> Makes me wonder if a solar system wide civilization, with trillions of beings, wouldn't invest in ships to go to the next system, extract resources, and create a stream of resources ships going back to the original solar system.
> If you weren't able to build it before then you aren't able to properly verify it
GP said "couldn't dream of building". To make an analogy, I wouldn't dream of building a house if I had to do every bit of brick-laying myself. But with others doing what I can't do, I can indeed dream of building a house and I do know how to verify that the house was built to satisfy my dream.
This analogy is ironic to me. For most people, building a dream house and verifying it means hiring someone else who is accountable for it being built to code etc.
This is exactly the naive gap that is happening with AI. There is no trusted middleman who does the verification and takes the burden of accountability. The AI vendor tries to sell it like magic but with a disclaimer that is is merely entertainment. The user tries to pretend they are reviewing, but often is just implicitly trusting the tool to do right by them on things they have no real capacity to evaluate.
> There is no trusted middleman who does the verification and takes the burden of accountability.
It's a great example of a project that needs accountability, but there's also thousands of other projects that need absolutely no accountability.
It's all relative to the stakes. The lower the stakes the less informed verification is needed.
The real trick is being informed enough on the boundaries to know where it matters. In the construction analogy, you need to be informed enough to know that a house is a bad idea since there are safety concerns. However building something small and non-load-bearing is probably fine to "vibe".
Eg there's no expertise needed to judge a garden trellis or 2 foot picket fence. It either works or it doesn't, and if it fails down the road there's no harm.
A house is a good analogy here. You can verify that a house is built to satisfy your dream. You can't likely verify that a house won't collapse in the middle of the night or during a storm/quake/etc. Once no human understands how the house is built anymore, we will need other ways to verify that or just trust it's done right.
It could just be that each of the two reviewers is merely focussing on different sides of the same coin? I use Claude all the time. It saves me a lot of effort that I would have otherwise spent in looking up specific components. The magically autocompleted pieces of boilerplate are a tangible relief. It also catches issues that I missed. But when it is wrong, it can be subtly or embarassingly or spectacularly wrong depending on the situation.
> I can still run 2-3 clients almost 24/7 pumping out features.
Honest question. How does one do that? My workflow is to create one git worktree per feature and start one session per worktree. And then I spent two hours in a worktree talking to Opus and reviewing what it is doing.
The comedy/tragedy of this is; whenever I talk to people outside of engineering at social gatherings, this is what they do. Tell me their resume and accomplishments. I’m like, can we just a have a conversation please?
I always asks the question “what keeps you busy”? People think my wife and I are retired because of how often we travel. I say I’m not, I work remotely and try to keep the conversation away from work.
I am hearing this term for the first time but I love it. It is novel and creates a picture. Exactly what Scott Adams says about labels used for persuasion. I usually say "highly trained autocomplete" in discussions at work, but I am going to say "stochastic parrot" from now on.
oh, OK. You should google the term to see where it comes from. it's from someone who is essentially an anti-LLM activist and it's meant as a slur. That's likely why people consider it to be a slur, due to its origins.
> everyone that claims it makes them so perceptively and clearly faster - how do you know?
For me, AI tools act like supercharged code search and auto complete. I have been able to make changes in complex components that I have rarely worked on. It saved me a week of effort to find the exact API calls that will do what I needed. The AI tool wrote the code and I only had to act as a reviewer. Of course I am familiar with the entire project and I knew the shape of the code to expect. But it saved me from digging out the exact details.
Absolutely. Rule #1, always leave a paper trail when talking with companies. The social contract is long broken, there is no room for "off the record".
It may be viewed that way, but it’s also useful to empathize with someone and get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy.
I usually do the same thing when the medium is text and someone is not happy. Tone conveys a lot of useful information. Even better if you can see a person and their body language.
I don’t think the cynical view of the staff person’s intentions is fair, though I don’t know the person’s history nor do I have dog in this fight.
The request by itself is fine; it's not about that, but about the nuance within the word choice and what it conveys.
It appears the OP is an incredibly valuable community member that has been deeply affronted and hurt by the recent changes. Any attitude other than "I'll move heaven and earth to make this right for you" will likely feel insufficient. Even failing that, I'd at least expect an attitude of "I really, REALLY don't want this to ever happen again". I see neither.
The staff member comes off as robotic because there's zero conciliatory tone or admission of wrongdoing at all in the message. "I'm sorry you feel this way [about the workflow]" puts the onus on OP, and doesn't convey a hint of remorse -- even "I'm sorry our workflow has intruded on yours" would of course be better. "Would you be interested" should be "Would you be willing"; "to talk about this further" could be "so we can better understand what went wrong".
These nuances matter a lot when people are offended. If they're this incompetent at communication over text, I don't know that I'd bother with a video call.
Fair point. The non-apology is not helping I agree and would have been better left off altogether. I’m guessing this staff person is not very high level and just trying to help and connect the right people. That is, if you’re not very high up in an org, you may not feel you have the authority to speak on behalf of the org as a whole. I don’t have much context to know.
Mozilla could of certainly handled it better as an org, that I would agree with.
> It may be viewed that way, but it’s also useful to empathize with someone and get more detail/nuance that can’t be conveyed simply over text. Especially when someone is not happy.
It can be, but maybe not when you're not actually replying to anything the other person wrote. The person who experienced the issues and chose to leave made a pretty clear list of "here is the exact reasons the bot is unbearable for us". This person who opened up the conversation is doing so via text, at least providing some sort of answer initially via the same channel before trying to get them to jump into a private call could have maybe came across a bit more empathic and collaborative.
How about something a human might write, like “Let’s talk and see if we can change things so you don’t have to leave, and so we don’t lose more people.”
Kiki is a corporate emissary caught between empathy and policy. I believe she genuinely wants reconciliation and understanding (“Would you hop on a call?”) but speaks in the soft dialect of institutional mediation. Her motivation is damage control through dialogue - to rebuild trust without ceding systemic control. She carries the company’s tone of “we’re listening,” but not yet its willingness to yield.
it seems like kiki(mozilla staff) want to talk on the phone because texting is not enough in this serious situation.
kiki has been working in the community forum, so i don't think it's just CS action.
