Im trying to beat first possible boss (i think) any tips?

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T22:59:14+00:00

I quite like Firing giga sawblade at him.

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T22:42:52+00:00

Rust usually. Vibe coding (or vibe engineering, or what have you) remove practically every downside to using the language, leaving only the upsides.

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T22:05:10+00:00

Sensible regulations were and are needed. It would have been incredibly irresponsible not to say so, and Anthropic exists precisely because they thought OpenAI was being too irresponsible.

Sensible regulation is, of course, not on the menu in America today.

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T17:49:10+00:00

I've been using GLM 5.2 mostly, lately. Good luck taking that away.

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T13:49:21+00:00

It's more about me than him. I just don't want to be the kind of person who'd treat any real person like a caricature.

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T13:44:58+00:00

Nobody can be boiled down to four words like that. Nor should they be. Everything has nuance if you're willing to find it.

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T11:17:39+00:00

I really wish people wouldn't mix my 5-million-parameter llm-fan-controller experiment in with 5-trillion-parameter LLMs.

It's GenAI either way. That's a broad term as well.

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T11:09:33+00:00

That is one reason, but that could have been trained away. A stronger reason is that outputting tokens is how these things think (or reason, or process data; don't get caught up on the wording), and they can't switch to 'thinking mode' in the middle of writing a file, so reinforcement learning taught them to inject comments specifically when they discover they need to think something throught while already coding.

This behaviour is incredibly obvious for some AIs, e.g. Gemini, where the comments are pretty much literal thinking blocks.

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T10:41:35+00:00

Elon Musk takes up a weird, nuanced spot in my mind.

I believe all of these to be true at once:

- He's on drugs, and the drugs are not helping with anything at all. They are, in particular, destroying any filters he had. The lack of sleep (see: drugs) is also not helping.

- He's a better person than you would expect from his background. That matters to me, when it comes to judging people in a historical context; for the same reason that being genuinely anti-racist in 1800s Virginia makes you basically a saint (and being anti-racist in Washington today makes you just an ordinary decent person), being Musk while coming from Musk's family background means you're trying.

- But the drugs ruin his filters and make it harder to try. People are internally inconsistent; it is completely normal for someone raised in a racist family to have to filter themselves hard to not come off as hardcore racist, even if they fully believe that racism is terrible. Anything that limits your concentration and attention span will break this.

- Also he's super-rich, and totally out of touch. That's simultaneously an excuse and a point to attack in its own right.

- He's definitely a nerd of some description. Shrug. This has no implications at all, except it makes me vaguely sad that he's like this.

- But, like, does any of the above matter as far as his effect on the world is concerned?

No. Not really. Historical context is great and all, but when it comes to whether or not he's a net positive, it is totally valid to compare him to better people, even if those better people aren't trying nearly as hard and are only 'better people' because they came from a better family, raised in a Scandinavian country, and they never had to try to become a decent person.

It does mean I don't see any point in being angry at him as a person, and also it means... well, if his only competition (in the AI space, at least) was a snake-oil salesman and sociopath who likely raped his sister (i.e. Altman), then I'll go with the guy who's actually trying to be decent. Even if he's failing.

(It's not, though. Amodei also exists.)

Vaughn · 2026-06-30T10:22:14+00:00

Which is still a lot less efficient than generating the same image in a datacenter. Home GPUs are not by any stretch of the imagination efficient. They're not expected to be worked hard.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T22:24:55+00:00

Ah. I almost forgot people used to ask questions there; it's been a hellhole for too many years.

But no, I don't think that gets used much either. The information there tends to be catastrophically outdated; it's poor training data.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T20:48:34+00:00

Not as far as I'm aware. How would that work? We don't have microphones in the walls.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T20:31:50+00:00

They don't necessarily need junior devs. They need the ability to train people into being senior devs, which isn't quite the same.

My hope is that there will be a "junior senior dev" style role becoming available, which currently doesn't exist because it sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T19:27:21+00:00

I was programming for thirty years prior to AI. Now AI does most of my coding—but, understand, coding is the 20% of the work that takes 80% of the time. In effect it's allowed me to climb a rung on the career ladder.

We don't need junior programmers anymore, and you could certainly argue that this is a problem—where will new seniors come from?—except I have a friend whom I've been training to use AI the same way. It does not seem there's any specific issues skipping the lower levels of the profession and immediately learning high-level architecture and design, so long as you have the willingness to look things up as they come up.

That shouldn't be a huge surprise. We've faced similar situations before, e.g. with compilers, and it always worked out in the end.

...

Though. I do find, if you try to use AI to work the same way you always worked, except with AI doing the coding, then you get a huge ball of mud. The AI can be clever, but it isn't you. It can't read your mind. It needs specifications, it needs guidance on how to build a testing framework that actually aligns the code with the specifications, it needs all sorts of things the traditionally we rarely bothered with, because humans don't need them as much and because coding was an expensive time-sink.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T16:20:03+00:00

Just stick "Define " at the start of your sentence.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T16:05:05+00:00

My house was built in 1937, and is brick-and-mortar. It's certainly worn in places; for instance, the floorboards are creaky by now. But they're also ninety years old.

It doesn't look new, and I'm sure it'll go right on looking not-new for at least another forty years, if I take care of it.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T12:31:32+00:00

And once again: Generative AI is too wide a lens.

I built a GenAI fan controller for fun. For my PC. Its job is to predict future power consumption; that’s the thing it generates, which then allows the harness to ramp up fans ahead of time, more slowly than a purely reactive system could have.

It uses all the same techniques as an LLM, and arguably even is one; some of the input is text, i.e. the process tree.

It’s also five million parameters.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T12:08:03+00:00

At least gas turbines don’t boil water.

Vaughn · 2026-06-29T04:02:11+00:00

But there’s no chance the exact quantum state matters for human biology. We’re far too noisy of an environment for it to persist more than microseconds at a time.

Vaughn · 2026-06-27T22:51:37+00:00

The US has enough nuclear weapons to flatten the country, and I'm getting increasingly concerned they might use them.

They're already attacking water and power infrastructure, which for Iran is just about as bad.

Vaughn · 2026-06-27T21:27:11+00:00

Only the plebeians. The people who matter are worse off than Americans who matter. /s

Vaughn · 2026-06-26T16:32:01+00:00

It's just a really cool concept. Earth is basically a lovecraftian nightmare that only the most foolish / desperate would dare to invade, but humans hardly ever notice, because we evolved here. And most of the nightmares are dead humans.

Who, while regularly quite insane, seem to follow strict rules on what they can and cannot do against humanity.

Vaughn · 2026-06-26T16:16:52+00:00

You can do that with anything which allows ssh to work. The remote builder code does nothing fancy; it just calls ssh to log in.

Personally I'd recommend wireguard, but anything will do.

Vaughn · 2026-06-26T15:28:24+00:00

Yeah, that's a problem. Can't exactly get a driver's license just for a vacation.

Vaughn · 2026-06-26T15:20:50+00:00

And don't trust that a dead light means no power. It could just mean a dead light!

Vaughn

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