I suspect sycophancy has a lot to do with things . People with power attract those who want their favour and/or money who will align themselves to please the powerful rather than steer them to their best selves. Furthermore as the sycophants accumulate the genuine voices likely begin to sound out of place, like their _against_ the individual. Ironically paranoia gets deployed in the wrong direction to push out the true voices.
I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.
I built a very similar system into my own assistant type project. In all honesty though I've not used it enough to know how well it works out in practice.
Since Kagi small web was on HN a few days ago I've been visiting multiple times a day and spelunking around. I've added a number of interesting feeds to my RSS reader off the back of it already.
I was looking into Fedify just yesterday! I'm trying to decide whether to A) try and make my blog an activity pub instance of some sort, B) host my own Mastodon instance, or C) Use someone else's Mastodon server and link to my blog POSSE style. If I go with option A (which somehow feels like how things are _supposed_ to work) Fedify looks like the way to make it happen.
minor nit to pick: Welsh accents are British accents as Wales is in Britain. In fact by some definitions it's the most British part.
People from outside the UK often use British as synonymous with English, and in the context of accents, often a South East English accent or some sort of Received Pronunciation (RP) accent. Technically a "British" accent could be from anywhere in England, Scotland, or Wales, and therefore by extension might not even be the English language.
While I'm here, since it's generally confusing, the UK is Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales.
I am actually English but I'm so used to speaking with international people I instinctively say British instead of English - because that's what people expect.
So being factually correct doesn't really matter. Nobody cares and nobody wants to learn so I adapt for them.
In the same way I almost exclusively write with American spelling now. Life is just easier when you stop fighting.
Yeah I've been wondering if the increasing coding RL is going to draw models towards very short term goals relative to just learning from open source code in the wild
I've been thinking about this recently and it seems like the most enthusiastic boosters always suggest difference in results is a skill issue, but I feel like there are 4 factors which multiply out to influence how much value someone gets:
- The quality of model output for _your particular domain / tech stack_. Models will always do better with languages and libraries they see a lot of than esoteric or proprietary
- The degree to which "works" = "good" in your scenario. For a one off script, "works" is all that matters, for a long lived core library, there are other considerations.
- The degree to which "works" can be easily (best yet, automatically) verified.
- Techniques, existing code cleanliness, documentation etc.
Boosters tend to lay all different experiences at the feet of this last, yet I'd argue the others are equally significant.
On the other hand, if you want to get the best results you can given the first 3 (which are generally out of one's control) then don't presume there's nothing you can do to improve the 4th.
I salaried employees who are paid by time, and are paying their own Anthropic bills.
Initially there is perhaps a mitigating advantage of briefly impressing ourselves or others with output, but that will quickly fade into the new normal.
Net result: employee paying significant money to produce more, but capturing none of that value.
I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.
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