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"We have many AI systems which can give us more. ... and Claude-Code, which have brought true advances in science, mathematics, and programming."

That contradiction kind of says he doesn't know what he's talking about.


Yes, the guy with a PhD in Machine Intelligence, co-author of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which is universally considered the bible of the field, recipient of the AAAI fellowship award and the Turing Award, and the inventor of Temporal Difference Learning doesn't know what he's talking about.

Sure, but does that mean he's right all the time about all things, including everything in his own field?

He is saying no generative AI is going to produce output that is both good and novel because it is always derivative. And then adds a generative AI (Claude Code) into his list of AI that have produced output that he feels is good and novel, invalidating what he is arguing.

"...no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white."


If you read it he says that CC has additional aspects beyond ordinary GAI, namely the ability to verify. That aspect is necessary for GAI to be good and novel.

Although personally I think code doesn’t actually need to be very novel so it’s actually the best example.


I don't completely disagree but its worth noting how new a lot of the empirical evidence in favour of LLMs are, so its not impossible to be a tad ignorant of the present

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws


Surprisingly enough, Turing Award winner and father of reinforcement learning Richard Sutton knows perfectly well what he's talking about. The whole talk is about the need to have the ability to test novel outputs against reality and iterate to find ones that are good. This is exactly what Claude Code, the agent framework, adds to Claude, the LLM, to allow it to find novel coding solutions that actually work.

You know it’s occurred to me recently that there really is no value in this age to any kind of professionalism or seniority

If you don’t agree with somebody, nothing else matters

It’s like people (you as an example) have taken the concept of experts and fucked it up so bad that simultaneously everybody thinks they’re an expert while also dismissing everybody else who claims they are an expert

It’s like the whole concept is entirely poisoned. Worse everyone is smugly pointing at the Wikipedia for “appeal to authority.”

Nothing new I suppose, Socrates after all was driven to suicide by the madness of his society accusing him of impiety.


Problem is, most of these "coastal" acacias don't live very long. Same with grevilleas.

The ones we have planted in our garden will likely need replacing in 7-15 years.


What I find bizarre is the word "siesta" doesn't appear in this article.

People have been working around the hot summer hours in Southern Europe for centuries. Until recent times it was part of the culture.


It's part of the culture where I live, but the heat keeps increasing. 45 in dry heat (unless you work outside) is fine if you get cooler nights to recover, but when you don't get a break, it's lethal. Also aircon helps you but adds significantly to the heat outside in urban areas, causing what feels like a vicious circle. Anyway, where I live aircon is not common and electricity costs are high.

As a child traveling around northern Spain and rural southern France we got caught out and had to stop and wait for a service station to reopen so we could buy petrol. All part of the experience.

I've lived in a few places that would get consecutive 40C+ days. Perfectly fine unless the wind is a strong northerly blowing from the interior. The 37C in Brisbane this year was much less bearable due to the higher humidity: 75% rather than 45%.


I would also add Iain McGilchrist, Donald Hoffman, Andy Clark, Jeff Hawkins and Jesse Prinz to that list.

I always thought the TV show Ozark was fairly accurate in it's depiction of money laundering. The family would buy a small business that they could inject cash and cook the books with fake sales.

any tips based job; serving/waiting, stripping, bartending, etc. gig/service work. freelancer websites that offer escrow, etc. Shopify. Hell, github sponsorships. You don't even need a physical store these days, or a business for that matter. Cashapp even. The list is endless and it's easier than ever.

Now I just need some dirty money to go through the hassle of cleaning


Can we just say it was basically vibe coded, but with real humans in the loop?

Version 5 was when the source material dried up, and the hallucinations became more frequent and obvious.

As far as I remember there was a basic outline of major plot points and where all the major characters ended up (a prompt) and were left to fill in all the blanks.


> Can we just say it was basically vibe coded

I mean he references a "murder of ravens" several times. It's an unkindness of ravens and a murder of crows. Classic LLM mistake right up there with the emdash.


Given he posted this comic in 2008, Randall Munroe was way ahead of the ball on the idea of autonomous agents.

Maynard Keynes posited a future 15 hour work week in 1930 based on the productivity gains after WW1, nearly 100 years ago now.

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf


> For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-- how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The average work time in European societies is probably that. The majority of citizens don’t work (too young, studying, sick, unemployed, retired). But it’s changing fast, the rich are no longer accepting this situation. The ones working get happily manipulated into believing others should suffer as much as they do, instead of organizing lifestyles into a more frugal fashion for the benefit of all.


Not defending the US here (not least because as a European I'm deeply pissed at the US government and the people backing it) but every country with a large military has similar plans, they are used as a training exercise/staff exercise rather than as realistic plans (as noted in the article you linked).

It depends. If you own a single block dwelling and have a yard with trees, plants, lawns or a pool there are always things to do.

$500/year for the garden is very conservative, even when you're doing all the labour.

It would be more like $500/month were you to get a gardener in. If you need an arborist (for example cutting back tall trees close to power lines or encroaching on neighbours) it gets expensive very fast.

A pool also costs at least $500/year just in chemicals.


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