1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art.
2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering.
These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things.
AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year.
I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.
Achieve a significant scientific or mathematical breakthrough without human supervision. Domain experts should agree that the new result is truly groundbreaking, and achieving it required fundamentally new ideas — not merely interpolating existing results.
Examples of discoveries that would have counted if they weren’t already made: Relativity (say a derivation of E=mc^2), Quantum Mechanics (say a calculation of the hydrogen energy levels), the discovery of Riemmannian geometry, the discovery of DNA, and the discovery of the theory of evolution with natural selection.
The idea is to test the system’s out of distribution generalization: its ability to achieve tasks that are beyond its training distribution. This is something that humans can do, but no current LLM appears to be able to do.
For recipes I use the Paprika app [1]. I point it at one of these terrible websites and it will scrape out the ingredients and instructions and present them in a useful way.
It doesn’t address the bigger problem but it solves this problem well.
Here are examples of people who were cancelled without even saying anything [1]. One was due to a misunderstanding. Another was due to something a family member said.
I’m rooting for you. Here’s a thought about a possible trade off between radicalization and engagement. When social media platforms optimize for growth, it makes sense for them to make it as easy as possible for users to share/retweet. It lowers “amplification friction” and allows messages to go viral. The most successful platforms have very low amplification friction, which suggests that low friction is an important ingredient.
What we are learning is that making it trivially easy to amplify anyone’s message enables cancel culture and (I believe) leads to radicalization.
If this is correct, then increasing amplification friction on your platform will lead to less radicalization, at the cost of lowering engagement. My guess is that for this to be successful requires a careful balance of where you land on the higher/lower friction spectrum. Too much friction leads to low engagement which leads to failure. Too little friction leads to uncontrolled amplification which leads to radicalization. So a balance is needed.
Either that, or a totally new idea is needed that turns existing platforms on their head.
It’s certainly possible my intuition is wrong. Run-flat tires can support the whole car, but it is possible this support only kicks in at very low pressure.
I agree that higher tire pressure results in smaller surface area, but it's not clear to me that the tire itself does not support the car, skewing the result. So I'm not convinced this sanity check is sufficient. For example, as another commenter mentioned, run-flat tires can support the car on stiffness alone.
The suggestion is to use F=PA to measure the car weight, where P is the tire pressure, A is the area the tires in contact with the ground, and F is the unknown: the weight of the car (measured in terms of gravitational force).
I don't think this works. To see why, suppose we make the tires out of a very stiff material. We control the pressure P, but changing the pressure will not change the surface area A. Therefore, by changing P we can set F to whatever we want, which shows that we are not actually measuring the weight of the car. The basic issue here is that the air pressure is not the only thing that is supporting the car.
I don't know how important the stiffness effect is for real tires, but I suspect they are sufficiently stiff that it matters a lot.
> “do what the experts say we should, while maintaining a diversity of expert views.”
I don’t think this is an actual strategy. If there is a diversity of views, which experts do you listen to? Also, experts in which field? Epidemiologists have generally recommended very strict shutdowns, but they are not economists and are not experts on the economic ramifications. Some economists agree with strict lockdowns, others do not. So it’s not at all clear what “listen to the experts” means in this case.
If Sweden has a significantly higher percentage of the population infected (as they claim) then it doesn’t make sense to compare death rates at this point, because it may be that these other countries will reach the same numbers (infection rate and death rate) later. This is a likely outcome because Sweden’s healthcare system has not been overwhelmed, so it’s not obvious that their policies will lead to excess deaths in the long run. The thing to compare is the final death toll (as well as economic damage), and we don’t know that yet.
I am sorry to hear you’ve lost your source of income.
> But financial hardship is solvable -- food, housing, etc. can be handed out.
That depends on the size of the handout. At the scale we’re talking about, I’ll just say that I don’t think it’s that simple. It is also without a successful precedent.
> Are people starving?
I don’t think so, but we also know that many people in the US live practically hand to mouth. By now, millions of Americans are probably without any savings or income. See the long lines at food banks for evidence. I expect that the longer this goes on, the more Americans we will see become poor, homeless, and find it difficult to feed their families. I don’t think people will starve, but how will this be resolved? Maybe instead of starving they will go to loan sharks and dig themselves into a hopeless financial hole.
I find it disturbing that you are willing to put all of this aside because you don’t know anyone who is experiencing serious hardship. Do you know anyone who goes to food banks? I don’t, but I know they exist and I don’t want to ignore them and say they will be fine because “we can hand out food”.
> In 100 years, the only footnote for 2020 will be all the deaths and suffering that this caused. No one will care that you were sad because you couldn't see your friends or go do sports.
It's weird. Why do you empathize with victims of the disease but not with victims of financial hardship? Do you not see people suffering when looking at hour-long lines at food banks and historical unemployment numbers?
Perhaps what will be remembered is the pain of those who were plunged into deep poverty in a New Great Depression that will take us years to recover from.
> At 2% a day cases double every 5 weeks. Would anyone apply this reasoning to any other disease?
I don't know but maybe the flu [1]? I don't think focusing just on the infection rate is useful.
> Classic psychological denial is clearly operating in force.
I think the denial is in thinking that we can beat the virus by extending the lock down for years (you say "might take two or more years"). It is likely that all we are doing is slowing down the spread, and that it will eventually infect most of the population, stopping only when we reach herd immunity. I say this is likely because this is where we are headed unless we come up with a vaccine or treatment at an unprecedented speed -- not something I would bet on.
If this is indeed where we are headed, it may be better to open up as much as possible short of overwhelming the healthcare system. Note that in many places, the healthcare systems are significantly below capacity (e.g. [2]).
To be clear, by “This is hysteria” I meant the gp’s claim that every healthcare system is overwhelmed. I was not referring to the general response.
However, see Sweden for a clear counter-example to your claim that the services are holding up because of the drastic actions taken. Their services are holding up with far less drastic measures.
My theory is that it’s because they stayed open. The numbers are higher, yes, but it has not been a catastrophic disaster like many predicted. Crucially, the health care systems are not overwhelmed.
So that is an important starting point for a discussion: it is possible to keep things mostly open (with appropriate safety measures) without overwhelming the healthcare system.
Note that it is possible that Sweden’s approach will eventually lead to a comparable number of deaths as its neighbors, but at an accelerated rate. Namely, it is possible that people are getting infected at a higher rate, which explains the higher numbers, but that the mortality rate will eventually be the same because the healthcare system is not overwhelmed. This depends on when and if we will find a vaccine and better treatments, which is an unknown.
On the other side of the equation, there is no mass unemployment, no hours-long lines at food banks, people are not suffering from mental health problems due to isolation, and so on. If Sweden does end up paying a higher price for its policies, it will still enjoy these benefits. They decided that it is worth the trade off. They are trying to prevent covid victims while also trying to protect potential economic victims, whose suffering is not being ignored. Is that wrong?
[*] 88% of deaths in Sweden are people over 70, and I believe many of those were in nursing homes. So it is possible that fine-tuning the policy can significantly reduce the death rate while keeping things open.
I have —- comparing with additional European countries, Sweden deaths per capita are lower than France, the U.K. and Italy, and is followed closely by Spain. Therefore, as I said, Sweden is not an outlier. At least the U.K. and Italy enacted far more restrictive policies than Sweden but achieved worse results. And this is just looking at the health part of the equation, not even discussing the economic benefits of Sweden’s approach.
I think this is enough to at least challenge the common viewpoint that restrictive lockdowns are the only way to deal with this.
None of what you said here takes away from the fact that your original claim is false. Again, you wrote: “ completely overwhelmed every single health system in the world.” That is not true, not even close.
Now, you write:
> Sweden has been heavily criticized for its handling of the situation
Yes, people have differing opinions. The fact is that Sweden is not an outlier in number of deaths despite keeping its economy essentially open. Perhaps this is what happens when you inform your citizens and then trust them to do the right thing?
> Pretending that doing nothing could not have catastrophic consequences is dangerous.
I agree, and I did not suggest that we should do nothing. But what are the optimal policies? Are the policies we have now optimal or can we do better? We need open and honest discussion to make progress on these questions.
You are making several false claims, most notably:
> We're talking about a "flu" that has, in a matter of weeks, completely overwhelmed every single health system in the world.
Many health care systems have been well below capacity throughout this. This includes most of the US (e.g. California), it includes places that have not shut down (Sweden), and it includes places that have reopened weeks ago (Georgia).
Despite these easily verifiable facts, many people believe as you do that health care systems are being overwhelmed everywhere. Maybe because the media is painting this picture by only focusing on the few places where this is actually happening.
This is hysteria.
It is blinding people from seeing the real, measurable damage wrought by the policies being enacted.
To be clear, I am not arguing for or against the validity of the claims regarding covid-sim. I am only saying that this is not a good example of the effect where people feel entitled to get open source code that fits their needs.
I don’t doubt it, but covid-sim is not the best example of this effect. In this case, people are worried that poorly written simulation code is informing policy decisions that affect billions of people. They are not demanding that it should be fixed, they are demanding that it should not be relied on in its current state.
1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art.
2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering.
These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things.
AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year.
I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.