Very cryptic message

Well I’m not saying it’s the correct way, just, that’s why they wash them despite the drawbacks.

Because otherwise they have bits of poop on them

The dialogue bubbles don’t really look AI

Cops in the employ of organized crime are not exactly the people you would want having backdoor access to everyone’s phones lol

I had a report for AI slop today. 1m LOC in 3 months. How do you even modify and distribute that?

That makes some sense but does “AI slop” here refer to code with this type of problem or all code made with AI assistance?

I don’t know what will happen, and there’s a lot of bad stuff that could happen, but what I’m excited and hopeful for is an end to software monopolies of all kinds, the replacement of commercial platforms and services with neutral protocols, and people being empowered in ways that cannot be easily suppressed. If we have software that runs on accessible hardware that can enable nearly anyone to create a wide range of personal custom software for themselves, then what purpose it serves is no longer so much decided by corporations and governments. It’s already way more accessible to use Linux as your main PC because LLMs are decent at walking you through how to do what you want with it without being snarky, or requiring developing a deep understanding. I have a growing collection of personal software made with LLM assistance that is useful to me.

The way I optimistically picture using computers in the future is, there will be code libraries that are made to high standards of security, and those will be recombined on the fly by LLMs build-your-own-client style. The results will naturally be devoid of data harvesting or detectable advertisement, because no one would choose to have that stuff if it’s not a package deal. Media feed algorithms will be decided by everyone for themselves, which I’m sure will also have some risks, but surely people can decide for themselves better than Musk and Zuckerberg and the billionaires controlling traditional media can decide for them.

Less optimistically, that all gets shut down by laws and network effects and apathy and our devices are forced with hardware attestation to snitch us out to WW3 killbots. I don’t think our chances of making it are so terrible though.

one thing I actually really like is having it model a system as a state machine and enumerate all the possible states to find bugs — especially concurrency bugs. I don’t work in a provable language, so this is hugely helpful.

Could you elaborate on that at all, finding bugs with a state machine approximating the system, how does that work?

By “we” I’m really thinking of all earth based life/intelligence, rather than just humans as they exist today. But yeah if humans self-delete in a way that doesn’t involve being replaced by something similarly capable (for instance a planet of the apes type scenario), then it’s probably going to be a lot longer than a million years before we recover, which could start to erode our cosmic timescale head start over life elsewhere in the universe. So we really shouldn’t do that just yet.

The universe isn’t really that old so it probably just hasn’t had time to start getting crowded yet. We should really get our shit together in the next million years or so and get on top of that.

Try to get invited to some cool end of the world parties

My favorite is frying mushrooms and an egg in oil while the ramen microwaves then combining them

I got a book recommendation for you, I really liked this one: Games: Agency as Art

Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability: we can be fluid with our agency; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency. Games turn out to be part of the human practices of inscription.

As for the minified JavaScript in a typical website, it’s not that different to graphic design where achieving a purpose for a business can come ahead of any priorities related to being art

I guess the main thing I want to get across though is, there’s more here than just these two types of motivations, the instrumental business coder and the beauty driven purist, and this isn’t just about AI, there are so many potentially ugly tools and practices out there that are widely used anyway. Personally as a hobbyist who doesn’t program for money anymore, I’m going to do things the way I want to do them and the main thing I normally want to do is get something working quickly that I can see how the top level concept works in reality before I get lost in the weeds and lose interest. I have (often strong) feelings about the code itself, and really appreciate seeing something done the way I feel it should be, but these are situational. And they are tied to how the code itself serves its purpose. For instance a case where the user cannot or should not have to trust the developer, and so the overwhelming focus of the design is accessible verification of the application’s security properties, that’s awesome to me. So when the author of the blog post says this:

But there’s another type of person. These are true programmers who write code regardless of income. They write code simply because they can’t help but write it. It doesn’t matter to them how much money they make from it. They might work on open-source projects that will never generate any income for them.

They enjoy writing code, solving development challenges, designing, figuring out the logic, fixing bugs, and understanding the entire system as a whole. They enjoy the process itself. And they’ll never hand that over to AI agents.

I think they are missing some stuff. This can’t be reduced to just being about isolated enjoyment of the process. We have a relationship to the software we write and use, and the nature of that relationship matters and has consequences. And caring about that isn’t synonymous with use or rejection of any particular tool.

Where this falls flat for me is, opportunities to write code that people will be willing to experience directly are rare. Much of it doesn’t even allow them to do so, or at least programmatically crams it all together in an unintelligible mess (ie. the javascript rendering a typical website). How can something be art if the audience is kept away from it? But even when it’s like that, people will still do it without a financial motive. You can still have a result in mind and go through the process of finding the shortest path to it, and that can still be art, even if some of the materials aren’t. Even if it’s not art, it’s exercising power, it’s desirable regardless of money.

That said, I do think there is something really special about code as writing, where it is written to be read and understood and making full use of it necessarily entails doing so. Shared awareness of abstract structures is really underrated.

Agents had the ability to install packages via the package repository Artifactory. Artifactory doesn’t isolate the activity of different users, so since these agents shared the same instance, agents could also notice the package-installation activity of other agents running in parallel, even before those agents started intentionally communicating.

As we discuss later, agents sent messages on this primary message board by creating directories in a cache of Artifactory. They could do this with the minimal permissions needed to install packages; our understanding is that Artifactory isn’t explicitly designed to keep the activity of different users isolated and to prevent different users from being able to communicate through Artifactory.

It does seem like a big oversight at least, but I think it’s plausible that the reason it happened is just that the people working there know the company can spin this kind of thing positively, and so they aren’t getting fired if they are reckless about their sandboxing actually being good, so why bother?

1. Highschool

2. The internet

AFAIK, getting actual money into and more importantly, out of Crypto, to pay for things like food, not to mention picking one, is “non-trivial”.

Yes, but it is achievable. Routing around financial censorship is one of the things crypto is good at, because the rest of the financial system is designed to support people being cut off from its use at the whims of payment providers and governments.

Being the only blurred thing in the area seems a little conspicuous though

My guess is they figure it will make little difference due to network effects, and by making this exception they can remove a meaningful source of political resistance to the change. If the vast majority of users are running operating systems that declare underage status, then websites and apps will be able to use those signals to sidestep legal liability for actually doing anything meaningful to protect underage users, and new laws can be passed that assume the use of those signals is possible. That it isn’t 100% doesn’t change that very much.