Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence
188 points by signa11 4 hours ago | 128 comments

alsetmusic 27 minutes ago
The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room.

The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.

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StilesCrisis 7 minutes ago
I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.
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dchftcs 2 hours ago
Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear.

But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

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whack 16 minutes ago
> They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.

If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.

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card_zero 59 seconds ago
I don't think that's quite right, unless you personally value joy for its own sake. I value knowledge, and joy is useful to creating knowledge, and suffering is harmful to it. But I don't want to have some futile joy, and I don't need to avoid some irrelevant suffering.

Otherwise you get effects like;

* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,

* Don't do anything less "joyful" but more meaningful.

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croon 8 minutes ago
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." - Oscar Wilde

Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."

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exitb 5 minutes ago
Every year half a million children die of diarrhea. There are so, so many people in the world, who are capable of joy and suffering, who "we" don't care much at all. However I have a feeling that "we" might be joining that group eventually.
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websap 34 minutes ago
Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil.

Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.

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throwatdem12311 18 minutes ago
I spent more than half my day yesterday telling Claude to correct itself because it did things I explicitly told it not to do in my prompt.

“You’re right - I overstepped”

Is the new “You’re absolutely right”.

I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.

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malfist 13 seconds ago
I have a script at work that writes out some config files and I'm having Claude run them after making changes. The script if it detects breaking changes will spit out a message saying what the breaking changes are, and not do anything, telling you to rerun it after validation with the override flag.

If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.

So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.

This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.

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sandos 6 minutes ago
This is one of a few reason I strongly prefer GPT and its codex variants. It seldom frustrates me, sure its not omnipotent in any way, but it just feels very "tuned in" when it comes to understanding intent and scope.
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PunchyHamster 10 minutes ago
Imagine worker that did loop of "you're absolutely right -> same fuckup again" multiple days every week, wasting time of whoever told them to do the task

They'd be out of company after a week

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throwatdem12311 58 seconds ago
I do want to fire Claude at this point and switch to Codex. Unfortunately the guy with the purse strings is ride or die full Claude psychosis and our business can’t afford to just buy anything and everything for funsies.
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doubled112 3 minutes ago
> They'd be out of company after a week

I really wish this were true.

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bravetraveler 6 minutes ago
Contractors?!
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manmal 19 minutes ago
Blacksmiths is not the best analogy here.
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remix2000 37 minutes ago
I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, not with Markov chains (next token prediction), not otherwise. Especially not now when the current ML hype is already winding down. And yes this is a matter of belief since I don't think any science precludes agi from existing nor is there any reason to be sure it could someday materialize. I honestly would rather believe societal collapse hits us before agi can even be theorized.
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gruez 22 minutes ago
>I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, ...

Sounds like you're talking about AGI, not AI. AI is here today.

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bayindirh 57 minutes ago
Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it.

AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.

"Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.

We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.

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limflick 43 minutes ago
Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.
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holtkam2 23 minutes ago
The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.
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roenxi 18 minutes ago
> I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.

You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.

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PunchyHamster 8 minutes ago
average person is absolutely awful judge on anything you put in front of average person tho.

And if anything, average AI user is vastly overstating how good/useful it is. Papers about it pretty much always show huge gap between "productivity person thinks they are achieving" and "actual growth of productivity"

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aaron695 42 minutes ago
[dead]
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lnsru 2 hours ago
Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.
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kuerbel 2 minutes ago
I work in infrastructure (backups, networking etc) and no longer in software. I just don't see llms being that useful right now. If I have a problem and ask an LLM the answer is either fabricated or useless, rarely does it know what it's talking about. And yes I know how to describe the problem so that it has a chance to give an useful answer.

Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.

Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.

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locopati 27 minutes ago
It is also possible to walk away from tech. To stop chasing the demands of anything for a buck and focus on something real.
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liotier 9 minutes ago
Yes - it is easier than ever thanks to AI !
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eloisius 51 minutes ago
It may be useful outside the current tech rat race. One possibility is that a decade of openly user-hostile business decisions will reach their logical conclusion even faster, and those that haven’t fried our brains with CC may be in a position to pick up customers from these behemoths as they disintegrate.
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paganel 33 minutes ago
> internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts

That is absolutely insane. Thing is I can honestly believe that it happens, which makes it even more insane.

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pjmlp 26 minutes ago
This is basically the next step of all the AI trainings and hacktons that many of us are now required to take part into, with KPI metrics on how each one is using their tokens.
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Jtarii 53 minutes ago
Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.
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datsci_est_2015 43 minutes ago
I agree, with the caveat that I don’t think any company is using AI well at the moment, specifically because I think our tooling around AI is woefully inadequate and immature.

Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.

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eloisius 5 minutes ago
Say the line, Bart!
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ungreased0675 43 minutes ago
Right now LLMs are heavily subsidized. When that ends, the actual cost of the service may exceed its usefulness for many use cases.
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almostdeadguy 26 minutes ago
I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.

I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.

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throwatdem12311 33 minutes ago
Maybe. But I used to have unlimited Claude Code usage but now I’m relegated to whatever the subscription happens to give me and when I run out of tokens I need to trad code until my limits reset. My manager saw the bill and nearly fell out of his chair. Small companies just can’t afford the added cost of AI at the real price (and we aren’t even in the real price territory yet).

Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.

There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.

I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.

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LtWorf 36 minutes ago
If by "using AI well" you mean kill off customer service; maybe customers will want to switch to other companies that are more expensive but have customer service.
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Oras 54 minutes ago
It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers.

I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.

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throwatdem12311 14 minutes ago
Technical Debt is not a developer skill issue. It’s a management planning, capacity and budget issue. It’s a bet that the cost of servicing the debt will be less than the cost of paying for it outright with cash. I’ve been in the industry for decades and 95% of the dysfunction in an engineering organization is always management.

AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse.

That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper.

Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.

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acdha 41 minutes ago
It’s a question of degree: technical debt has a carrying cost trying to balance features against your ability to support the codebase. LLMs change both sides of that equation but I think most companies are going to struggle with maintaining a balance when it’s so easy to push past concerns and get something which seems to work.
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bayindirh 51 minutes ago
Tech debt is a debt taken to reduce development time. It's a time debt actually. Patching something that would work until the team has the time to do it correctly.

...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.

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thinkingemote 12 minutes ago
Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".

My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?

(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)

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rognjen 5 minutes ago
This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange.

Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?

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namenotrequired 2 hours ago
The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title
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qlm 2 hours ago
In case it gets edited, the title of the HN submission is "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence".

I laughed when I read this, imagining a weird act of self-congratulation in front of a silent audience.

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CalRobert 2 hours ago
I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline.

But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.

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nvme0n1p1 44 minutes ago
English isn't ambiguous here either. It's the fault of journalists who have this weird obsession with removing as many words as possible from headlines.
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sumeno 50 seconds ago
The actual headline is not ambiguous at all

> Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'

Modern journalism deserves a lot of criticism, but this headline is not one of those cases

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xxs 45 minutes ago
>I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this.

most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.

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weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago
Not to me... Maybe a skill issue?
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master-lincoln 2 hours ago
"Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence "

Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker.

The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know.

Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific.

How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?

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rjh29 41 minutes ago
While it's technically ambiguous, most native speakers would immediately understand that Steve was not the person cheering. Firstly, Steve cheering makes no sense. Secondly, it's a very common construction for newspaper/article headlines.

For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..."

Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.

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orphea 8 minutes ago

  While it's technically ambiguous
Is it? To read it as intended, shouldn't it be "Wozniak is cheered"?
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robrain 48 minutes ago
Could also mean that he was cheered by the response to his comments and his disposition improved. There are layers of ambiguity in this headline.
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jcgrillo 21 minutes ago
Language is often ambiguous! You have to guess the intended meaning based on context clues. Unambiguously phrased language sounds less natural, because it is. Incidentally, this is part of what makes natural language such an awful fit for controlling a computer.
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testfrequency 27 minutes ago
I cannot stress how much the deep internal Apple loyalists loathe Woz. I personally find him one of the best parts of (old) Apple, and it’s a shame the company internally continues to think of him as a loose cannon.
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evilduck 19 minutes ago
How many people from that era still exist at Apple to be holding a grudge like that? Genuinely curious, since it's been a very long time since he was last involved at Apple.
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datakan 10 minutes ago
I worked at apple a couple decades ago. He isn't loathed so much as acknowledged as being uncontrollable. Internally at Apple it is very strict in terms of what you can say and do, like being in a communist country where you never go against Dear Leader. Woz speaks his mind and that is ultimately why he left early on. He also has a conscience and cares about people, something Apple does a great job of pretending to do.
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porknbeans00 2 hours ago
good ole woz. being just a wonderful fuzzy warm hearted human being.
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pera 26 minutes ago
It a real shame there are no many people like Woz in the bay area
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LatencyKills 2 hours ago
I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time.

He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.

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rebekkamikkoa 4 hours ago
I really like how he approaces AI. Not the tone other leaders are talking, but much more human and much more collaborative. How young people actually can help with the AI shaping. For example Eric Schmidt was really terrible at his speach in front of University of Arizona.
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ramon156 2 hours ago
Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"
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embedding-shape 2 hours ago
To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place.

Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.

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block_dagger 2 hours ago
Ah, so the students were saying “moo,” not “boo.”
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limflick 2 hours ago
I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.
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master-lincoln 58 minutes ago
This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product
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bayindirh 54 minutes ago
Adding non deterministic layers on top of a painfully deterministic layer to make more betterer deterministic things is an oxymoron.

...and many people choose to ignore that fact.

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jappgar 2 hours ago
They can start by voting for politicians who will rein in big tech
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aduwah 2 hours ago
There is no politician who stands against big tech and by extension big money
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coffeefirst 57 minutes ago
We are about to test that theory.
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master-lincoln 51 minutes ago
not even Bernie Sanders?
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maratc 42 minutes ago
In the US, the politicians need money to be elected in the first place, and a lot of it. Lots of money comes from the big tech (to both parties), and the big tech won't give money to anyone with a plan to "rein them in."
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jappgar 9 minutes ago
They don't need money they just need votes.

If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate.

You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.

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sweetheart 2 hours ago
They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
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muddi900 2 hours ago
Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?
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darkwater 2 hours ago
Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...
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sweetheart 2 hours ago
I think it’s possible.
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globalnode 2 hours ago
Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
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sweetheart 47 minutes ago
Okay!
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mherkender 2 hours ago
If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.
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SecretDreams 2 hours ago
Now, more than ever, I think young people are cows for the economic meat grinder. It takes me to one of my favourite quotes:

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."

I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.

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Jtarii 51 minutes ago
The world is a significantly better place than it was when my parents were my age.
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limflick 2 hours ago
I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit.

On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.

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simonh 2 hours ago
It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI.

Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.

Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.

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limflick 60 minutes ago
How good is AI integration in Apple products? Did they drop the ball as hard as Microsoft did? I naively assumed a few years ago that Microsoft could pull it off perfectly because they had more than enough in terms of resources & engineers (yes, I was this naive in college)
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embedding-shape 2 hours ago
Yeah, hard to guess how a person would react to transformative technology, together with whatever context it'd be brought up, their reaction could differ.

I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.

Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.

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cheschire 2 hours ago
His reaction probably still would not have been solidified yet, given how long his response took to other tectonic shifts in technology. That isn’t to say he wouldn’t have an opinion to voice, I just suspect it wouldn’t have resulted in a product direction for at least a few more years.
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jorvi 56 minutes ago
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.

Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.

I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).

Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.

> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..

Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.

You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.

In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.

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jcgrillo 44 minutes ago
The problem is natural language is a horrendously bad human-computer interface. Even if they're running nondeterministic software, computers are very precise machines. You wouldn't talk to your lathe or milling machine and expect good things to happen. So why would you have that expectation of a computer? It's ridiculous sci-fi fantasy nonsense.

It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.

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porknbeans00 2 hours ago
no this is a fair question. he was enough of a sociopath to disown his own kid, but his narcissistic tendencies and love of the arts would have been a weird counter point to that.
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latexr 2 hours ago
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.

Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.

https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114

Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.

> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.

Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.

> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.

When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.

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Forgeties79 13 minutes ago
The difference is it’s incredibly easy to opt out of apples AI-like services. For instance, I have never had Siri on on my iPhone no matter how many years go by. And every time I’ve gotten a new one, it stayed off. One tap, that’s it.

They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.

Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago
There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings.

Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.

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jdmoreira 46 minutes ago
It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore.

I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.

And yet, here we are.

Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.

You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?

What have we done?

People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.

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simplyluke 17 minutes ago
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?

The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.

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pjc50 27 minutes ago
> But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?

> What have we done?

Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.

It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.

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goolz 28 minutes ago
Modernity is soulless for the most part. Social media, the 24/7 news cycle, unaccountable mega-corps, the list goes on. I suspect people are tired of the constant psychic damage you endure for just trying to exist in 2026.
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subjectsigma 32 seconds ago
If you’re still writing things like this you are stupid or willfully ignorant. All the boomers at work expose similar opinions and it’s because when the younger generation tries to explain why they feel this way, the boomers stick their fingers in their ears and start yelling.
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etempleton 15 minutes ago
I have noticed a certain personality gloms onto AI and unlike other technologies, it is so easy old people and the technologically illiterate can do it! In fact, old people and morons seem to love it. And it gets annoying really fast. The same people who were web 3, crypto, block chain, nft bros are the biggest supporters of AI. Utility or not when scammy people act the same way as they did for all the other tech trends it is a massive turnoff. I am tired of seeing AI writing and AI images, and instead of people talking about how we are going to use AI to make people’s lives better the only thing people can talk about is how much money some tech bros are going to make and how everyone else is going to lose their jobs because we won’t need them anymore. And your idiot friend from HS has an awesome business idea, which amounts to AI art on a t shirt or AI youtube videos and just needs you to be in on it with them to actually do the work like they are selling Amway.

I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.

So, yeah, I can see why the kids are over it.

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apical_dendrite 9 minutes ago
I was inspired by technology when I was young, but not anymore. When I was young it felt like the tech industry was about empowering human beings - Steve Jobs liked to say that a computer was like a bicycle for the mind. Today it feels like the tech industry is about wonton destruction ("move fast and break things") for the purposes of making a tiny number of people fantastically wealthy.

I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.

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shafyy 35 minutes ago
People are not excited because those companies blatantly disgregard the law, exploit and fuck people over and try to concentrate as much power as possible in their hands. Young people are not stupid, they can see that the increasing wealth gap makes their lives suck more. And they also understand that AI is a hypercapitalistic tool, that, if left unchecked, will only accelerate this trend.

So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?

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dmacj 41 minutes ago
Are you seriously going to compare AI with shoes?
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jdmoreira 38 minutes ago
did I compare AI to shoes anywhere in my text? They also used to teach comprehension when I went to school.
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NichoPaolucci 18 minutes ago
You chose shoes as your comparison point.

Using two symbols of technology: AI (advanced modern technology) Shoes (cheap, basic materials)

You were saying the following, in essence, no? "My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."

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rpastuszak 43 minutes ago
Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligence, Artificial Intelligentsia - I’d argue that one of them is not real.
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Aboutplants 2 hours ago
Finally someone smart enough to read the room!
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aubanel 23 minutes ago
This contrast is a bit sad. When Eric Schmidt told students the truth about the importance that AI will take in the future ("It will touch every profession, every lab..."), students booked him But the takes like "AI is not real/powerful, human intelligence is better", which are basically pleasant myopic lies, are cheered. Cope bias is powerful.
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dmazin 12 minutes ago
The point of a graduation speech like this is to get students hyped up about themselves and their future. Surely you see the merit in, amongst a backdrop of a horrible job market, telling students that they have, inherent in them, the stuff of greatness, just as people did (checks watch) 3 years ago before vibe coding?
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jcgrillo 16 minutes ago
> Cope bias is powerful.

Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.

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vasco 2 hours ago
Actual link to the quote video: https://youtu.be/S24CGNgqZJA
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ripe 28 minutes ago
The entire commencement program is here. Woz speaks at around the 42-minute mark.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sSfADusN40

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mustaphah 2 hours ago
Can't locate the link to the actual speech
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theow838484jj 57 minutes ago
There was study that big percentage of university graduates, strugles to comprehend written text. In AI terms: take 20k token paper, feed it to well rested graduate, and they will strugle with basic memory recall, reasoning and comprehension! My laptop performs better than that!
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nvme0n1p1 37 minutes ago
My car runs faster than any human. Therefore exercise is a waste of time.
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theow838484jj 32 minutes ago
I love this example.

Car (like humans) requires a lot of care and maintenance. You have to feed it (gas), park it, and jump through many legal hoops just to use it.

Walking is very often faster, and if not you can just fly or take a taxi.

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limflick 51 minutes ago
I haven't read the study, but I wonder if one reason comprehension went down was because of over-reliance on AI among students.
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theow838484jj 46 minutes ago
Ai is around for a few years. This type of studies goes back decades.
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irishcoffee 52 minutes ago
Ah studies, those things nobody ever cares to reproduce.

At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.

Give it a bit more effort next time.

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theow838484jj 48 minutes ago
20k tokens is about 40 pages of text. Weekly i do about 1000x that. (I am very low lever user)

I really do not think there is a point to argue here.

Also why you have to be unicorn to comprehend 40 pages paper? I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!

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feverzsj 2 hours ago
He also said he's not impressed by LLM, which I totally agree.
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konschubert 28 minutes ago
I don't know what to say. I may not like it, you may not think it's actually intelligent, you may not think it's going to change the world - but how can you not see that this is revolutionary?
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damnitbuilds 3 hours ago
[flagged]
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watwut 2 hours ago
The kind of rhetoric that equates criticism of Israel policies with antisemitism is literally populism.

The kind of rhetoric where you twist what people said or agreed with into something else so that you can mock them ... is the dangerous populism.

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gambiting 3 hours ago
>>In between going on Jew-hating Propal marches

Just reminder that being against Israel or its actions in Gaza is neither antisemitic nor Jew-hating.

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dijit 2 hours ago
It's a valid reminder, but there are plenty of people who despise Jews who are currently operating with total indemnity with this as their defensive line.

And even if you call them out, there are people who will openly defend them.

I do think that this topic is much too disgusting for anyone to think that there are hero's in the conflict. I'm not Jewish, nor am I Arab, I have no skin in the game.

But I don't like how readily we accept that cililians, women, children: are totally acceptable casualties as long as it's "$otherSide, they deserve it, $ourSide is just defending themselves". Gazans supporting Hamas and Israeli's defending the IDFs worst actions are all guilty in my mind and playing games implying one is worse is subtly letting the other side off the hook.

If there is a god, Allah or Yaweh- the people who defend child murderers and rapists no matter the "side" are going to have defend their reasoning, I hope they're comfortable with that.

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keybored 2 hours ago
Both-sides nonsense. We’re decades past assuming good faith from people who equate criticizing Israel with racism.
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dijit 2 hours ago
There's so much documented evidence of people attacking jewish people who they call zionists without cause that I find this line of reasoning stupid.

In recent memory there was Ethan Klein, who is Jewish and has visited Israel but is openly critical of Israeli actions and supports Palestine; yet people harassed him and his wife constantly about him being Jewish.

I'd totally buy your argument, criticising Hamas isn't the same as being racist to Muslims, and criticising the actions of Israel is not the same as being anti-semetic.

I also buy the fact that Israel will defend themselves by claiming racism, something I've seen Muslims do in the UK too.

I'm absolutely saying both sides, because ultimately both sides seem to think it's ok to murder children, or to use people as pawns to be be killed to further their expansionist efforts.

But It's absolutely true that people are just abusing random jews under the mistaken belief that all jews are zionists, or all jews support israel.

Fuck, even people who live in Israel will condemn IDF actions.. There exists nuance of people on the Palestinian side online, yet that affordance is not afforded to Jews.

I find that quite ironic, and I'm personally not very chill with hypocrites.

Anyone defending rape or child murder is a fucking monster.

There is never valid justification, not even if the kid is carrying a suicide vest.

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juanani 3 hours ago
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anonyfox 24 minutes ago
Maybe I am in a minority position here, but despite me vibecoding for many months now (havent written a single line by hand and forced me todo so in the beginning), I still have my IDE open right next to Codex/CC and while the LLM is crucnching along and doing TDD loops I actually read whats created/changed and just sit with it judding if its only right on surface or semantically stupid underneath, essentially realtime-architecting and steering the code agents sometimes even midflight. so I do end up with these 200k+ LoC projects now since typing is lightning fast and 2/3 of my codebase is tests (I insist on regression tests after every steer) but in fact I perfectly know what each piece is doing and where it is, as well as the still not optimal parts and have a mental list for refactoring it later when I have time or a spare parallel agent can do it when feature work isn't crossing the same areas.

so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.

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