The recent post on ripping DVDs reminded me of the DeCSS prime number. Fascinating topic to think about.

this goes somewhat further, if you consider binary representation as a very large number. any digital image, or audio is fundamentally a very large binary number, so any such representation of illegal action, is an illegal number, that can be used to manufacture offending media.

What if the language model writes a story about a character who is conscious and that story is written live about how the character interacts with the world.

I have been very successfully ignoring Windows on Arm since it first appeared :)

I understand the sentiment ;) But IMHO the title of the article is still a bit misleading or incomplete.

I mean, so has Microsoft, so...

I like to complain about Microsoft as much as anyone, but this is simply not true. At least not since the "second coming of Windows on ARM".

We might well be the most advanced species in the universe. Seems unlikely, but we really don’t have anything else to measure against at the moment.

I wish these posts that talk about non-human mistakes that agents make would post some examples. They would be interesting to see.

One nasty set of bugs Claude recently introduced; it was doing a large refactor which involved changing call sites to conform to a changed API. Tedious, but straight forward. It helpfully added about 50 if(!something) continue; statements, this would make the code silently absorb issues that should have thrown. Had I accepted this, the results would have made the program run like shit but not crash, making debugging much harder than it needs to be. Really effing annoying! Thanks Claude!

It’s the annoying thing about AI. If it works, the AI is magic. If it doesn’t work, you’re using it wrong.

It was the same thing with OOP, TDD, agile development, C, C++, Rust, ORMs..

Whenever something impacts a ton of people you will get some who gain a lot from it and some who don't, and they're generally unable to relate to the other side.

Maybe the thing works in some domain and not the other. Maybe the two groups are doing different things. Maybe the context around it is different. Maybe they have a different definition of "better".

I think it helps to keep an open mind and not grow attached to either position, but rather inquire, "well we did X with outcome Y, what did you do instead?"

So, would you change your view if someone else runs this bench w/ a different harness and gets better results?

This is me. Different music, same deal. Finding you’re not as alone as you thought you were is what the internet is for.

Anybody know how much ram you would need in a Mac to run the Pro model?

I don’t think that’s completely true, there is an art to code beyond it just being correct. There are a great many correct implementations of a program, but only some of them are really beautiful as well. Most people don’t see the code or appreciate this, but the difference between correct and art is clear to me when I see it.

Code can be beautiful or ugly but that doesn't make it art.

Art is not just about beauty, it is about expressing the mind (feelings, experience etc) of the author. AI will never do that (except if it learns to express its own experiences, which would be art, but not something competing with human art; it would be like if we had contact with alien art).

I think that's the main thing many people who've never seriously made art or aren't deeply involved with it on an emotional and psychological level are unable to grasp.

Code is my art and is how I express myself. I agree that nothing that AI does is art.

I think most of us agree that writing code can be expressive. But I don't think that alone qualifies you code as art.

I have written code myself that I deem beautiful and expressive. But I'm also a musician, and making music (and listening to it deeply) has given me such intense, mystic experiences, that they dwarf anything I've ever experienced writing code. It's also much harder to make good music because it requires a kind of courage and psychological constitution that is simply not required for writing code.

Code in general is obviously not art, which is all that matters here.

I respectfully disagree, I think code has always been more of an art than a science. It's an odd one, I'll grant you, as you need to do a lot of work to really appreciate it.

I agree that it's "more art than a science", colloquially speaking. But I would still not call it art. Not by a long stretch.

Fair enough.

It’s making a tiny number of people richer and a very large number of people poorer. It isn’t going to end well.