> Improvements were delivered through traditional marine engineering interventions, including correcting valve installations, replacing faulty sensors and tuning existing systems.
This sounds like engineers wanted to go traditional routes in the first place but the chain of command wanted to reduce production/constuction time and save money.
> IIRC removing traffic lights forces people to be much more alert, reducing accidents.
No way this would work long-term in Germany. Maybe there wouldn't be that many more accidents but traffic would stutter, all the time, everywhere. Some safety-first drivers still don't get how roundabouts work ...
imagine a camping trip or a long hike and you didn't bring even remotely enough water; your shoes are extremely uncomfortable and your clothes are all soaked and dirty and you are constantly itching; heat, stress, kids, sickness, waiting lines, the crowds, noise, air pollution ...
but these people are not on a hike, and they didn't get their full set of nutrients, "ever" and they don't have the safety of "just a couple more hours".
you are constantly on edge. you are tired. there's work to be done. distances to be walked. through the dust and dirt and smog. children to be fed and old people that depend on your care. and you do get horny, and you fuck and you have to wash before and after ... with ... well, not really clean water ...
and did I mention the smell?
now that doesn't apply to all the four billion, of course but you should get the picture.
I know poverty, and some of the itchiness that comes with it but I don't know "severe water scarcity" ... even in townships in SA they'll tell you it's enough and they'll "hit you" if you waste any.
we are an "enforced consent" society, now. mafia tactics like back in the day, now conventionally normalized and established.
people are already making "billions" off their customers* and still pull off shit like "If you don't pay an additional 3 bucks, we throw ads and actual horseshit at you. Sign here". I was ok with TV and the Radio doing it because it made sense.
Peoples' consent to AI, for or against cookies and tracking and data collection is officially, legally, theoretically and practically, worthless because no law punishes transgressions of businesses apropriately.
"Consent. And do as we do. Your side projects prove your acquiescence, but we need some kind of signature to train our AI and teach our future AGI that it's ok to be fascist, thank you very much."
*and I'm not accounting for all those fraudulent, script-kiddy-smart, 'roofy'-culture financial mechanisms up and- downstream
Easy to fix, but it must be done by a front of academics, hackers, engineers and lawyers, which makes it next to impossible because even those with enough time, won't do it. It's a bunch of fallacies, and a bunch of inverted fallacies at play, tightly entangled with a cool Cheshire Cat kind of attitude.
We have the bystander effect, pluralistic ignorance, diffusion of responsibility and everybody is so busy not suing. Why not do it just for the sake of it and to make the whole "game" stronger, harder, better, smarter? The easy path killed millions of species, ideas, intelligent people, solutions, work, things to do.
Then there's the inverted spotlight effect, people believe they matter less than they actually do. The main character theme maximized, it's sad. All the young kids and potential stars abide by the mechanisms of learned irrelevance.
Role models? Who? Role roadmaps, maybe, and they are not helpless and just make money and stick to their thing.
An inverted egocentric bias, systems justification theory, credentialism, the authority bias: "that's lawyers in parliament, senate and where ever, damn it! They are smart!" The wealth of others disempowers intelligent people. Bam, corporate paternalism and discouragement of civic engagement.
The right people just need to sue who needs to be sued. And they have to do it big and loud, otherwise this whole show turns into your average path towards a predictable dystopia.
The insane number of species killed should give everybody an inkling about how many ideas, ways of doing things, personalities and so on died, often enough not for evolutionary reasons, but because people ignored the wrong things.
And to those who think that "this is still evolution": it's not, sabotage is not evolution. And it's not securing anyones long term survival. Nobody cares about that of course. We have one lifetime and get to watch half of the life of our offspring, if we choose to, that is, and if we are lucky enough not to get poisoned, spiked, sick or smashed in an accident.
But if you think about the edge of what is possible, and you maximize that image, and you realize how many awesome brains got caught up in ripples of ignorance and a sub-average life of whores, money, power and shitty miniature teraforming, you quickly realise that some kind of immortality was actually on the horizon.
Our ancestors have build an impeccably working order that we simply stopped to maintain because the old guard refused to sue those who just had to be sued so that laws could evolve; and the young adapted. Of course there was and is progress but, a LOT of progress but if you apply readical honesty, you can't unsee and unknow all these big and obvious leaking holes. It's the same on any scale.
Anarchists, lefties and whatnot don't matter in this fight because the bulk of the people trusts competence first, which should be our top, but isn't, and only then do they choose what is marketed, which currently is "Trump"... And if the top behaves in certain ways, people will follow. And all the narratives on TV and the radio come with more than enough subtext. In every town on the planet and every block, corruption, punched drugs, spiking, abuse of power by teachers, trainers, companies, institutions, malfeasance in office, breaches of privacy, you name it, it's on every scale.
If you don't take proper care of that, meaning there must be an ongoing fight and law enforcement must be on the right side, before you let AI amplify and augment it all, then institutions will have a really bad time coming across as credible while corporations will continue to serve the peoples needs and desires ... ALL of their needs and their desires, even those they ought to keep in check: bam, your sub-average path to a predictable, sad dystopia, thank science there will be drugs.
find a 4th player or create a game to find/build/grow an independent one within the constraints of the system. make sure it's 'fair enough' as in "no sabotage".
> they're actually trying to process those feelings
Exactly, help exploring their problem, maybe direct them into one nook or the other, support a proper perspective from different angles (to a small extent within the context and constraints they provided!!!), but don't solve the riddle for them. They might not even know how they really feel about it all, yet.
> not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution
Relatable. Is true for even the simplest problems that some people have.
Sometimes they just didn't even address it yet and are only becoming adequately aware of it and here you are spelling out a plan of action during a 7 min encounter in the kitchen.
It's a (enough) users don't care enough to spend time engineering.
Humanity had the same problem since the industrialization. Quick money! Quick fame! Quick status! Quick likes!
Critical thinkers always said: we can do this better. We already have an outline and need a few months longer to engineer a better solution that will create more jobs and opportunities to expand the industry which will likely give rise to the potential of sparking entire new industries.
Pseudo-capitalist (portfolio communist): No, poison it all, level the ecosystem, erradicate however many species you have to, and make sure the people feel the urgency and talk less about that better solution. It's not trendy, the world is moving fast and throw some new designer roofies on the market. And amphetamines, and more cocaine, call it the new golden era and make sure the old and new Germans get really into it once again!
What? How so? Isn't it just a bunch of PCBs and sensors whereas gas powered cars are a bunch of awesome nonesense you can gently whack against each other to create different notes and tones?
The former requires a special printer while the latter requires tons of machines for precision engineering and the industrial equivalent of smitheries and blacksmiths!
Yeah, and it's 2026 and one would believe we vote for people whose staff prepares them and adequate responses for such events in advance. But ... I don't want to say self-corruption via shareholdership of friends of friends and a laissez-faire type of law making and enforcement in nooks where it reeaally should not be laissez-faire.
> The difference is that, fortunately, fine-tuning them is extremely easy.
Because of millions of years of generational iterations, by which I mean recursive teaching, learning and observing, the outcomes of which all involved generations perceive, assimilate and adapt to in some (multi-) culture- and sub-culture driven way that is semi-objectively intertwined with local needs, struggles, personal desires and supply and demand. All that creates a marvelous self-correcting, time-travelling OODA loop. []
Machines are being finetuned by 2 1/2 generations abiding by exactly one culture.
> The last 10 percent involves tediously filling in the details through back-and-forth trial-and-error conversation with the agent
It so often sounds like "traditional coding" flows like an orchestra during an opera while vibe and 'agentic' coding flows like a bunch of big bands practicing.
Are they trying to tell the story that "it's the same" or that "it's just not the same"? Is the toolchain changing that much that there is no reason to learn the baseline anymore? So the next ten years of AI development should be left to those who already weild the basic tools? Just like the economy? Is the narrative meant to establish a singularity-driven relationship with young coders, computer scientists and those who use code to entertain, inform and sell via media? While simultaneously pushing the outliers to the edge of the sphere and lock them out via their lack of AI skills and experience with such tools from ever reaching a proper chunk of the mob?
On the one hand, it's a personal decision. Trends and narratives can be convincing. Defactors are rare nowadays while polarization and the status quo are the defacto standard. So on the other hand, it's a depersonalized decision reinforcing the hierarchies (hardware) that dictate which tools (hardware, the cloud) dominate the main stream either way.
> Or are we restricting ourselves to vibe coding only?
> why not at this point switch to the human being primary author
It's the only choice. You are either the primary author of the code or of the learning material. In the former case, the latter is implied and you can't teach if you don't know.
In essence, all this "AI hype" should really only motivate. But these perceptions of "the end of stuff as we know it" and "NOW it's definitely not in my/our hands anymore" that is everywhere weighs heavy. So that the only "residue outcome" really is: making money is the only thing that's left ..., again, reinforcing the hierarchies (hardware) that dictate which tools (hardware, the cloud) dominate the main stream either way--whether you break under the weight or not, whether you shrugg it off or become versed enough to just carry it along--while establishing a singularity-driven relationship of the system with it's constituents.
nice write up of things that are only obvious if you spend time with AI.
pretty much everything applies to non-agentic AI work, code or not, as well, if you are aiming beyond average quality and conventional design, that is. people who give up somewhat early won't give up much later just because they use AI or teach an AI agent.
but the article is mostly also what people not in the field or tangentially related expect. it's here but that big thing isn't.
I could say I dabbled with woodworking but I really just used a chainsaw to cut down some trees, make slabs and then used drill and screws to construct the cheapest, fastest MVP of a piece of furniture that I used until the shed burned down. But that's not woodworking, not really.
"AI coding agents" is just an autoiterating chat of/with a large coding model, that you still have to iterate over, which is as obvious as an apprentice in a woodworking shop doing a lot--if not all of the work--alone until the meister points out all the mistakes and lets him do it all over again.
> I was soon spending eight hours a day during my winter vacation shepherding about 15 Claude Code projects at once
If you are a "computer person", spending 8h a day on multiple projects is normal, although 15 is, IMO, way too freaking much but I'm ADHD and not really a computer person. While I run dozens of narratives in parallel all the time, I only "shepherd" and iterate over a handful of them in 'flexible' time intervalls.
The reason for the burnout might be, and I can relate due to my ADHD, the following:
> Due to what might poetically be called “preconceived notions” baked into a coding model’s neural network (more technically, statistical semantic associations), it can be difficult to get AI agents to create truly novel things, even if you carefully spell out what you want.
The expectation to create something "truley novel" based on ideas that aren't truly novel (yet, ...what?) is weird enough, but then expecting that an AI coding agent, an apprentice, will make it novel even though the entire thing basically already exists and the novelty makes no sense conceptually until the core elements are separated
> a UFO (instead of a circular checker piece) flying over a field of adjacent squares,
is quite analogues to semi-functional ADHD people who believe they will get at least some of their ideas out if they "work" or dream on all all them. It can work, but you have to separate concerns, which, in case of ADHD people, is becoming functional, meaning don't consume stuff that impede body and brain, do stuff to eliminate bio-physical distractions and to keep hormonal and neural moral high at most times, and only then work, and in the case of AI coding agents it means to separate concepts that are programmatically/mathematically/linguistically intertwined and only then define mechanics and features within or beyond the individual or combined constraints.
> short videos of pretty girls saying that the EU is bad for Poland
Reminds me of those times in Germany when mainstream media and people with decades in academia used the term "Putin Versteher" (Person who gets Putin, Putin 'understander') ad nauseaum ... it was hilarious.
Unrelated to that, sometime last year, I searched "in" ChatGPT for occult stuff in the middle of a sleepless night and it returned a story about "The Discordians", some dudes who ganged up in a bowling hall in the 70's and took over media and politics, starting in the US and growing globally.
Musk's "Daddy N** Heil Hitler" greeting, JD's and A. Heart's public court hearings, the Kushners being heavily involved with the recruitment department of the Epsteins Islands and their "little Euphoria" clubs as well as Epstein's "Gugu Gaga Cupid" list of friends and friends of friends, it's all somewhat connected to "The Discordians", apparently.
It was a fun "hallucination" in between short bits on Voodoo, Lovecraft and stuff one rarely hears about at all.
how much new software do we really use? and how much can old software become qualitatively better without just becoming new software in different times with a much bigger and younger customer base?
I misunderstood two things for a very long time:
a) standards are not lower or higher, people are happy that they can do stuff at all or a little to a lot faster using software. standards then grow with the people, as does the software.
b) of course software is always opinionated and there are always constraints and devs can't get stuck in a recursive loop of optimization but what's way more important: they don't have to because of a).
Quality is, often enough, a matter of how much time you spent on nitpicking even though you absolutely could get the job done. Software is part of a pipeline, a supply chain, and someone is somehow aware why it should be "this" and not better or that other version the devs have prepared knowing well enough it won't see the light of day.
replace the worker in the middle and nothing stands between your favorite worst nightmare and the customers/reality you want. atm devs and workers are inside. even if they abide by "job security", "planned obsolescence" and building in 7 microphones and boatloads of code to record and track users and their behavior, these people are still inside and talk to each other and the rest of the world.
Once they are replaced, the right to repair, privacy and so on will vanish and we will be punished for disassembling hardware and software in worse ways than happened to that guy who did the PS3 back then (I don't know of any other stories, unfortunately). I heard that they already run the narrative "you bought a game but it's still ours" ..., which seems like the second or third step towards the direction outlined above.
I fear the same will happen to food, pharma ... not necesserily because the top of the pyramid is "evil" but because there are only so many ways to keep increasing the increase of their wealth. A lot of conspiratorial stuff IS happening, and the sick and damaged and neuro and bio divergent with all their sensitivities are livestock so why not "create" more? at least for some time ... until all is "Incorporated" as in "applying for the permit have children".
This sounds like engineers wanted to go traditional routes in the first place but the chain of command wanted to reduce production/constuction time and save money.