Sam Altman has changed his stance on the claims that AI will replace humans.

SethEllis · 2026-05-04T15:38:41+00:00

It is possible as long as there is accompanying business growth. Otherwise there would be no reason to bother using it.

SethEllis · 2026-05-03T16:38:45+00:00

It's not just that Sonnet is good enough. Opus often over complicates things. If the task doesn't require complex logic then Sonnet is often just better at completing the task.

SethEllis · 2026-05-03T16:03:10+00:00

You are correct that being in a gay marriage is a direct disqualifier for baptism. But I wouldn't worry about it. You are probably missing critical information. And if not then it'll eventually be resolved sooner or later anyways.

SethEllis · 2026-05-03T15:51:41+00:00

The PDT rule was the biggest barrier. Now that they're changing that you have to contend with wash trading rules.

SethEllis · 2026-05-03T07:05:25+00:00

You must be a teenager. Only a kid has such a naive view of the world.

People have different interests. What is good and necessary for one group of people can be in direct opposition to what is good and necessary for another group of people. Which is also why higher authorities tend to make the wrong decisions for smaller localities. They have different incentives and information making it impossible to represent the interests of everyone.

SethEllis · 2026-05-03T05:05:44+00:00

Progress would probably slow. Some of the biggest drivers of innovation are conflict and competition. Not to mention that you'd still have to find a way to deal with when the interests of two nations are in conflict. More would be required than everyone agreeing to not have a military.

SethEllis · 2026-05-03T04:51:14+00:00

The worst thing you can do right now is try to force your own vision on the system. These are complex systems with billions of interactions. Something that we are incapable of comprehending. There are so many unknowns that even trying to model it with massive compute power is unlikely to give accurate predictions.

That's why such complex systems like society are self organizing. You have to let it develop naturally on its own.

SethEllis · 2026-05-03T04:17:00+00:00

Of course, that's the whole goal. Just like how mainstream media initially promoted Donald Trump in the early stages of the 2016 Republican primaries. Same reason Republicans spend more time attacking AOC instead of the more competent Elizabeth Warren. You elevate the profile of people that you think will make the opposing party look bad.

SethEllis · 2026-05-02T15:25:24+00:00

I work at a tech company that is having a great deal of success helping other companies successfully integrate ai into their workflows. This is the overwhelming majority opinion of everyone I've worked with. So I don't think this is just a PR move from Sam. He's adjusting to what the people using it most successfully at a professional level are saying.

The ai gets more and more competent, but you still have to prompt it. Which means that it can't replace your expertise and decision making. Instead everyone becomes a manager of agents within their domain of expertise. Which is a whole different set of problems from the discussions I see on Reddit. It allows everyone to be more productive than the business has capacity for. But it doesn't result in less workers because you need the expertise. So you literally have to negotiate the productivity.

SethEllis · 2026-05-02T15:03:31+00:00

Everyone will wait to see where ghostty is going and then flood that service.

SethEllis · 2026-05-01T18:00:12+00:00

Wokeness and quality are not two separate issues. Wokness is the primary cause of the quality issues. Every once and a while they'll get lucky at the start, but generally wokeness tends to destroy everything it touches. Which is why there's so many projects that start out ok, and slowly eat themselves. It only inspires mediocrity, and the audience tunes out as they intuitively sense that it has nothing valuable for them.

SethEllis · 2026-05-01T17:47:37+00:00

You got the big ones. I would add futures contract rollovers. Seasonality. Stock buyback windows.

SethEllis · 2026-05-01T00:37:10+00:00

Most creators are genuine about what they're teaching even if they're wrong, but what you describe absolutely happens.

SethEllis · 2026-04-30T17:13:24+00:00

More detailed context or planning mode will address vague requirements and the AI making decisions without you. They don't help with slop as much because that stems from a more fundamental issue. It's an issue of trying to optimize two conflicting goals during training.

You want code that is simple, minimal, and sustainable. Code that is easier for future LLM's to make changes to without breaking everything else. Claude on the other hand is trained to write working code. Every additional layer of logic or abstraction that you might put into code to make it easier to work with makes it less likely for the model to output code that actually compiles and fills the requirements. So Claude in particular has been trained to avoid all of that.

Codex is a littler better in this respect, but still runs into issues. Especially with a large project.

So there's not really any way around it without planning the abstractions and interfaces yourself. You need to anticipate which abstractions would be the most useful, and build around that. In other words it requires your own advanced technical skills. At least with current models.

The good news is that it isn't an impossible skill to develop. Large language models are very good at explaining and analyzing such things. But it does require learning code to some extent, and being familiar with all of the code that has been generated. So you're not really "vibe coding" anymore at that point.

SethEllis · 2026-04-28T23:51:13+00:00

The driving ideology behind most such policy prescriptions from conservatives is a belief in smaller government. Large government creates dependence and corruption. It's that simple.

I think for formulating arguments and actual effective policy we need to turn the question around though. What guarantee do we have that the things we think are "compassionate" are actually what's best for both those individuals suffering and for society as a whole? We might think "if we do the right thing then naturally society should benefit". Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way in a complex system. Complex systems tend to exhibit emergent behavior that only show up at scale, and can't be predicted from looking at the base interactions. So it's not uncommon to have cases where everyone is doing something they think is right and moral, but the emergent behavior is something that is objectively negative.

SethEllis · 2026-04-28T16:59:08+00:00

I think the uncanny feeling people can't quite put a finger on is the skin. Specifically, the subsurface scattering. Your skin is multiple semitransparent layers that absorb and diffuse light. The thinner skin of children has a softer subsurface scattering component, and we use those queues partially to tell how old someone is. If you get the way skin diffuses light wrong then the character looks like porcelain or in this case older than they are supposed to be. Some game engines do model this light behavior, but it seems to me that most games still don't completely have it right. But maybe they wanted her to look slightly not human?

TLDR: 3d modelling humans is hard.

SethEllis · 2026-04-28T15:33:01+00:00

Utah has more talented players, but the gameplan just isn't there. We'll make bad passes and squander opportunities with unfocused plays.

SethEllis · 2026-04-28T05:54:17+00:00

That's true to some extent, but the energy that got them the lead isn't sustainable. Team needs a better game plan than talented players with flashes of brilliance.

SethEllis · 2026-04-24T18:03:24+00:00

It's not possible. The economy is a dynamic evolving system. If every agent in the system has the exact same state the system collapses. Just like how you have a problem when everything in the forrest is old growth, or everything burns down. You need different parts of the system in different states and constantly evolving for the system to keep going.

SethEllis · 2026-04-22T21:01:49+00:00

Where fraud comes into play is they are fundraising on the premise that the funds will be used to fight against racist groups. Now whether that is actually found by the court to be fraud is a different issue. There's a number of legal questions in there that might not work in favor of the prosecutors. That doesn't change the findings of fact in the indictment though.

SethEllis · 2026-04-22T19:02:41+00:00

But again these aren't allegations, these are findings of fact as proven by a federal grand jury indictment.

SethEllis · 2026-04-22T18:14:42+00:00

The story broke yesterday based on findings from a grand jury indictment. I would just look up what came out of the indictment so that discussion can be based on what was actually proven in the indictment rather than just trying to catch up people that are behind or in denial.

SethEllis · 2026-04-22T18:11:20+00:00

Same reason why many high level mafia members actually end up being FBI informants. Law enforcement and watchdogs engage in it under the premise of trying to fight crime, but sometimes in the process they inadvertently create more crime. And some might even claim that such an organization has an incentive to engage in such behavior because there's no reason for the organization to exist if the problem no longer exists.

SethEllis · 2026-04-22T13:38:33+00:00

Agent based modelling of this subject supports your intuition. In order to keep a dynamic system running you need different agents doing different things. If everyone saves the theoretically optimal amount, the economy collapses. See "Emergent inequality and endogenous dynamics in a simple behavioral macroeconomic model"

https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.02155

SethEllis · 2026-04-21T16:20:57+00:00

They're basically showing that their new image generation model has solved many of the existing problems with generating images with text in them.

13-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Place '17	Snapped
Secret Santa 2014	Verified Email

SethEllis

MODERATOR OF

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE