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Everyone else is already pointing out how competent over unique is purely a positive, so I want to criticize the other implicit assumption here.

This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any creativity -- and it's also incorrect.

If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore", look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.


Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine, so forgive me if I come off a little curt here, but-- I disagree strongly with how this was phrased.

"Generative AI" isn't just an adjective applied to a noun, it's a specific marketing term that's used as the collective category for language models and image/video model -- things which "generate" content.

What I assume you mean is "I think <term> is misleading, and would prefer to make a distinction".

But how you actually phrased it reads as "<term> doesn't mean <accepted definition of the term>, but rather <definition I made up which contains only the subset of the original definition I dislike>. What you mean is <term made up on the spot to distinguish the 'good' subset of the accepted definition>"

I see this all the time in politics, and it muddies the discussion so much because you can't have a coherent conversation. (And AI is very much a political topic these days.) It's the illusion of nuance -- which actually just serves as an excuse to avoid engaging with the nuance that actually exists in the real category. (Research AI is generative AI; they are not cleanly separable categories which you can define without artificial/external distinctions.)


This is so strange, because, at a low level, a branch isn't even a "thing" in git. There is no branch object type in git, it's literally just a pointer to a commit, functionally no different from a tag except for the commands that interact with it.

Meanwhile mercurial has bookmarks. TBF I'm not sure when it got those but they've been around forever at this point. The purpose is served.

I think there are (or perhaps were) some product issues regarding the specifics of various workflows. But at least some of that is simply the inertia of entrenched workflows and where there are actual downsides the (IMO substantial) advantages need to be properly weighed against them.

Personally I think it just comes down to the status quo. Git is popular because it's popular, not because it's noticably superior.


> I think there are (or perhaps were) some product issues regarding the specifics of various workflows.

I love jumping in discussions about git branching, because that's a very objective and practical area where git made the playing field worse. Less and less people feel it, because people old-enough to have used branch-powered VCSes have long forgotten about them, and those who didn't forget are under-represented in comparison to the newcomers who never have experienced anything else since git became a monopoly.

Anyhow, let's pick django as a project that was using a VCS with branches before moving to git/github, and have a look at the repo history: https://github.com/django/django/commits/stable/6.0.x

Yes, every commit is prefixed with the branch name. Because, unlike mercurial, git is incapable of storing this in its commit metadata. That's ridiculous, that's obscene, but that's the easiest way to do it with git.


Just because there is one project apparently using this in a way that indicates someone could perceive something as a weakness... It doesn't mean it's a real weakness (nor that it's serious).

You can just not move branches. But once you can do it, you will like it. And you are going to use

   git branch --contains COMMIT
which will tell you ALL the branches a commit is part of.

Git's model is clean and simple, and makes a whole lot of sense. IMHO.


> Less and less people feel it, because people old-enough to have used branch-powered VCSes have long forgotten about them, and those who didn't forget are under-represented in comparison to the newcomers who never have experienced anything else since git became a monopoly.

I'm old enough to have used SVN (and some CVS) and let me tell you branching was no fun, so much that we didn't really do it.


That's the definition of a tree though. Everything has a parent, no cycles allowed.

> If another model can find the vulnerability if you point it at the right place, it would also find the vulnerability if you scanned each place individually.

They didn't just point it at the right place, they pointed it at the right place and gave it hints. That's a huge difference, even for humans.


> That said, a well-designed scaffold naturally produces this kind of scoped context through its targeting and iterative prompting stages, which is exactly what both AISLE's and Anthropic's systems do.

Unless the context they added to get the small model to find it was generated fully by their own scaffold (which I assume it was not, since they'd have bragged about it if it was), either they're admitting theirs isn't well designed, or they're outright lying.

People aren't missing the point, they're saying the point is dishonest.


No, you wouldn't. The vulnerability has been in the codebase for 17 years. Orders of magnitude more than 20k in security professional salary-hours have been pointed at the FreeBSD codebase over the past decade and a half, so we already know a human is unlikely to have found it in any reasonable amount of time.

> Their job literally depends on them finding Mythos to be good, we can't trust a single word they say.

TFA article is literally from a company whose business is finding vulnerabilities with other people's AI. This article is the exact kind of incentive-driven bad study you're criticizing.

Hell, the subtitle is literally "Why the moat is the system, not the model". It's literally them going, "pssh, we can do that too, invest in us instead"


One of the five fundamental pillars of conservative thought, as phrased by wikipedia (which is itself merely paraphrasing Russel Kirk, a foundational of post-war American conservativatism), is:

> A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize natural distinctions.

Racism and bigotry are not errant additions to conservatism, they're a logical extension of one of its foundational pillars. (Though that is not to say that the left is not without its racism and bigotry as well, it's just less of a natural fit)


> “I think… I don’t know… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs (software engineers) do end to end.”

I think it's disingenuous (as disingenuous as you're accusing these marketing teams of being) to paraphrase that as "being told on one hand that we are 6 months away from AI writing all Code". It's merely stating that it's a real possibility. (It's also disingenuous to use a post complaining about a behavioral regression bug as evidence that it's not progressing)

Dismissing it as impossible is silly, considering how close it already is to a junior dev. Keep in mind that 14 months prior to that statement was before we even had any public reasoning models. Things really are moving that fast, it's just, at the moment, unclear how fast.


We’ve been suggesting that programmers are going to be replaced by simpler programming languages, gui programming tools, no code tools, low code tools, and now AI. The real big step was when Claude code came out and introduced the agentic loop where it could self validate against tests/linters/tooling, but everything after that had been penned as miraculous when IME it’s a new iteration of the same thing - wild hallucinations, getting stuck in deep loops, ignoring explicit instructions and guard rails, wild tangents and just generating stuff that doesn’t work or solve the problem.

> I think it's disingenuous (as disingenuous as you're accusing these marketing teams of being) to paraphrase that as "being told on one hand that we are 6 months away from AI writing all Code". It's merely stating that it's a real possibility

No - you don’t get to make wild predictions and say “oh I didn’t actually mean that, look how succesful we are though”. These teams aren’t saying “hey we think we’re going to majorly influence programming in 6-12 months”, they’re saying “we’re going to replace programmers”. If you can’t stand over your claims, don’t make them. _That’s_ disingenuous.


> We’ve been suggesting that programmers are going to be replaced by simpler programming languages, gui programming tools, no code tools, low code tools, and now AI.

The difference is that it's actually working this time. Non-programmers are writing full apps. Sure, they're simple ones, often just CRUD and UI, but it actually is changing things in a way it never has before. You can't assert something is the same as everything previous when there's already evidence that it's different.

> No - you don’t get to make wild predictions and say “oh I didn’t actually mean that, look how succesful we are though”.

Except that's not what's happening here. I'm criticizing you for misrepresenting what claim was made in the first place. No where in your evidence have you shown anyone "walking the claim back". If anything, TFA is claiming evidence of an LLM doing "most" of what SWEs do "end to end" three months ahead of schedule.

If you want to present evidence Dario (or another CEO -- I'm sure Sama has made much more fantastic claims that you could falsify) made claims that didn't pan out, be my guess, but don't tell falsehoods about the evidence you are presenting.

(And no, I'm not counting breathless tech reporters -- everyone knows how much to trust them when they report a cure for cancer -- they'll say everything is a miracle cure. But the fact that hundreds of "miracle weight loss cures" that never panned out made the new in the past several centuries didn't make GLP1s fake just because they had the same type of hype.)


> The difference is that it's actually working this time. Non-programmers are writing full apps

You can say this about every step along the way. C programmers replaced assembly programmers. Python programmers replaced C programmers. low code tools replaced interal tools teams.

> I'm criticizing you for misrepresenting what claim was made in the first place. No where in your evidence have you shown anyone "walking the claim back".

The claim is that SWES will have their work done by models in 6-12 motnhs. We are _nowhere near_ that 9 months on to it. That's all there is to say it.

> If anything, TFA is claiming evidence of an LLM doing "most" of what SWEs do "end to end" three months ahead of schedule.

TFA based on a model that is so good that it has to be kept from us? from the company that literally can't keep their app up? From the company who shipped an update that didn't launch?

> be my guess, but don't tell falsehoods about the evidence you are presenting.

I mean, I literally posted a quote from the CEO of one of the two major companies saying that SWEs are 6-12 months away from being replaced. This is fantasy talk from a guy who is incentivised to have you believe this. If the claims are that software is changing, and how we're building/deploying software is adapting to that new world then yeah that's fair enough. But the current models, harnesses and tooling are not replacing an SWE unless there's a paradigm shift in the next 3 months. And my point is that we appear t be going backwards, not forwards.

> didn't make GLP1s fake just because they had the same type of hype.

No, GLPs work and that's the difference.


> I mean, I literally posted a quote from the CEO of one of the two major companies saying that SWEs are 6-12 months away from being replaced.

Even ignoring the other ways you're misrepresenting the, there's a huge difference between "might be" and "are going to be".

I'm sorry if English isn't your first language, but we're going to have to agree on basic grammar or else it's not going to be productive for me to continue responding to the flaws in your argument.


If you're on Pro, Group Policy tends to be more stable than plain registry tweaks.

In particular, I advise everyone to turn off web search in the start menu, it makes it so much faster and more useful:

   Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search > Don't search the web or display web results in Search


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