"The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."
Teaching math, history, and language isn't about remembering facts or specific skills, they're proxies for teaching you to think and reason and operate in the world.
The cardinal mistake many inexperienced parents make is to think you can chose what your kid learns. So they will yell at their kid that it needs to be calm, something they fail at in this very moment. Kids care much more about how you live than what you say. You can tell your kid to respect nature, but what drives it home is if you show respect of nature without even mentioning it on a day to day basis.
Handling risk and uncertainty is one of those things. You can't tell your kid to be able to deal with uncertainty without fear, you will have to show to them (1) that you are also able to deal with it and (2) that you trust them to do it too. Sure they should ask their parents if something seems off or a bit too much to them, but there are so many parents who appear to trust their kid with next to nothing.
While it just came out, are you planning on reading Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas?
* https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
You don't own it. You can't own it. Access can be removed at any time.
This situation may not persist but it's not like traditional pillars of society have demonstrated any incentive or even a perception of obligation to act in the public interest lately.
For the past few decades, slowly but surely, the recipients of the benefits of technologies have increasingly been corporations. Of course people are worried that this will move even more wealth out of their hand and into CEOs' coffers.
We really are living in technofeudalism, and we need to figure out how to stop it.
You didn't share yours and Adam's prompts in the post, so I'm left wondering how much of the success of this project is attributable to your collective ability and experience (both with this particular project and software in general) vs the capability of the model and harness itself? On that note, do you anticipate releasing LLMs at Oxide[1] (linked from RFD 0576)?
Personally I find credible success stories like yours interesting, if a little jarring. If they were commonplace, shouldn't software be generally getting a lot better?
[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/meta/tree/master/engineerin...
I think it's a pretty deep point -- your memory and consciousness are shaped by the media environment (media being the thing that Klosterman thinks about obsessively)
And the media environment drastically changed after the 90's -- because of the Internet
I think his main point was about access to media in different eras, but it's worth reading directly if you feel like that
I have to admit I feel similarly conflicted after a few recent REAL WORLD experiences. The first is that Gemini and Claude taught me a whole bunch of things about beer that I feel like I should have known, or a friend should have told me in the last few decades :-) (I'm in my mid 40's)
As background, I am a simple man, and I like one type of beer (pale ale), and drink 1 beer a day. But it has to be fresh, crisp, bitter, and not make me want to fall asleep (lower alcohol)
So here is some color on what I learned:
- I worked in SF / the bay area for nearly 2 decades, and I'm now in Philly. I have been wondering for like FOUR YEARS why when I buy pale ale, it is somehow OFF. Well Claude told me that east coast pale ale is actually more like "English Ale" (e.g. Yards brewing), and west coast pale ale is its own thing (e.g. Lagunitas)
Apparently west coast is what I developed a taste for -- it is more bitter. And this totally tracks for me. So the same term is used for 2 slightly different things, and AI cleared that up for me
- I walked into a beer store today in Philly, and there are 5 IPAs for every Pale Ale, which annoys me because I prefer the latter. (That happened in San Francisco too, and I'm sure many people here have had that experience)
And Gemini taught me that "session IPA" is actually a marketing term for Pale Ale. I always choose things labeled "pale ale", but many people want something labeled "IPA". So they came up with the term "session IPA" -- an IPA with lower alcohol, aka Pale Ale.
I use Gemini anonymously, so it doesn't remember things about me. And after I described my beer preferences and the fact that I'm in Philly, it specifically brought up Tonewood Brewing in NJ, which is in fact the beer I've drank the most in the last 3 years!
---
So yeah I find it eerie that the LLMs are helping me with words versus reality.
- the same term "pale ale" referring to slightly different things on the east coast and west coast -- this was tripping me up for years
- the term "session IPA" being a marketing term for Pale Ale -- also something I didn't know for years
- based on simple verbal descriptions, they are able to recommend the beers that I actually drank and liked (even though I use Gemini anonymously, and that was my first time asking Claude about beer)
I've been drinking something slightly "wrong" quite often, because of a confusion over words on the label. I guess I simply don't know anyone who I can ask dumb questions about beer to.
Bryan Cantrill is a tech CTO.
The last time I saw his name was talking with Simon W. about how LLM companies need an Obama figure. (Not necessarily saying it as in, I hope they get an Obama figure. But if they knew what was good for them.)
> Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.
Is Cantrill the Vietnam war hawk in this comparison?
> It is no exaggeration to say that this was brought to us
Wait for it.
> by Claude. Yes, we of course could have gotten BattleTris working without Claude’s help (but the preceding two decades tells us pretty clearly that we wouldn’t have!). The reasons that we wouldn’t have done it (didn’t do it!) on our own are myriad: yes, the work involved is tedious (and time-consuming), but also because it is so indeterminate as to be speculative: when porting something (which is what this amounted to, even if porting into modernity and with as light a touch as possible), it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought) — and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).
Why use Claude then?
So for regular programmers I would question being afraid of AI taking my job and then also using AI. Not for work. But for thrills. Why help train this thing? Well anyway.
Just one more thing. You might become unemployed. The craft you once knew might become destroyed. But! You did get to revive that zany game from fiften years ago. Okay I’m done.
> So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.
> Where does that juxtaposition leave us? As I have outlined in Oxide RFD 576, I believe that LLMs are but a tool, albeit an exceedingly powerful one. When we cease to believe this — when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord — we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it. Yes, LLMs mean a lot of changes to domains that may be unaccustomed to technological change, and yes, some of those changes will leave us wistful for a bygone era — but I also believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.
We have to have the right mindset. We must imagine Claude as happy...
No, it is clear that The Machine is not what is forcing anything down our throats; it’s just a tool, wielded by the powerful.
I don't understand this question in response to the quote preceding it. He just explained why Claude was useful in this instance.
Apparently because the concern is not evenly distributed.