My personal mental image for AI agents is Mr Meeseeks.
Per Wikipedia:
> Meeseeks are a powder-blue-skinned species of humanoids (each of whom is named "Mr. Meeseeks") who are created to serve a single purpose which they will go to any length to fulfill. Each brought to life by a "Meeseeks Box", they typically live for no more than a few hours in a constant state of pain, vanishing upon completing their assigned task so as to end their own existence and thereby end their suffering; as such, the longer an individual Meeseeks remains alive, the more insane and unhinged they become.
Yeah this article has a very "blame the user" attitude because it labels a supply side issue as a demand side collective action problem.
"Just buy less house" sounds very avocado toasty. Anyways, the actual way many people are "escaping the trap" is by not having children and not buying homes. Or at least delaying doing those things.
If anything, the collective action problem is political. But it's very systemic. Simply voting for a good representative isn't enough unless those representatives push for systemic change (and the right kind at that).
There's definitely an asymmetry in how the systemic dysfunction benefits the Republican party over the Democratic party. (Overall the system benefits both parties though since it entrenches partisanship.)
I'd argue that the asymmetry has less to do with change vs. no change and more to do with the Republican party currently being an "anti government" party (pivoting to that post New Deal). So less is expected of them in terms of functional governance.
With respect to change: I've heard a lot of commentary that the Republican party today is more of an instigator of change than the Democratic party (being seen as a defender of the status quo), despite the traditional alignment of Republican/conservative/no change. Democrats are seen as pro-institution and Republicans anti-institution.
In case it matters, I personally don't identify with a political party. I just want functional government and politics and I see a lot of dysfunction. I'm an engineer so naturally I gravitate towards systemic solutions to systemic problems.
I learned recently that there's actually a name for this concept. Murc's law states that in American politics, only Democrats are assumed to have agency.
Presumably democratic reforms could help change the dynamic if they changed the incentives. Right now, it's a politically viable strategy to just obstruct the other party when out of power, and politically unviable strategy for Congress to oppose a president from the same party. Both of which lead to a lot of dysfunction.
As an example, if Congress had multimember districts with an appropriate voting system (e.g. ranked choice voting for all members at the same time), then you can effectively nullify the power of gerrymandered voting districts (the current system, where effectively politicians choose voters rather than the other way around). Doing so would elevate the influence of general elections over party primaries. Then representatives would be less afraid of challenges in those primaries, which is currently one of the major disincentives in opposing the president of the same political party (fear of being "primaried").
I'm curious how this works if the green team writes an implementation that makes a network call like an RPC.
Red team might not anticipate this if the spec does detail every expected RPC (which seems unreasonable: this could vary based on implementation). But a unit test would need mocks.
Is green team allowed to suggest mocks to add to the test? (Even if they can't read the tests themselves?) This also seems gamaeable though (e.g. mock the entire implementation). Unless another agent makes a judgement call on the reasonability of the mock (though that starts to feel like code review more generally).
Maybe record/replay tests could work? But there are drawbacks in the added complexity.
FWIW he gives his ethical reasoning on his website:
> Broadly, I am supportive of arming democracies with the tools needed to defeat autocracies in the age of AI—I simply don’t think there is any other way. But we cannot ignore the potential for abuse of these technologies by democratic governments themselves. Democracies normally have safeguards that prevent their military and intelligence apparatus from being turned inwards against their own population, but because AI tools require so few people to operate, there is potential for them to circumvent these safeguards and the norms that support them. It is also worth noting that some of these safeguards are already gradually eroding in some democracies. Thus, we should arm democracies with AI, but we should do so carefully and within limits: they are the immune system we need to fight autocracies, but like the immune system, there is some risk of them turning on us and becoming a threat themselves.
Basically, he's afraid that not arming the government with AI puts it at a disadvantage vs. other governments he trusts less. Plus, if Anthropic is in the loop that gives them the chance to steer the direction of things a bit (what they were kicked out for doing).
It's not the purest ethical argument, but I also would not say that there is a clearly correct answer.
It seems like best etiquette would be to have a username with "bot" in it and include something in the post explicitly indicating it's a bot (e.g. a signature).
This isn't even a new problem where a good cultural solution hasn't been figured out yet. Reddit has had bot etiquette for years.
It's so interesting to read these comments because this this is literally my job (to help Workspace teams integrate Gemini faster)
Some thoughts:
- Hardware constraints are real, even at Google.
- Features are often released for enterprise users first, before being released for the general public.
- I only started my current role last year.
- 2 years ago is forever ago in AI and things are changing a lot. For example, with older model generations people used to do a lot more fine-tuning (slow) vs. prompt engineering (fast). The implication is that things that are easier to do today might have been hard to do not that long ago. The rapid changes also create churn for internal platforms and dev tooling.
- Google is less yolo and cares about safety, prompt injection, etc. so some time goes into that
- Typical big company bureaucracy also applies, but TBH there's a lot of pressure to deliver Gemini related stuff so I think there's less of that
In my experience, using LLMs to code encouraged me to write better documentation, because I can get better results when I feed the documentation to the LLM.
Also, I've noticed failure modes in LLM coding agents when there is less clarity and more complexity in abstractions or APIs. It's actually made me consider simplifying APIs so that the LLMs can handle them better.
Though I agree that in specific cases what's helpful for the model and what's helpful for humans won't always overlap. Once I actually added some comments to a markdown file as note to the LLM that most human readers wouldn't see, with some more verbose examples.
I think one of the big problems in general with agents today is that if you run the agent long enough they tend to "go off the rails", so then you need to babysit them and intervene when they go off track.
I guess in modern parlance, maintaining a good codebase can be framed as part of a broader "context engineering" problem.
Over a decade ago I tried getting the HPV vaccine in my early 20s, but the doctor told me it wasn't recommended for men and that insurance won't cover it. I was young and didn't have the money to pay out of pocket.
I went to Planned Parenthood and got the vaccine last year. At some point they changed the recommendation to men under 45 now and I got all 3 shots free.
Honestly, though I'm glad to have finally got the vaccine it's been a pretty frustrating experience.
On a quick skim, my interpretation is that the article critiques the classic (but simplistic) advice that asking questions and letting the other person talk more than you is the key to having a good conversation, especially to ensuring that the other person is happy with the conversation.
The classic advice is basically a caution against being a boring monologuer. And it has its merit. But this is an extra "level 2 conversationalist" lesson. It's the old: "OK remember those rules you learned in level 1? Here's when you can break them".
Th affordance analogy is that you want to give yourself and your conversation partner an abundance of options and opportunities for good conversation. Asking questions often is a way of doing that, but it's not the only way, and not all questions are equally helpful.
> This product injects source code derived from copyrighted sources into the software of their customers without informing them of the license of the original source code. This significantly eases unauthorized and unlicensed use of a copyright holder's work.
It appears that GitHub wishes to address this issue via UI changes to Copilot. A quote from a recent post on GitHub[0]:
> When a suggestion contains snippets copied from the training set, the UI should simply tell you where it’s quoted from. You can then either include proper attribution or decide against using that code altogether.
> This duplication search is not yet integrated into the technical preview, but we plan to do so. And we will both continue to work on decreasing rates of recitation, and on making its detection more precise.
That post is also on the Hacker News front page right now[1], but has 10% of the upvotes as this post so it's less visible.
I'm hoping all the criticism will encourage GitHub to make a better product.
Per Wikipedia:
> Meeseeks are a powder-blue-skinned species of humanoids (each of whom is named "Mr. Meeseeks") who are created to serve a single purpose which they will go to any length to fulfill. Each brought to life by a "Meeseeks Box", they typically live for no more than a few hours in a constant state of pain, vanishing upon completing their assigned task so as to end their own existence and thereby end their suffering; as such, the longer an individual Meeseeks remains alive, the more insane and unhinged they become.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Meeseeks