dw_arthur (u/dw_arthur)

dw_arthur commented on $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor github.com/novatic14/MANP... · Posted by u/ZacnyLos

jeffbee · 2 hours ago

People made self-guided missiles with 1940s technology, in the 1940s. It can't be too much of a surprise if someone right now can make guided missiles in their garage with 2026 electronics. At this point the "guided" feature is trivial, the "missile" part is doable, and the weapon has probably become the tricky part.

dw_arthur · 14 minutes ago

Throwing an aside here that anyone interested in 1940s war technology must check out the old BBC documentary The Secret War (1977) which goes into depth on solving the engineering challenges of the war.

dw_arthur commented on India's top court angry after junior judge cites fake AI-generated orders bbc.com/news/articles/c17... · Posted by u/tchalla

Latty · 12 days ago

It doesn't matter, because any process that seems right most of the time but occasionally is wrong in subtle, hard to spot ways is basically a machine to lull people into not checking, so stuff will always slip through.

It's just like the cars driving themselves but you need to be able to jump in if there is a mistake, humans are not going to react as fast as if they were driving, because they aren't going to be engaged, and no one can stay as engaged as they were when they were doing it themselves.

We need to stop pretending we can tell people they "just" need to check things from LLMs for accuracy, it's a process that inevitably leads to people not checking and things slipping through. Pretending it's the people's fault when essentially everyone using it would eventually end up doing that is stupid and won't solve the core problem.

dw_arthur · 12 days ago

As someone who has done QA on white collar work it's tiring looking for little errors in work reports. Most people are not cut out for it.

dw_arthur commented on Technical Excellence Is Not Enough raccoon.land/posts/techni... · Posted by u/bo0tzz

quotemstr · 17 days ago

It used to be. That's why LLMs adopted it. How do you think they got their preferences? A Magic 8 Ball?

dw_arthur · 17 days ago

It was okay writing in the context of marketing. A normal person never wrote like that.

dw_arthur commented on The Slow Death of the Power User fireborn.mataroa.blog/blo... · Posted by u/microsoftedging

dw_arthur · 18 days ago

Low information density is a big AI tell. Also sheer length is another AI tell. The LLM pukes out a bunch of text and the "author" either doesn't have the skills or energy to edit it.

dw_arthur commented on AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says gizmodo.com/ai-added-basi... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

chris_money202 · 20 days ago

I think a pretty good example I had at work, we had the option to buy a software package from a 3rd party company. After reviewing the specs we needed, I told my manager to give me a few hours to see if I could produce what we needed with AI instead. Lo and behold, I was able to do it in just a few hours, AI package was tested, integrated, and we moved on. No where was any of that recorded that I just saved the company lots of money using AI. I bet there are lots of examples like this that just aren't adequately tracked at both micro and macro levels. For some reason we expected to to be able to see these huge gains from AI but we never bothered putting systems in place to observe them.

dw_arthur · 19 days ago

It should show in decreased revenue for the company you didn't buy the product from. It also should show up at your company either as increased profit margin, increased investment, increase in total employee wages, or increased dividend payout.

If this is happening on a widespread basis in the economy we should see evidence of it sometime this year and that's what investors are anticipating with SaaS stocks.

dw_arthur commented on Writing code is cheap now simonwillison.net/guides/... · Posted by u/swolpers

crystal_revenge · 20 days ago

> The new skill is mastering the craft of directing cheap inputs toward valuable outcomes.

Strongly agree with this. It took me awhile to realize that "agentic engineering" wasn't about writing software it was about being able to very quickly iterate on bespoke tools for solving a very specific problem you have.

However, as soon as you start unblocking yourself from the real problem you want to solve, the agentic engineering part is no longer interesting. It's great to be solving a problem and then realize you could improve it very quickly with a quick request to an agent, but you should largely be focused on solving the problem.

Yet I see so many people talking about running multiple agents and just building something without much effort spent using that thing, as though the agentic code itself is where the value lies. I suspect this is a hangover from decades where software was valuable (we still have plenty of highly valued, unprofitable software companies as a testament to this).

I'm reminded a bit of Alan Watts' famous quote in regards to psychedelics:

> If you get the message, hang up the phone.

If you're really leveraging AI to do something unique and potentially quite disruptive, very quickly the "AI" part should become fairly uninteresting and not the focus of your attention.

dw_arthur · 20 days ago

It's funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet. I'm going to be really confused if this is still the case at the end of the year. A whole year of access to these latest agentic models has to produce visible economic changes or something is wrong.

dw_arthur commented on Global Intelligence Crisis citriniresearch.com/p/202... · Posted by u/tin7in

ByThyGrace · 21 days ago

Really? Well I stopped reading this piece when the AI generated charts showed up. Come on, that's just in poor taste.

dw_arthur · 21 days ago

Citrini charges like $1000/year for a subscription. It's ridiculous he is using AI generated charts.

dw_arthur commented on Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/Cyphase

nsonha · 22 days ago

I find it dubious that a technical person claims to "just bought a new Mac mini to properly tinker with claws over the weekend". Like can they not just play with it on an old laptop lying around? A virtual machine? Or why did they not buy a Pi instead? Openclaw works with linux so not sure how this whole Mac mini cliche even started, obviously an overkill for something that only relays api calls.

dw_arthur · 22 days ago

As a long time computer hobbyist who grew up in MSDOS and now resides in Linux I'm starting to wonder if I am not more connected to computing than a lot of people employed in the field.

dw_arthur commented on What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the space around AI resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen

ericdykstra · 25 days ago

I won't ever put my name on something written by an LLM, and I will blacklist any site or person I see doing it. If I want to read LLM output I can prompt it myself, subjecting me to it and passing it off as your own is disrespectful.

As the author says, there will certainly be a number of people who decide to play with LLM games or whatever, and content farms will get even more generic while having less writing errors, but I don't think that the age of communicating thought, person to person, through text is "over".

dw_arthur · 25 days ago

I assume if someone used an LLM to write for them that they must not be comfortabley familiar with their subject. Writing about something you know well tends to come easy and usually is enjoyable. Why would you use an LLM for that and how could you be okay with its output?

dw_arthur commented on Why I'm Worried About Job Loss and Thoughts on Comparative Advantage lesswrong.com/posts/YPJHk... · Posted by u/cubefox

dw_arthur · a month ago

The Jevon's paradox example of plummeting costs to create videos doesn't make sense to me. If people are already watching 7 hours of videos a day how much more time do they have to consume video? There are only 24 hours in a day. Earth is only so large and can only handle so much pollution. There are limits we need to talk about here. I guess Elon hand waves it away by saying we'll go into space but that remains to be seen.