There's no going back on this. This is putting a very capable intelligence in the hands of the masses. Private companies in the US are aching for Trump's protectionism but it'll do nothing. The hardware needed to run this is ofc prohibitive, but actually putting it out there feels like a 'RSA source code on t-shirt' moment for humanity.
No, luckily private companies in the US are aching for this to NOT be banned. NVIDIA, Microsoft, etc. just released that letter. We’re saved from the trillionaire companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) by the other trillionaire companies acting in self-interest (hosting and hardware).
Sometimes I’m not sure who is more unhinged: the total AI kool aid drinkers who think this will make us all into immortal demigods (or take over the world as it goes “foom”), or the AI doomers and haters who exaggerate everything potentially negative about it and react to it the way a 1980s Christian fundamentalist reacted to rock music.
It’s a new fundamental innovation in math and CS that allows large scale lossy compression of natural language another data formats in a way that is semantically queryable and cross-referenceable. It also manifests some form of emergent intelligence, likely evidence of the long posited link between intelligence and data compression.
The tech is awesome. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen in over a decade. The industry is kind of shitty, which is not unusual. The discourse around it is almost universally insane, crazy people arguing with crazy people.
Oh and get off the AI eco bullshit train. Look up the energy cost of AI queries vs driving or running a home air conditioning system. Feel bad about using AI? Skip that DoorDash order. You probably just saved the energy of 1-2 days of heavy Claude Code use.
We've had frontier models widely available for general use for 5-6 years now. Despite the promises, we haven't revolutionized anything; not society, not government, not engineering, not the environment. The only thing we've done is revolutionize the pockets of AI purveyors, suppliers and charlatans. We haven't cured disease, ended hunger, or achieved time travel. Sure, the tech is cool. But it's cool at 1b, 8b, and 30b parameters at a size that fits on consumer hardware. Hyperscale AI that's built for no purpose in particular, at any social/environmental cost, is everything that's wrong with society. That's not Christian fundamentalism or doomerism, that's recognizing the sickness at the core of the tech industry. We let the tech-billionaires delete their ESG pledges, and abandoned the fight against climate change so we can generate celebrity porn.
To steelman the haters, I think their view is that the industry is so uniquely shitty that it's unconscionable to help the industry at all by using the tech, which is a product of that industry.
TL;DR: Glorified contract role for integrating your employer's APIs with enterprise customers. Like working with mckinsey vibe PMs and being sold on fat margins you'll see none of? Perfect!
The author suggests they want three clicks at any pace to always == the same functionality, so they can whiz through their photos and rotate each predictably. Fair.
> And it would be so much more predictable and pleasant if you could just tap the button three times at any pace you wanted without thinking, without paying attention, without getting your UI blocked by an animation that no longer helps you.
They cite accessibility.
The thing is, I can imagine the complete opposite side of the argument, where someone with motor impairments or parkinson's, for example, ideally liking if their over-clicks were ignored if they'd already locked-in their intention.
iOS has an accessibility option called "Ignore Repeats", which seems like a better approach because it's system-wide. So people who need that kind of accommodation can have it in places like the on-screen keyboard too, without needing everyone else to slow down their typing.
That's good. I wonder if it should be opt-in instead of opt-out. Disabled people are arguably less able to find random configuration options than non-disabled counterparts. I get a bit bothered with how undiscoverable these options are. But power-users by their nature don't mind going to the extra mile to get perf out of their experiences.
There are many types of disabilities. If "power user" means "someone who doesn't use defaults", then people with disabilities are actually more likely to be power users.
Being fast does not make you a power user. "The button works when I push it twice" is a reasonable expectation of a device by default. If that weren't the default, then most people would have a worse experience with their phone.
I totally agree, even not going as far as a Parkinson case, if you already so old and not too old persons use phones and touch screens, you will see that very often it is complicated for them to click on the small button at the right place and to have the feeling that "they have clicked".
So, for me, on the argument of about accessibility, the Nothing Phone behavior will work a lot better I think. In their mind they don't count and click 6 times to put the image in a specific position. In addition with considering that it would not make much sense to click 8 times in advance to turn back in the exact position where you are.
The mindset in their case is more: click and wait, compare if it is the position you want and do it again. The other sensitive button that will bufer would probably trigger overshooting, going too far, then too back, etc... similarly to when you have issue scrolling in a list to the right spot.
The case of the iphone would be better only for someone like a younger person, tech nerd, that want things to go fast without having to wait. Same thing for computer keyboards where I could type multiple letters in advance before the first one even show up on the screen with the lag.
Around 2011, my grandfather with Parkinson’s and deteriorating eyesight received an iPad from family. They didn’t use it for much, mostly video calls and reading the Bible, with the text steadily getting larger and larger (up to letters being more than 5cm tall towards the end). It was funny just how good it was if an app only supported iPhone and not iPad, because then the iPad would scale it up to double physical size.
This is just the 'LLM judge', very badly implemented without any scientific prudence. What a joke. To be terse: you cannot rely on LLMs to provide standardized scores against arbitrary criteria. To get close to 'reliable' you would need highly tested rubrics, grounded in human decision-making, and you'd need to avoid all the measurement biases these things are riddled with... positional/order effects, anchoring on whatever numbers you stuffed into your own prompt, scale-format sensitivity (a 1–5 and an A–E scale give different answers for the same input), holistic-vs-isolated context effects, and lovely examples like where adding a "be unbiased" instruction makes it more biased. I've studied this at length. You cannot even _begin_ to approach this problem seriously without held-out validation, inter-rater agreement, and ground truth. This repo is just quagmire of wishful vibes with random numbers littered throughout.
These vast multi-agentic systems with roles like 'Researcher', 'Writer' (with a review loop), 'Reflection agent', seem to ~feel~ mostly right but lack evals as to the merit of agent decomposition. So it forms a satisfying enough flowchart but I see no evidence these authors actually tried other approaches or agent roles. And let's be honest: an agent is just a system prompt and output contracts, and these rich architectures seem to be pontificating beyond their worth. It all feels a bit vibe-y.
I've been wondering lately if old-school cybernetics might help there.
But my off-the-cuff, uninformed opinion is that the precise structure doesn't matter too much, and the impact these structures really have is that they allow More Tokens for the Token Furnace.
Bad architects favour microservices over monoliths.
YAGNI almost always applies to microservices, and the coordination overhead and boilerplate they add introduces immense costs, especially for smaller companies.
This homogenisation of architecture around Netflix size engineering has really cost our industry a lot.
reply