with customers. Come to Menlo Park and help us turn the $13 trillion US mortgage industry into a set of APIs.
We did this at stripe when deprecating TLS 1.0, and called it a brown out (I don't know the origin of the term in software).
You do it when you have a bunch of automated integrations with you and you have to break them. The lights arent on at the client: their dev teams are focused on other things, so you have to wake them up to a change that's happening (either by causing their alerting to go off, or their customers to complain because their site is broken)
What Stripe did for payments, Pylon is doing for the mortgage industry: We're taking a sleepy industry with backward technology and re-building the stack from the ground up. We're first-principles thinkers, and our team is small, talented and ambitious.
I'm hiring generalists who love coding and want to build something beautiful in an industry where technology written in the 90s is the norm. We're Series A, well funded, and we have traction with customers. Come to Menlo Park and help us turn the $2 trillion US mortgage industry into a set of APIs.
I've been commenting on HN since 2009, if you apply through this link, I'll personally reply to your app:
What Stripe did for payments, Pylon is doing for the mortgage industry: We're taking a sleepy industry with backward technology and re-building the stack from the ground up. We're first-principles thinkers, and our team is small, talented and ambitious.
I'm hiring generalists who love coding and want to build something beautiful in an industry where technology written in the 90s is the norm. We're Series A, well funded, and we have traction with customers. Come to Menlo Park and help us turn the $2 trillion US mortgage industry into a set of APIs.
I've been commenting on HN since 2009, if you apply through this link, I'll personally reply to your app:
So, you're in one of two situations if you're getting leetcoded vs. let in through the side door at a company (i.e. through your network: the red carpet)
1. You're a newgrad. You have no work history, but you do have a lot of time on your hands and a desire to prove yourself. Go study leetcode and prove how awesome you are.
2. You're a senior engineer who has a small network (not a dig, lots of great developers are introverted and have small networks, myself included). In this case, it sucks but... just practice leetcode. Don't worry, the fact that you're a good engineer means you'll pick it up quickly. It's not the same skill as professional software development, but there's a ton of skill transfer, and it might even be a little fun.
Time crunch, test anxiety etc, those can be overcome by practicing. A lot of times really smart people are averse to practicing since they never had to do it in school. But, I'm telling you, any smart dev can learn to leetcode well while being timed. It'll be fine
Again, the IQ being measured isn't "Are you able to invent A* search during the interview?" but rather "Can you memorize and apply these algorithms?".
Believe it or not, most humans on earth can study as long as they want for leetcode and still won't do well on them. If you can drill and study for them and your scores improve... bam: that's the IQ test.
Leetcode is just a proxy for an IQ test. That's it. If you can study up and do well on leetcode, then you're smart. People getting hung up on how realistic the questions are, or whether you ever need to implement X data structure are confused.
Fact is that no job can give a reasonable test for how it is to work there short of working there. There's team dynamics, developer / project fit, etc etc. All you can ever do is measure some proxies. Leetcode is just a much better proxy than the old "how many ping-pong balls fit in a school bus" questions.