> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks
Social media felt this way in the early days, too.
> they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately)
This is dangerously untrue. LLMs will deliberately tell you the things you want to hear. They even "call you out" in exactly the ways that are most palatable to you. There is ample evidence that LLMs can be biased. The ability to broadly influence individual opinions, without even needing bot accounts on social media is exactly one of the reasons so many people who want power/money are flocking to control these LLMs.
> so many of my interactions are with jerks
This is one of the ways that the LLMs are "scarier" and more powerful than social networks. Real people are more likely to be obviously pushing agendas or otherwised easily dismissed.
> LLMs are the ones getting better
Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media. It's the reach and anonymity of social media without needing to control a feed algorithm, deal with content or people that doesn't fit your agenda, or produce fake content that does.
I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives
Believe it or not, the laws don't say verbatim "Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising...". I can't really believe that this is a real question and that I'm trying to explain this, either. The actual laws are more specific, and combined with how the courts interpret them, cover a lot of different situations and try to do so in a reasonable way.
If you actually want to understand why "an actor pretending to enjoy drinking Coca Cola" is okay while other kinds of endorsements are not, in the US at least, you could start with the FTC "Truth in Advertising" website, and "Advertising Endorsements" specifically, or other resources on that page.
In the US, the FTC is very clear that faking or purchasing testimonials is illegal. Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising and is a form of fraud. On the other hand, selecting and advertising specific real testimonials is fine. A customer described their actual experience that way, and presumably the consumers understand that advertisers will select especially positive individual testimonials for their advertisements. I can't believe I'm actually trying to explain this, but fake testimonials are illegal because the consumer has no way to know that they are made up. Real testimonials are not "lying with statistics", they're not statistics at all, and are legal because consumers can understand that it's not the median customer experience.
If picking real winners and real winnings to feature in the ad was just as good, they could do that. If not, then yes, it makes an impact on the world to mislead people with that marketing.
Somehow there's a difference between things that happened and didn't happen, and that's a good place to draw a line in the sand of what you're allowed to advertise and not.
That's like saying, if I have 9 apples, and I give you 3, how many apples do I have? 4! Get it? I have 4 apples, and I have 2 more, but that still means I have 4 apples! I still argue that, since 9 > 8.5, this is a trick question rather than a puzzle. If the puzzle said "how do we apportion the camels so that the three sons are satisfied" that would be different.
No, it's that I don't believe the given solution solves the problem as stated. I think if it had said "at least 1/2", "at least 1/3", etc, then it would be fine. Like, if I asked you "how do you paint a 10 square foot wall white with only an ounce of white paint?" and then revealed the answer as "add a bunch of blue paint! The wall is painted white now (also blue, but still also white). Haha!"
I only looked at the first "puzzle" and then came back here in some kind of frustration. The "solution" includes apportioning 9 camels to the first son, but 9 isn't 1/2 of 17. Maybe I'm pedantic, but if the solution is allowed to approximate or change the aportionment, then that should be specified in the puzzle statement! I felt tricked. Anyone else?
I had an experience with this during the Helene Hurricane in rural western North Carolina. We had no power or cell service for 18 days. In the first few days the roads were too damaged or block, so the only modes of travel a lot of places were by foot, bicycle, or ATV. Suddenly we were visiting with our neighbors by foot without prior plans, folks were grilling in their front yards, and of course, phones were not relevant. The first few days, you pick up your phone out of habit and "realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down". And then you stop even doing that. A lot of people suffered and there was a lot of damage. In other ways we were thriving.
I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.
There is a difference between a project that is eventually abandoned out of annoyance because you couldn't accomplish what you wanted and a project that gets a day or two of attention and then gets aborted because you figured out it wasn't worth it or got interested in something else. I think the parent comment is talking about the former and I'm responding to that, while you're talking about the latter.
I think most people are finding the opposite. Claude Code is not only reducing how many projects get abandoned, it's also resurrecting projects from the graveyard.
I think it can be easy to look at code as an asset, but fundamentally it is a liability. Some of the "bottlenecks" to new code are in place to make sure that the yield outweighs the increased liability. Agents that produce more code faster are producing more liability faster. Much of the excitement and much of the skepticism about coding agents is about whether the immediate increased productivity (new features) and even immediate yield (new products or new revenue) outweighs the increased long term liabilities. I'd say we won't find out for another 1-3 years, and of course that the answer will differ in different domains.
From this perspective, attempting to build these bottlenecks into the agentic workflow directly makes some sense. Supplying coding agents with additional context that values a coherent project vision and that pushes back against new features or unconstrained processes would be valuable.
Is this what the article is trying to get at? Is this attempting to make some agents essentially take on product management responsibilities, synthesizing as much as possible into a cohesive product vision and reminding the coding agents of that vision as strictly as possible? Should these agents review new proposals and new pull requests for "adherence to the full picture", whether you want to call this "context" or "vision" or something else?
I think these agents might do an exceptionally good job at synthesizing context and presenting a cohesive roadmap that appears, linguistically, to adhere to the team values and vision. But I'm doubtful that they can have the discernment that a quality manager or team can have. Rapidly and convincingly greenlighting a particular roadmap could do more harm than good.
My sense is that it's the opposite. The people who complain about meetings, managers, and methodologies also complain about agentic coding. The people who are excited about frameworks, methodologies, and project management tooling are excited about agentic coding.
I think you're mixing up the laws and the implementation/enforcement. There's nothing wrong with moral laws around behavior (you shall not kill), but you're right that society-wide enforcement requires laws and repercussions. It sounds more like to agree with the laws and want them enforced.
Did you look at the examples? There's a big difference between "if I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have" which is one kind of irrelevant information that at least appears applicable, and "if I have four apples and give away one apple, how many apples do I have? Also, did you know cats use their tails to help balance?", which really wouldn't confuse most humans.
This is a great link. I'm not very well versed on the llm ecosystem. I guess you can give the llm instructions on how to behave generally, but some instructions (like this one in the system prompt?) cannot be overridden. I kind of can't believe that there isn't a set of options to pick from... Skeptic, supportive friend, professional colleague, optimist, problem solver, good listener, etc. Being able to control the linked system prompt even just a little seems like a no brainer. I hate the question at the end, for example.
I think that maintaining a stable temperature means warm walls/floors/furniture and potentially cooler air temperature, as opposed to a cold house with intermittently warm air. Most people can feel comfortable at a lower thermostat (air) temperature if the walls etc are warm due to maintaining a stable temperature. I don't have calculations or references, YMMV.
Social media felt this way in the early days, too.
> they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately)
This is dangerously untrue. LLMs will deliberately tell you the things you want to hear. They even "call you out" in exactly the ways that are most palatable to you. There is ample evidence that LLMs can be biased. The ability to broadly influence individual opinions, without even needing bot accounts on social media is exactly one of the reasons so many people who want power/money are flocking to control these LLMs.
> so many of my interactions are with jerks
This is one of the ways that the LLMs are "scarier" and more powerful than social networks. Real people are more likely to be obviously pushing agendas or otherwised easily dismissed.
> LLMs are the ones getting better
Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media. It's the reach and anonymity of social media without needing to control a feed algorithm, deal with content or people that doesn't fit your agenda, or produce fake content that does.