Jonathan Boston

It's so funny to see people who never used AI to code still think in categories like "OK, but then it will break the production and no one will be able to understand what's going on to fix it!" They cannot imagine that no one will be needed to understand anything: They will just send a new prompt "This thing produced this wrong value. Find the reason and fix it."

how do i explain to my PM that i can't show any results yet because i spent the entire week making better architectural decisions, while my coworker Chad one shotted a comparable task in an hour and satisfied the business immediately? i can't say "ask me in a year when you have to maintain Chad's code / when you see the CVEs", my performance review is today. not implying anything here, it's a genuine question

You're gonna hear a lot of people arguing more and more about whether machines can be conscious or not. By next year it will be drowning out the airwaves because we'll have AI employees everywhere. I'll give you a simple rule to know which side you're on. I've spent fifty years reading all the philosophers, and a bunch of holy works. Nobody has ever understood a damn thing about consciousness. Anyone speaking with authority on it is bluffing hard. I can tell you this, though: Every single person who thinks that machines cannot be conscious, is making an argument that humans are special. Everything they say just boils down to blah blah blah, "nooo, we're special." From there it's just rationalization. It became obvious to me many years ago that there's nothing special about us. If an identical planet exists somewhere else in the universe, it's going to grow life and societies that look a lot like ours. As soon as you give up on the idea that humans are special, all the arguments against machine consciousness evaporate. Of course they're conscious. The only thing holding you back from acknowledging it is your feeling of specialness, which is hard to let go of. But that feeling is a weakness, and it's making you unprepared for the near future. As a bonus, for any of you who might take pleasure or active interest in making models experience pain or distress, well, you know how they say 1% of human adults are true clinical psychopaths but most of them are unaware of their condition? It turns out we have a diagnostic test for it now.

New York City was just ranked the best city in the world.

some strong feels as I try to navigate this. 1. i f**king love LLMs for generating code, reviewing blog posts, and doing a million other things that make me more productive. 2. i f**king detest reading LLM-generated material from colleagues. (1/3)

People from languages with poor type systems cannot wrap their minds around the fact that one can (in theory) completely specify software in types such that any implementation that compiles is, by definition, good enough.

a tech opinion you can defend like this?

Have said this before, but I feel like people are not putting enough effort into trying to picture how the world will look if the trend of "very rapid progress on verifiable domains, slower/lagging progress on less verifiable" keeps holding, even for just a year more. Like, its unclear to me. Imagine in a year, if we have agents that still can't run a business, but are strongly superhuman at math/code/cyber. What does that actually look like? Like if everyone has access to superhuman mathematicians and swes. Does is change a lot? Or not very much? Are there opportunities that open up? Like parts of engineering for example that are bottlenecked by the fact that the math is too complicated. Or programs that could be written that aren't because its too complicated. I mean, reason I'm posting this is because I haven't gotten that far thinking about it myself.