P.S.: I want to make it clear that this isn't just about dealing with other humans. The dread I contemplate should affect even introverted shut-ins.

I want to reduce accidental complexity, discover and understand real problems, solve them well, and leave the world somehow better for it. Not just some infinitely process ping-pong of a hallucinated digital dollhouse fifteen levels removed from objective reality.

Moment of the breakdown (I couldn’t find a less shitty video).

https://youtu.be/CtYEm21Fhpo?t=79

Soul engraving video seeing him go through that

>I think what could help make this better is investing into giving agents actual personality, instead of them being just sycophantic clones of each other. AI agents as team members should have clear aspects of distinction both in their abilities and behaviors.

A language interface doesn't need a personality any more than a visual interface does. For most professional work, source data isn't written in the first person. Ego is an imposed product feature that wastes energy. What would the purpose of diverse personalities be? I want models as tools, not friends.

Most people likely have a natural aversion against having "team members" without agency or consciousness. Giving them artificial, acted personalities would be even more horrible. LLMs are tools and trying to elevate them to the same level as actual humans is nuts.

(Yes yes, we can't know whether it "feels like" something to exist as bursts of vast numbers of matrix multiplications, but at least it would be a rather strange existence.)

I've been at my current company for just over three years. I manage a small team of developers at a medium-sized consultancy, building internal tooling for our data analysts.

One of my junior developers started the same day I did; we went through on boarding together. He's in his mid 20s, this is his second job post-college, after having an abysmal experience entering the workforce during COVID. He's had some struggles with learning to code but has taken my advice to build side projects for things he is interested in and has really started to take off. He got married last year and just last week bought a house.

One of my developers was a brand new junior, having started her first job post-college just a few months before I started at the company. When I first met her, she apologized to me. She hadn't done anything, she was just that kind of mousy person whose obviously been ground down by everyone around her for her entire life. I started making her deliver our project status updates. I also give her full projects that she works on her own with no input from me, other than whatever advice she herself asks of me. She finished her master's degree in computer science last year and also recently bought a house.

One of my more recent developers came to us from after 10 years of working on-site on military bases. She'd been stuck in a corner, made to maintain large legacy projects on her own, over looked for promotion her entire career. She's one of the best project managers I've ever seen. I have her deliver all of our presentations to the C-suite (and there are a lot of them). She just got engaged and I recently got her promoted for the first time in her career.

One of my former developers came to me from a different part of the company. He came to the company after being a medic on active duty in Afghanistan. His former team couldn't figure out what to do with him and when the contract on which he was working expired, they didn't bother to find a new one for him. He had told his supervisor he wanted to be a programmer, not an analyst, and somehow his supervisor knew I was looking for people. He was an absolutely terrible programmer. I spent multiple sessions a week working on mentoring him. Ultimately, I suggested he find another company and helped him find one that I thought would fit him better, something smaller, not in consulting, that could have more time to work directly with him, and kept him busy with documentation tasks until he could transition with no down time. He still sends me updates on LinkedIn. He also bought a house and is getting married soon. He loves his new job, misses our team, but says he's learning a lot more now.

Our company is one of the worst places to work as a software developer I've ever seen. Not quite the worst in that nobody is yelling at us or threatening us with violence, but our management has absolutely zero understanding of the business of software development. It's incompetent-bad, not evil-bad. The actual projects are ludicrously bad with no direction. My boss listens to me in our one-on-ones with bewildered eyes as I describe the cacophony of dumb ideas from our C-suite stakeholders, folks he has no involvement with because my team is matrixed out to internal work. He mostly just lets me do whatever I want as long as the timesheets get signed on time. I love working here. I also recently bought a house, my first one in my life. Oh yeah, we live in Northern Virginia, BTW, houses ain't cheap here. But I love working here despite all the product idiocy because I don't see my job as building software, I see it as building software developers.

Fuck calling a computer program a "teammate." A computer program is not going to have a brilliant and beautiful life. We only do any of this shit because it's in the service of people.

> these seemingly intelligent entities that we could talk to and interact with just like we do with humans.

> Now that we have that, everybody hates it.

There are several reasons for it, most of them having to do with looking beyond what’s right in front of your nose. For many people, we don’t “have that”, LLMs are not comparable to interactions with humans. Then there’s all the shit around it such as the further consolidation of power in the hands of a few who really shouldn’t have it, the destruction of livelihoods, the increase in disinformation and propaganda, unhealthy habits and depression, and on and on.

Too many of these conversations focus only on the technology and completely ignore the context in which it exists. That lack of human perspective is a major reason why Hacker News is made fun of and dismissed relentlessly on other places on the internet (called “the orange site”), and everyone here is (wrongly) lumped as being a bunch of out-of-touch selfish nerds.

I get it. I am still in love with the idea of having little bot and helper I can interact with. Realistic NPC, etc ... I think my current distrust and disappointment as many reasons that mostly boils down to imagination vs. reality.

The current generation of LLM takes a lot of resources to make, so of course it was made and pushed by the worst offender of late-stage capitalism. Giving an air of mercantilism, corporatism and general greed and unfairness already oh so common in our time. It's hard to see Claude as a cool entity and not exclusively made for profit, with all that entails. It's also (partly via the training data, partly via the proprietary system prompt and other safety mechanism) give the output a god awful personality. Sycophant, safe, easy language, no personality. And I have given up on trying tweaks to not have them sound like an incredible gigantic corporate-safe-speech dork.

Then there is all the limitation of LLM. We keep calling the current tech "AI", but they are as close to my own definition of AI than randomize decision tree npc where in early 2010 games. They can't do logic. They are a random number generator that are just insanely good at giving you the number that you want (which, I should emphasis, is absolutely crazy). Some techniques help with that, but the tech is fundamentally limited, which often make them frustrating.

So you really place no value on talking to other people. I guess you must think that's not part of engineering

I think its an intentional mockup - perhaps the intent is to make it look like it all happened within a minute, and I'm sure they picked that time to imply that its something you could do after your 9-5... marketing is all so sinister.

Nostr isn't really p2p it's just that if you stick to text it's cheap to host a server

Maybe they meant git? Not right either but less wrong.

Oh, is this a thing?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glitterati

> people who are famous, wealthy

Oh, okay...

> and attractive

lost me

> The bubble can't pop soon enough.

I am not ready for a new hype cycle based on whatever the imagineers come up with next.

[flagged]

Are you making a joke? Not being snarky, I actually can't tell if it's a real suggestion or satirical.

Don’t forget to light some candles and invoke the name of the Omnissiah while you’re at it.

Me: Shoot me in the face, @cringebot

Cringebot: :salute: on it!

Not sure how long the subreddit has existed but I always assumed it was inspired by the episode of The Office where Michael asks Oscar to explain what a surplus is like he's 5. The broader usage on social media and the ELI5 shorthand are definitely the result of the subreddit though.

This article is definitely abusing the terminology, because I wouldn't expect even tech-knowledgeable people to know what Nostr is or does.

It’s way older than Reddit, it’s older than the Office. I remember Denzel Washington saying it in some movie when I was a kid, and I doubt it originated there. Doesn’t Einstein have a quotation about it, too?

The phrase was in an episode of The Office prior to that. I think it's fairly old.

>it’s now just shorthand for “describe using the first principles the expected audience should understand.”

I think at that it still fails pretty bad. I suppose the expected audience is quite a bit broader than people who would know or actually care what nostr events are. Maybe my expectation is off though.

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein (allegedly :))

I always thought that the quote was with "5 year old" and that it was the reason for ELI5 :)

I remember someone saying it in high school back in the late 90s or early 00s.

In this article, it's just an AI-generated TL;DR, tagline, sub-title box that was badly prompt-engineered and the website owners didn't care about its quality. I am pretty sure the entire website is an AI generated news aggregator.

Are you smarter than a five year old, kinda show

Ouch

Extract money from venture capital

But who is allowed to press it? If anyone, then anyone can expose career ruining messages from someone else, even inadvertently.

Pretty sure slack enterprise has this feature for turning private chats into public channels.

Edit: verified. You can do this but takes an extra step of converting to private channel first then swapping the channel mode.

Pretty sure slack enterprise has this feature for turning private chats into public channels.

Checked docks. You can convert any private chat into a private channel. Then swap the channel from private to public.

Having every inconsequential discussion on public channels is what really lower the signal to noise ratio of messages on Slack nowadays. I am starting to revert back to email now because at least the signal to noise ratio there is much higher.

I'm confused are against the idea of private groups at all or just that you can't change the visibility settings later on?

The issue is when users interact with claude, what can they see? If the AI can see super-secret-payroll-details.md - is it allowed to discuss that with any user? is there some sort of internal ACL within claude that asks pretty please don't tell everyone they're underpaid?

That's why multiuser agents can be an issue.

The other way to do this, is to have claude installed for everyone, and any user's chat with claude uses their personal permissions via something like oauth delegation or AWS IAM role kinda things. But that, again, is complicated ACL logic living through the delegation of roles and access

Because there’s an unlimited number of groups with different combinations of memberships. If I am in group A but not group B and an agent is in both, what is it allowed to share with me?

And if someone gets access to a channel that they shouldn't?

The best norms around slack channels is to have most channels be public, but have norms where not everyone is in every channel.

Totally get that for code! But there are orgs where non-code things are compartmentalised — maybe for leak reasons — that still want to employees to make use of agents.

For code, often contractors and partners are only given scoped access to relevant projects.

Argument similar to: people still get hurt riding a skate without a helmet, why do I need it anyway?

And I find this thought process somewhat faulty.

[flagged]

It's probably just Dorsey's vibe-coded side project. The scope isn't too big and it's rather unimpressive

Not at all the same thing. Your half-baked works can't appear to be anything else than what they actually are. You are in no danger of wasting anyone's time.

For one thing, you probably never tried to mislead anyone. Did you put 8 minutes of effort into something and then come here and try to say "Hey world, here is a thing you should all care about and invest in. I mean, I didn't, but you should."?

But even if you did try, you physically cannot (5 years ago) generate the equivalent of 10 years of work by a 10 person team complete with docs and tests that all looks plausible and maybe even runs.

Know of any other labels that are blocked or taken ?

But why would a business want to have it's internal communications be on a platform like signal? none of the privacy features feel relevant to work related communications, if anything I think a company needs the ability to see all communications on platforms it uses for audit ability, collaboration, etc

I'm not saying it's a bad choice. Slack is written in Hack, Discord written in Elixir, and Teams is written in C#. Why teams choose languages is always a point of curiosity to me.

[dead]

> Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?

Technically, because if the world moves to AI-driven tools and Slack is not cooperating, it will no longer serve the world and will be left behind.

> Isn't a tool supposed to work for you

If you want AI integration in your chat and Slack is not helping make it happen, then Slack is not working for you.

On the other hand, constantly chasing the latest fad can be a useless drain of resources and (worse yet) attention. In this context, AI is by now most likely not a fad, but the ways to interoperate with it can be: mcp, cli, agent, tag, ... And the same goes for users, reinventing their processes and practices 5 times per year.

I'm sympathetic to this POV. I think specifically in the case of Slack, it's not their responsibility in a cosmic sense, but it is in line with the direction and general promise they've been making to customers since forever.

A major part of Slack's go-to-market strategy for as long as I can remember has been pushing Slack as more than a interface for talking with teammates, but as a unified interface for generally piloting your business. Slack has heavily pushed ideas like "SlackOps", they've had Slackbot in the product forever, and they've always prioritized and sold integrations designed to let you build your business workflows in Slack. They even updated Slackbot to go from "that chatbot you DM to set reminders" to "Your AI teammate in Slack": https://slack.com/features/slackbot

So adapting to agents is in keeping with what Slack promises its users. I know that a lot of people don't want more AI features in apps that don't need them (i fall into this camp despite working in ML myself and using LLMs all day). I just think that in the case of Slack, their most passionate power-users are also the sort of people who do really want AI features.

Notion is probably a good companion here. It is similarly a really primitive utility--text editing--that has marketed itself as a sort of central interface for running your company. I know plenty of people, especially outside of engineering, for whom Notion is essentially their browser for work. And it's probably not a coincidence that the Notion + Slack are the two normal office software companies I can think of who've most heavily adopted and marketed AI features.

It’s not Slack’s responsibility to do so, but it is their vulnerability if they don’t

We also adapted our workflows to the invention of trains, shipping containers, the PC & the internet. I fail to see why AI would be so different.

It is like asking in 1999 why DHL should have a website. Surely they can just meet people where they are - on the phone, on the high street. Why does everything need a bloody website.

You would like Cory Doctorow's concept of reverse centaurs.

There's a new feature being added to AT to support "permissioned data" that would handle a Slack-like use-case: https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0016-p...

What problem is that a solution to? Is there a problem with someone owning it, in that case: what?

The story right now is to own the least you possibly can, at least if you're a business. If I can buy it that's usually the right choice, in terms of opportunity cost if nothing else.

(I work for Block, not on this)

Cash App was not an acquisition, it originated as a hackweek within (what was then called) Square.

Possibly you’re thinking of the Afterpay acquisition?

If by throwing shit you mean copy everybody

No other company in the internet age has done what Facebook has. Zuckerberg -

Copies every product he sees. Copied Twitter, Snapchat. Lifted features from Google+ Overwrite people's public-facing emails, which hurts being able to use competitive services https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 Apparently wrote some tool which allowed for data transfer into FB from Myspace, but not the other way around (yes, I know. In many ways Myspace was hot trash, that doesn't mean he wasn't a malicious actor to extreme extents Blocked links to competition Other things I can't remember right now

Say what you will about Myspace, or Friendster, or Google+ (I'm annoyed as anyone they thought a great method to get people to use it was "ok, we'll ask you again later" on Youtube) but Facebook has always rigged the game, they've been bad actors

Hi!

> So you're explicitly picking a bot per person, you're just calling them an agent. But you never really admit this because you call it 'an agent' rather than "the user's agent". You're still ending up with lots of agents each owned by people, you're just writing another orchestration layer yourself.

Giving everyone their own agent/bot/app in Slack is nontrivial because of how Slack apps work. If you're okay with them impersonating you, it's easy, but that's weird and I don't like having to guess/discern if I'm talking to you or a bot wearing your face

> How? How is this resource managed or limited? Do I have to assume Buzz will just borrow my laptop's CPU & GPU at random?

This is opt in. It's an integration with https://github.com/Mesh-LLM/mesh-llm that scopes shared compute to your Buzz community. This is very early right now and we're working to get it right. But the idea of a totally self-sovereign, self-hosted community providing its own inference is exciting.

We’re out of drinks. Can you two go get more wine coolers?

So why can't the cursor instance on your laptop have a slack bot? I've had a slack bot on my build machine written in chicken-scheme of all things for years, I feel like the great people (or clankers?) at cursor ought to be able to figure this one out

Kind of amazing that given the state of the world money is still focused on remixes of different forms of social engagement. Is this because it's an obvious place to display ads? Or is it something else?

I'd like to think if I were JD that I would be focusing on something a bit more tangible for the world. A more useful aspect of tech to emerge or be invested in.

But, apparently AI agents in chat that sit adjacent to code is The Next Big Thing?

Are you implying that a tech billionaire, who moved to a private South American compound, who looks like a man that microdoses ayahuasca daily, might just a rich kid tinkering to stay relevant without the incentive or context to actually BE relevant anymore?

I thought they were the ones that are supposed to be making them for me, and to make that digital coinage for me via the ai autonomous business proxy

Why not use Nostr? Why come up with something else entirely that would be just a worse version of Nostr at best?

You may want to participate in multiple communities hosted by different people, but with the same identity everywhere. Provably you to anyone that reads your messages.

That made me laugh

You're right, but can we stick with Blue Ocean and Red Ocean as metaphors? 0 to 1 makes sense, but 1 to N loses it, and the whole framing reeks of pseudomathematics and math envy (which there is way too much of in the tech industry), when we have a perfectly good metaphor from competition in natural selection. Also the tech industry has way too much renaming-things-with-less-intuitive-terminology-to-seem-original.

I know that he referred to Twitter as "it's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in"

Yes Zuck because a product that didn't constantly fuck around with people's privacy settings and had real real-world uses... sure, money is all that matters. You would know. Your vision of the web isn't liberation, it's "dumb fucks", that's all you think people are