Right. There is something interesting here that could be explored thoughtfully. The hard part is that we rely on compilers being correct, and they mostly are.
We have no viable mechanism yet to get the same level of confidence if some LLM-based system writes the binary.
Perhaps we can get to a system that produces not just the binary but also a machine-verifiable proof that the binary implements some higher-level language description of the program.
Though then the question will be whether we've gained anything, or whether we've just replaced the compiler with something massively more expensive that does the same thing.
There's some potential here for the LLM-based system to drive better performance optimizations than a regular compiler could.
Of course this isn't what Elon is actually saying, and we'd be better off if fewer people listened to him.
Factories are places for the mass production of identical or nearly identical widgets.
There are some kinds of mass produced software, like the low value apps that lots of businesses want to have for some reason and that should have been websites instead.
But actual progress comes from software that isn't mass produced. So choose your ambitions wisely.
We can point out mistakes that feel rather grating without assuming intent behind them.
I agree that their use of "he" is likely because they're not a native speaker, especially because they're arguing against the capabilities of LLMs.
That doesn't make it inherently wrong to point out the mistake when it's so intertwined with the deeper discussion here, especially given the fact that some (hopefully few) people do build relationships with LLMs.
That's true, but it does mean that the LLM itself actually does have access to those thinking traces and could therefore, at least in principle, answer what it was thinking. They're probably not trained to do that, though.
To expand on this, I've found that often, the best way to make a change is in two steps: First, make the change easy (the re-architecture). Second, make the change that is now easy.
My best software development experiences have been in cultures where this way of working was common.
It is a shame that these cultures are not more widely spread; and I mostly blame GitHub: the lack of good support for stacked PRs or patch series or whatever you want to call it makes it harder than it should be to work in this way.
This doesn't actually seem to be true based on a quick googling, i.e. Germany has somewhat higher median income.
But in addition to the raw numbers, you have to keep in mind that they don't account for cost of living and that different countries account for various services differently, especially health care.
The trick is to do something else in those 20 minutes (or, ideally, even longer).
That's the main value I've been getting out of coding agents. I have them do (comparatively) simpler tasks or explorative tasks in the background while I'm in a meeting, doing code reviews, or otherwise working on something else.
Of course a lot of it is about the energy and overall exposure, and the harms of this, if any, are more likely elsewhere, but it's completely reasonable to question extraordinary promises made by people who up to this point have shown no expertise in the field.
I swear, it's like some people have already forgotten about Theranos.
Agree with most of this except come on. Facebook was born out of a misogynist precursor. The idea that its CEO had no malicious intentions is ridiculous.
Of course that is a feature, but at this point I have to suspect that you're willfully ignoring the point.
The moral problems begin when writing that book gives you extraordinary power beyond what is healthy for society (which is extremely rare for authors, of course; the discussion isn't really about authors, you just invoked them in an attempt to conjure a moral shield for the people who are the real problem).
And again, even that in itself is still not a moral failing of the individual. It's primarily a failure of the system in which the individual operates.
It does become a moral failing of the individual if the individual uses that power to perpetuate the system.
Yes, the same is absolutely true for many other professions. And artists are probably more aware than most, at least on average, how much luck plays a role.
But note that I have been very careful not to call the fund managers individually immoral.
It's because while for some people there may be jealousy involved, many more have realized or are now realizing how much power the ultra rich have, and how bad that is for our societies.
Once a company becomes large enough, it becomes so influential in society that control of it must be made more democratic.
I don't think anywhere has figured out quite the right way to go about it yet, but it's clearly the right goal. Some countries require employee representation on the boards of large companies.
Part of it is work, yes. But consider. How much is your take home as a fund manager with 100M AUM? How much is your take home with 10B AUM? The work is the same, yet if the take home is different, you've proven that your income is not in fact earned through work in a moral sense.
The sad part about it, and one that has become a bit of a theme with his postings, is that pg stopped being intellectually honest in his online writings at some point over the last two decades.
His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all.
The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally, the argument is that it's impossible to become a billionaire in a moral way, though that's more of a problem of the system than it is necessarily one at the individual level. A just and moral system would assign the value being created in such a way that becoming a billionaire would be essentially impossible.
Yet pg never even acknowledged the possibility that that might have been the argument.
Agreed. To put this in perspective, batch 1 token decode is bandwidth limited in theory.
Memory bandwidth of RTX 3090 is listed as 936GB/s. The post isn't fully clear on which model they used and how big it is, but even assuming it perfectly filled the 24GB of that GPU, 30tok/s means the achieved bandwidth is only 720GB/s. There's a bunch of room for improvement here even without MTP, and those improvements should largely stack with MTP.
Interesting to see somebody argue out in the wild for what I have been subjected to in the past and have long considered absolute worst practice.
It may be that my perspective is different because my work tends to be in "hard" foundational software (think OS components and programming language tool chains). It's not that customer requirements aren't a thing at all in that kind of work, but they tend to be far removed from the day-to-day and instead, mechanical sympathy rules supreme.
Commit messages need to focus on the software, not on the trappings of the process by which it evolves. Links to tickets can provide helpful context especially for bug fixes, but they belong in the commit message footer.
Your last paragraph is absolutely an anti-pattern at least in this work. If the implementation of a new feature is split over multiple changes, then surely there is something different and important to say about each of those changes. Does your split even make sense otherwise?
That is definitely not my experience using Claude Code with Opus. I work in a very sparsely commented code base, and the agent produces substantially more comments than the surrounding code.
As a software developer, you must never subject your team mates to a PR that you yourself believe to be low quality. The point of code review by others is to catch things that you missed.
There are multiple lines of defense for quality. Yes, automation can and should be one of them, but your own self-review always has to come before review by your team mates.
We have no viable mechanism yet to get the same level of confidence if some LLM-based system writes the binary.
Perhaps we can get to a system that produces not just the binary but also a machine-verifiable proof that the binary implements some higher-level language description of the program.
Though then the question will be whether we've gained anything, or whether we've just replaced the compiler with something massively more expensive that does the same thing.
There's some potential here for the LLM-based system to drive better performance optimizations than a regular compiler could.
Of course this isn't what Elon is actually saying, and we'd be better off if fewer people listened to him.