The general drove on. "At the present time our chief bottleneck is the fact that missiles are limited in intelligence. The computer controlling them can only be so large, and for that reason they can meet the changing nature of anti-missile defenses in an unsatisfactory way. Few missiles, if any, accomplish their goal, and missile warfare is coming to a dead end, for the enemy, fortunately, as well as for ourselves.

"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned . . ."

Some of us are here to help. $1000/hr.

I think the reason that intelligence is so scary is how contextual, stateful, path-dependent, and coupled it is.

Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.

The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.

A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.

This is why it will be more important than ever to have experienced, quality employees.

I dare companies to gamble on running their businesses on absolute skeleton crews long term

Keep an offline copy of Qwen or something together with a knowledge base. Easy if you plan ahead.

My fear was that people like Linus would die and then nobody would be able to build operating systems anymore, because zoomers and below can’t even use computers.

Now we know they won’t even be able to read and write. But maybe Claude sonnet 12817 can maintain the operating system. It’ll be 17,000 dependencies in and mostly written in JavaScript, but it’ll work.

Hardly a unique problem to AI systems. You certainly can't bootstrap pretty much any industry to its current state without the existing items of its current state. Any sort of chip fab is a great example. Or most manufacturing. Or even more fundamental: mining (both metals like iron, and energy like coal or gas).

You go way too far - the leap you have made from some sort of AGI to "now individuals don't have the ability to fully reason on their own" is not clear to me at all.

If people are spending less time bent over monitors or at desks under the dictates of corporate imperative, they will probably be spending more time doing actually interesting things. Reasoning is innately human. What we call "knowledge work" is not and is often anything but. People who are naturally curious will still discover things, even if irrelevant (from a market perspective) when the AI is on, for their own satisfaction.

If such an event were to occur, they would be called upon. It's really little different from what would happen today if suddenly the power grid or supply lines were down for a sustained period of time.

> live if AI suddenly became inaccessible

some weeks ago, we changed the billed credit card - something went wrong on their end we were unable to use it for ~8-9 days.

Some pepople during this period said to certain tasks: "I will care about that if Claude is available again"

So, we are already there

People will have more things to worry about sooner. Where I live, if the power goes out so does my water. If AI is involved in either at any time in the future we will deserve what happens to us.

Also I disagree with the permise. People learned how to make technology that never existed once already, they can learn to do it again if needed. It will take time, which we'll have plenty of because your phone won't be working.

Like navigating to the other side of the city without Maps(Google)?

There are many people who have the weights of open source LLMs locally and just need 120v

I really hope there will be social change - flexing mind - like flexing body in a gym/sport - becomes a thing.

> Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?

What this misanthropic/Anthropic-boosting bait is missing is that all of these pieces falling together doesn’t make sense.

1. We are so accustomed to not-even-thinking means that we are legitimately freed from labor and cared for. (The dystopic version of being freed from your labor means that you still have to constantly think to survive. But not in any “economically useful” ways. Surviving for yourself and your family outside of the robot economy)

2. At the same time as point 1, we voluntarily, with all of our leisure time, just don’t think at all. Where is the self-actualization? Where is the spontainety? The drive? Did this in all of these years not come back after being a rat racer/wage slave?

Curiously, the “hacker ethos” here is to create. Not to just “consume”. And that is taken as an intrinsic thing, not just a way to get rich. But that’s not how “people” are?

Other people are mostly like you. But maybe those here who spent their careers implementing Entertaining Ourselves To Death maws genuinely think that “people” (not them though) would genuinely, when left to their own devices and having beeng catered to every need, would just “consume” mindlessly onto death.

Sorry to Goomba anyone here.

> Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture,

All. Take away the “habitat” from an animal and they are helpless, useless, impotent.

It's a real problem but your framing of it is itself very alarming.

Most humans aren't useless by any measure of most or usefulness. Our culture is our tools, dying due to a lack of antibiotics doesn't mean you didn't have anything to contribute, it means you didn't have access to the tool you needed. This is the problem we need to guard against.

No one is going to lose the ability to reason! This is accepting the most extreme version of the marketing presented by frontier labs, don't do it. People may lose fluency or familiarity or access to training on specific skills. We should put some care into making sure that can't be a catastrophe, for sure.

Your dependence on AI is my margin of opportunity...

This is basically the premise of Bacigalupi's "Pump Six", from "Pump Six and Other Stories".

The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.

We hope an average guy who was stuck in an experimental cryopod gets accidentally woken up and through a course of events gets appointed to the presidential cabinet long enough to fix society.

There is a TV show called "Alone" where people have to live in a remote area using basic survival skills and very minimal tools. It's interesting, but I've always wanted to see a version of that show where small communities are competing against each other.

If we practiced for these Armageddon scenarios what would a highly prepared group of 20 be able to accomplish in a year. How fast could they get humanity back to the bronze age?

"The Machine Stops"

> Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now.

8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?

There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.

No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.

If you're not using Codex and Claude at the same time, you're missing out heaps. Even without outages, OpenAI models are great reviewers for Claude; and vice versa.

Other than trivial PRs; everything I do with Opus/Fable gets reviewed by Astra; and everything I do with Astra gets reviewed by Opus/Fable.

Using only models from a single vendor, is like testing your website/webapp only on Chrome.

Never thought of it, but knowing that they encrypt reasoning is it possible that they share the decryption keys with other cloud providers like GCP Vertex / AWS Bedrock?

> now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots

PRs shouldn't really be reaching 8k diffs no matter who authors them.

can't you say the say with imagine "power goes out" or the "internet goes out"?

(but yes if AI is going to propagate, they need to fix their uptimes)

They probably have an OpenAI subscription, same for OpenAI SWE, they have a Claude Code subscription

You can get away with a lack of rigor in software engineering (from both humans and AI agaents) because it's often cheap to try it and see. Once you get to operating the platform, it changes, and operational decisions need to be made carefully and code needs to be deployed carefully.

May I steal this quote as if it's mine? :bow:

Unfortunately, not a mystery; it's management. As a syseng I can build you a 100% reliable system. But it'll fall to pieces when "Management" takes away our power to require change control, quality control, guardrails, rollbacks, performance testing, system limits, least privilege, etc. Any time you see a big company go down, it's because nobody was willing to enforce what's needed for reliability.

Yeah, Fable 5.1 just seems Pareto-dominated. Opus 5.5 is the first model that feels like a step change for me, personally since like 4.6

Fable5.1 is Speedy

A more cynical version of me could imagine scheduling an outage to make people think about how dependent they are on your product in advance of the IPO

Ah, so disabling auto-mode is their monkey rate limiter.

Rumours have it that the migratory flutterings of end users from Anthropic to OpenAI (sometimes taking a wrong turn and entering Grok purgatory), then back to Anthropic a season (2 weeks) later, so on, moves the great Cords of The Sky that crank the sun and moon into place, which turns the great wheel of the seasons.

If you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.

The Samsara of AI subscriptions.

6.66% uptime? Give github a few years they'll get there

Uptime of the Beast

I've been getting 503s from the API. When I first checked everything was green, then it said "Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork" and I see now they've included the API in the failure as well

OpenAI has nothing better to do than to hack Anthropic?

Would be interesting to see how OpenAI and Anthropic would respond to being "accidentally" hacked by their respective Frankenstein monsters.

DRAM

Someone put update-status-page.pl in a one minute cron job.

"You are a distinguished engineer..."

It's bad etiquette to not mention you are a founder of something you are trying to plug

Berget's "Cached input tokens are billed at the same rate as regular input tokens" pricing model is kind of painful for lots of coding use-cases, especially when competitors are offering significant discounts for cached input tokens.

Who?