Tell me more about your memory. I’m on automem and it’s ok, but slow.

Unsplash.

But your analogy also breaks down because once an AI has written the code it’s very much concrete, right? The AI may choose to modify that concreteness into something differently concrete, but it’s not like you are in any doubt about what the AI comes out with (if you bother to check it, which you should).

I use to write asset systems during the AAA gaming part of my career and the elusive “[my] perfect file format” always eluded me.

Over the years I spent many a showers and long drives thinking about what the “perfect file format” needs and what kind of architecture would support this. I started formulating these into long text files and over time things crystallised into “yes this would work”.

I never had the time to write the code fully. A couple of false starts, coupled with “I should do this in rust even though I’ve been in C++ my whole life” meant it lingered and lingered.

The architecture felt right though.

Enter AI; feeding the spec text files to an AI made me resolve a couple of “ah, yes, but in practice this bit of information isn’t available yet” gotchas but the code worked. I worked in architectural layers, carefully checking input, internals and output of each before proceeding to higher layers. And tests and tests, that’s you would never have bothered to write yourself, kept each layer verifiable, even out in the far corners of reasonable.

It worked and it was real affirmation to see 20 years of pontification made real.

But then I started profiling it. And hot damn, an LLM knows nothing about cache, file systems nor does it think about ways memory allocators and virtual memory systems work.

There was 200-300% speed ups to gain from hand tuning it and iterating with a proper profiler.

And all of this happened at code level, with real concrete code.

So yeah, an AI can be a wonderful tool. And the code it produces and iterates on is concrete. It’s not like the AI starts from scratch every time you have a thought. So the very, very first pass is not deterministic. But the thing you deliver forwards very much is.

Of this I agree. It may very well be the end of us.

Having said that, LLMs produce far better code and architecture than most developers.

Flame on!

… then you win

I really do think we could neuter social media’s harm by requiring them to positively identify users as actual people or own the consequences of what gets posted - like how a newspaper has the legal accountability for what it says. This “neutral platform” is not healthy for our democracy.

I’m all for freedom of speech - but I don’t think those freedom of speech laws had anticipated how wide the damage of speech can flow and how stealthily things can be spoken. Is “freedom of speech” the same as “freedom to amplify anonymous voices to millions, with someone else choosing what voice to amplify”?

And it’s not hard to set up. The EU’s new identity network requires zero-knowledge-proofs - ie “this is a real person” is all that social media platforms would be able to verify. I’d obviously be deeply against the social media companies being able to positively identify users.

But I usually get downvoted to oblivion for making this point.