I share the instinct. but I think we might be wrong directionally.
Looking at history, every time a tool automated part of our work (I’m thinking of calculators, high-level languages, libraries, frameworks) people warned that skipping fundamentals would be fatal. But
None of those transitions made understanding obsolete.
If AI coding agents are different, and not knowing how it all works becomes an unrecoverable error, as you imply, that would be a first. So I am inclined to side with history and guess that a best of both worlds exists. In which, sadly, hand coding is practically gone (I don’t like it either).
We shouldn’t use agents as blindly as the prompt might invite of course. A new engineering discipline will likely emerge: one focused on supervising, validating, and shaping what the agents produce.
Believe me, i do have mixed feelings about all this. I love writing code with my hands. But we shouldn’t fight the tide; we should build a different boat.
Just to add to this, people say the same about eg citizen Kane being such a classic but without the context of it having genre defining firsts, the film doesn’t stand out as much to a modern viewer.
For those unaware, this is a very interesting guy, because he stumbled on (creating, through his business Medal) a valuable AI dataset that - by offering to buy his company - reportedly OpenAI offered him 500M for. The dataset, I understand, is first person game video plus controller actions.
He then realized the value, which is in short a way to teach models real world and gui operation common sense. He can train a model to predict, from video, what a controller would have to do.
This is expected to lead in breakthroughs in robotics, gui controlling, self driving, and more.
He responded by learning deep learning, and starting a new company, general intuition.
I respect this guy a lot for teaching js this.
Absolutely fascinating and I take his opinion seriously.
He's building Eureka Labs[1], an AI-first education company (can't wait to use it). He's both a strong researcher[2] and an unusually gifted technical communicator. His recent videos[3] are excellent educational material.
More broadly though: someone with his track record sharing firsthand observations about agentic coding shouldn't need to justify it by listing current projects. The observations either hold up or they don't.
This is a tangent, because it clearly didn’t pan out, but I had hope for rust having an edge when I learned about how all objects are known to be immutable or not. This means all the mutable objects can be held together, as well as the immutable, and we’d have more efficient use of the cache: memory writes to mutable objects share the cache with other mutable objects, not immutable
Objects, and the bandwidth isn’t wasted on writing back bytes of immutable objects that will never change.
As I don’t see any reason rust would be limited in runtime execution compared to c, I was hoping for this proving an edge.
I think it would be quite difficult to actually arrange the memory layout to take advantage of this in a useful way. Mutable/immutable is very context-dependent in rust.
Rust doesn't have immutable memory, only access restrictions. An exclusive owner of an object can always mutate it, or can lend temporary read-only access to it. So the same memory may flip between exclusive-write and shared-read back and forth.
It's an interesting optimization, but not something that could be done directly.
I played a Legends MUD game on a BBS, could that be it? I’ve looked for it for years on and off and finally found it recently. With text files, and Even the executables and database to run it.
I could go along with this to some degree if any country would be able to act the same way the USA is doing; then there would be a balance of power. But as it is, only a small number of powerful nations are able to act like this, without military repercussions.
So if Venezuela wanted to forcefully reverse a coup in the USA? Or Canada wanted to reverse election fraud in the USA?
They can’t. So the USA shouldn’t either.
Unless you can tolerate living by the whim of a more powerful bully.
Which I, as a non-us resident/citizen, am forced to tolerate now, but don’t like.
So no, I don’t think nations can justify interfering in sovereign nations by force for any reason.
The history of central and south America is littered with such events, committed by the US. I guess that's why those countries are all so safe and prosperous. Nicaragua and Haiti got it twice so they're doing fantastic right now!
The funniest part of DPRK is how we got bombed with propaganda about how the "supreme leader" was a madman that shouldn't be allowed to have nukes because he would immediately use them and then suddenly the propaganda stopped as soon as there was evidence that they had actual nukes. I suspect the same thing would have happened with Iran if they had gotten them.
> requires stronger justification, like active, extreme mass killing.
… which actually did happen under Maduro, btw.
> Protests following the announcement of the results of the presidential election in July were violently repressed with excessive use of force and possible extrajudicial executions. Thousands of arbitrary arrests were carried out against political opponents, human rights defenders and journalists; hundreds of children were among those detained. Detainees including women and children were allegedly tortured. Detention conditions continued to deteriorate. Impunity prevailed for human rights violations.[1]
Is your argument that his dictatorship wasn’t repressive or bloody enough to warrant that? I don’t think that argument has legs - I think it is reasonable for him to be ousted based on the repressive regime argument. Yes, there are bloodier regimes around the world, but that’s like a speeder complaining to a police officer, “why did you stop me? I was only doing 80, the guy in front of me must’ve been doing 90!”
To me, the strongest argument against overthrowing Maduro is geopolitical destabilization and the general, “don’t mess with other countries because it erodes the norms that keep peace around the world.”
I am unsure. It's certainly very good that he's gone. I don't know if it meets the threshold. There being bloodier regimes is I actually think a reasonable counter-argument: should we topple all them, too?
If polls show over 95% of Venezuelans are happy with this outcome after three months, I may shift my position a bit. In general though, I think it's a bad precedent for the world superpower to bomb countries and abduct rules because the ruler is bad. Plus, Trump's motives here are not remotely pure.
Now it’s not clear who is running the country. Maduro’s administration is saying they’re still in charge via their VP, but the opposition has said they are “prepared to assume power,” wherever that may mean.
I fear that there could be so much suffering as a result of this. Power vacuums and forced regime changes don’t seem to go well.
This reminds me a little of when the US toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq - initially there was celebration, which soon gave way to, “oh shit… now what?”
I think his removal has a lot more to do with his willingness to cooperate with the “bad guys“ in the Middle East. I think this also has a lot to do with why we suddenly care about Somali fraud rings that have been operating since the 1990s. The stage is getting set for another regime change in the Middle East. It’s pretty amazing what you can buy with a $250 million campaign donation.
Are asylum cases from Venezuela legitimate or not? One cannot support asylum claims while simultaneously believing Maduro didn't deserve to be arrested.
I absolutely believe that asylum claims from Venezuela are completely legitimate and that Maduro completely deserved to be arrested. I am just saying under international law and norms, the United States government did not have the legal or moral right to go in and abduct him to arrest him. And also, I am not necessarily sure if he deserved to be arrested to be charged with the odd charges the United States is saying they'll charge him with (drug-related offenses) as opposed to all the things related to human rights violations and being a despot. And double-also, Trump's motives here are almost entirely ulterior and impure, as opposed to a moral desire to bring a horrible dictator to justice and free a nation from his clutches.
If it was about peace and rebuilding their economy oil would have been mentioned as US companies move in to help them leverage their resources AT COST.
Instead, the joke about the US invading for oil proves true once again, and look at everyone fooled by the justification for it. Maduro a bad person? Yeah duh...so why US moving in to take profits from their oil as well as supporting politicians there who were allied with Maduro...
US are liars. And Venezuelans on here gonna act happy bc Maduro gone. But just you wait, 30 years will go by then Venezuelans will be crying about reparations for their natural resources being raped by the US.
Looking at history, every time a tool automated part of our work (I’m thinking of calculators, high-level languages, libraries, frameworks) people warned that skipping fundamentals would be fatal. But None of those transitions made understanding obsolete.
If AI coding agents are different, and not knowing how it all works becomes an unrecoverable error, as you imply, that would be a first. So I am inclined to side with history and guess that a best of both worlds exists. In which, sadly, hand coding is practically gone (I don’t like it either).
We shouldn’t use agents as blindly as the prompt might invite of course. A new engineering discipline will likely emerge: one focused on supervising, validating, and shaping what the agents produce.
Believe me, i do have mixed feelings about all this. I love writing code with my hands. But we shouldn’t fight the tide; we should build a different boat.
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