> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.
Yes, and this is unfortunately the best move in many situations given how hard it is to fire people.
The ideal thing to do is fire the incompetent manager who is a tax on their team rather than a multiplier.
That unburdens the highly competent engineers on their team to do good work.
However, that might not be possible or even a good idea.
A failed hire might reflect badly on the upper manager, or prevent them from hiring a replacement.
It might require a lengthy performance improvement plan, which means you have a burdened team for that whole duration.
It's often easier to de-claw the bad manager, and take back on their responsibilities yourself.
Not ideal, but the best of a bad situation.
> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.
The second red flag in all of this is that an engineer doing good work on their own is labeled "rogue".
Management's job is to make people productive, if they can't realize that the best configuration for their team involves some individuals working largely separate from the managers own mediocre day-to-day ceremonies/projects, then they aren't doing their job.
People that don't need to be managed are the best kind of people, if you can't spot them and leverage them, get out of management.
I'm picturing a 10 second clip showing a child with a green box drawn around them, and position of gas and brake, updating with superhuman reactions.
That would be the best possible marketing that any of these self driving companies could hope for, and Waymo probably now has such a video sitting somewhere.
It depends on the video. What they should do is arrange for the video to get leaked and let the Internet courts argue about it, and then based on the Internet verdict, come out and claim it's real and they fired somebody for leaking it, or it's AI generated.
Love him or hate him, releasing the video is something I can see Elon doing because assuming a human driver would have done worse, it speaks for itself. Release a web video game where the child sometimes jumps out in front of the car, and see how fast humans respond like the "land Starship" game. Assuming humans would do worse, that is. If the child was clearly visible through the car or some how else avoidable by humans, then I'd be hiding the video too.
I once took a philosophy class where an essay assignment had a minimum citation count.
Obviously ridiculous, since a philosophical argument should follow a chain of reasoning starting at stated axioms.
Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class).
The citation requirement allowed the class to fulfill a curricular requirement that students needed to graduate, and therefore made the class more popular.
In coursework, references are often a way of demonstrating the reading one did on a topic before committing to a course of argumentation. They also contextualize what exactly the student's thinking is in dialogue with, since general familiarity with a topic can't be assumed in introductory coursework. Citation minimums are usually imposed as a means of encouraging a student to read more about a topic before synthesizing their thoughts, and as a means of demonstrating that work to a professor. While there may have been administrative reasons for the citation minimum, the concept behind them is not unfounded, though they are probably not the most effective way of achieving that goal.
While similar, the function is fundamentally different from citations appearing in research. However, even professionally, it is well beyond rare for a philosophical work, even for professional philosophers, to be written truly ex nihilo as you seem to be suggesting. Citation is an essential component of research dialogue and cannot be elided.
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority
Hmm, I guess I read this as a requirement to find enough supportive evidence to establish your argument as novel (or at least supported in 'established' logic).
An appeal to authority explicitly has no reasoning associated with it; is your argument that one should be able to quote a blog as well as a journal article?
It’s also a way of getting people to read things about the subject that they otherwise wouldn’t. I read a lot of philosophy because it was relevant to a paper I was writing, but wasn’t assigned to the entire class.
Huh? It's quite sensible to make reference to someone else's work when writing a philosophy paper, and there are many ways to do so that do not amount to an appeal to authority.
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class).
an appeal to authority is fallacious when the authority is unqualified for the subject at hand. Citing a paper from a philosopher to support a point isn't fallacious, but "<philosophical statement> because my biology professor said so" is.
Okay now factor in the probability of divorce, and the amount you get to keep afterwards, and discount it to present value, vs. paying more taxes and keeping it all.
Also remember that you typically lose half of income forever, not just wealth in a divorce.
It is important to understand the consequences of breaking any contract you enter into, including marriage. Luckily, you're not stuck with default terms to that contract, and if you're not comfortable with them pre-nuptual agreements can modify those terms.
> I don't think there's any question at this point that it's in Nordic self interest to develop a nuclear deterrent.
Yes, it definitely is.
> The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome.
That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
> and the risk of major accidents will increase.
I don't think that's reasonable to say about a bunch of countries getting their first nuke.
The concern should be more with countries like the US and Russia that have so many nukes, which they can't possibly use effectively, and don't have the ability to properly maintain.
If every western country had exactly one nuke, the world would probably be much safer than if the US has all of them.
> A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome. That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
It's even more complex than that. If Ukraine responded conventional war with nukes, it can be sure Russia would retaliate with even more nukes, practically extinguishing their statehood.
The equilibrium is reached when the exchange is equally devastating, so the only winning move is attacking first, and only if the attacked won't be able to retaliate. The Cold War never ended, just warmed a little, because it doesn't exist (yet) a guaranteed way to avoid an all-out nuclear retaliation.
Russia didn’t start this war with the intention of getting into a protracted slugging match over 20% of Ukraine - they got into for the whole thing.
Luckily Ukraine beat back the drive on Kyiv. But if Russia’s success metric at the outset of the war (the complete capitulation and conquest of Ukraine) carried a credible risk of losing Moscow or even smaller cities closer to the front would they have been anywhere near as likely to have made such an attempt?
Russia did not start this war after a rational and accurate assessment of reality.
Why do you believe they would rationally and accurately assess nuclear war probabilities?
The entire problem is that these leaders are fucking nuts, and surrounded by people who cannot defect from sycophancy to burst the stupidity bubble and bring people back to reality.
What would have saved Ukraine is actual support.
Arguably what would have been Ukraine's best bet is if they had substantial independent oil reserves that they could not tap alone. The USA would have "liberated" them years ago. Hell, Trump is literally going this direction now, demanding "mineral rights" to do what we should be doing already.
Re-read what you wrote. That's exactly what this was is about: who gets to control a colony. And from that angle, the US went from having 0% of Ukraine as its colony to having 75%, including all mineral rights. At this point continuing the war is too expensive, which is why the US and Russia want to just stop. Europe keeps jamming up the gears though because they got a terrible deal.
that was the etymology, given the world we were emerging was one where major world powers came directly to blows amongst themselves rather than through the countless small-scale, regional proxy wars we saw over the 2nd half of the 20th century.
It's not up to me. So I'm not "letting" or not "letting" anyone do anything.
I was stating what I believe to be a true counter-factual. If every western country had 1 nuke, the world would be safer than if a single country has all the nukes.
The west is also not "my side". I have no stake in most western countries, and their success or failure is not something I feel as part of my day-to-day.
I'm glad there is more than one, so if something goes wrong I can go to another one.
The west gets special treatment because it is filled with prosperous democracies. Democracies are relatively stable, and rarely do things outside their Overton windows, like launching a nuclear weapon unprovoked.
Prosperity is what makes people peaceful. Prosperous people have more to lose. No one in the west wants to backslide towards a state of nature because an invasion or unprovoked conflict went the wrong way.
I am not convinced that the likes of Putin or Trump would care about the total destruction of their largest city, so long as they weren't there at the time.
This completely misses the reason why you need to hire the best initially. It has nothing to do with the hardness of your own company's problems.
It has everything to do with the distribution of productivity among any kind of engineer.
Engineers follow a pareto distribution. In a normal sized team, with a typical hiring funnel, you will have a few high performers, who are responsible for most of the team's productivity.
If you can only hire one person from that team, then it is more likely than not that you will hire someone with productivity below the team's mean.
At an early startup, this could be a death sentence.
Especially since we typically reason and plan in terms of means, so it may come as a surprise that your single engineer is less productive than the mean of most teams that you have worked with.
The other reason (also not mentioned) is that you eventually want to scale hiring.
That means that you need to have people, that you have hired yourself, hire more people on your behalf.
The best people (A players in the metaphor) don't have imposter syndrome, they know how good they are, and how good they aren't.
They want to work with other talent, that makes their lives easier, more interesting, and less stressful than covering for/babysitting other people.
It's also the only way they can grow from where they are at.
So they can be trusted to hire more A players, out of self interest.
The median engineer (let's call them a B player) often knows about where they stand as well, and often they will have started to diversify their skillset into organizational politics.
They intuit: hiring people more competent than them gives them less leverage, and they are pretty good at zero-sum status games, that's their edge.
They don't want competition, so they hire C players.
So the reason you want to start with the best is because it's the only way to ensure you can move fast when you need to, and the best way to keep the organization effective long enough to exit.
All organizations decay into incompetence, but hopefully you can get yours and get out before that happens.
I would extend that even further, I'm a fan of the idea that you should thoroughly vet the founders for excellence if you want to maximize your chances of ending up at a great startup. Not just your eng manager and peers.
Like with your "A player" engineers example, founders need to be exceptional if they want to attract great talent to work for them. So if you're pretty unimpressed with them as you're getting to know the company, the likelihood that the team they hired makes up for that deficiency is very low, and you'll end up around non-A players.
So... every company only hires the best!? I jest, I jest!
In general, I've found that the younger engineers (20s, up to 30s) have a lot of vim & vigor; but, even the very best ones generally do a lot of spinning-in-place, when they think they're making progress. Almost anyone above a certain level -- call it the 30–40% mark (it's low!) -- can be raised up to be a competent engineer. Probably what'd be called an "an A- or B+" player? That's just part of a good training & onboarding regime; although, it can take 1-3 years, depending on the person. Very good "natural" talent can definitely boost top performance to an A+, but it won't substitute for literal time-under-stress of delivering high quality product-ready code to clients.
One reason you see a pareto distribution in "normal sized" teams is not solely because of competency, but because the 80% can rest on the 20% and therefore don't feel too pressed to work that much. Therefore the pareto model breaks down in 1-man teams.
Yes this is the proverb. I often hear it quoted as A hires B hires C, as a remark on organizational decay.
But the original (and the way you phrased it) is a statement about what kind of person each wants to hire out of their own self interest.
That's the more insightful version IMO.
AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.
There's no reason to believe that's the case.
LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon.
They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cognitively demanding engineering tasks like design, planning, or creative problem solving.
We will need a different architecture for that, transformers don't look like they get smarter in that way even with scale.
AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task
This is probably true, but on a time horizon that is almost certainly much much longer than we think. Centuries. Perhaps millennia, even.
It's fun to go back to the newspapers of the 1920, 30s, and 40s, and see how absolutely CERTAIN they were this was going to happen to them. I'm sure there are examples from the 19th and 18th centuries as well.
Advancement happens in fits, and then tends to hibernate until another big breakthrough.
And even when it does happen, humans love to do things, just for the sake of them. So I highly doubt art, music, literature, or any other thing humans love to intrinsically do are going away, even if they can be done by AI. If anything, they'll be done MORE as AI enables wider participation by lowering the cost and skill barriers.
I think I completely agree with you but I think HN folks seriously underestimate the rate of progress. Believe what you will about the magnitude of capex but it’s coming and it’s coming fast. And we are extremely extremely close now. I agree we constantly have gotten timelines wrong, and I think it’s easily possible SOME capabilities may take longer but I think it’s hard to overstate just how much we are accelerating progress like in the next year or two.
But yea: self driving cars are still not here, see e.g. all the other AI booms
Difference here is we’re seeing it with our own eyes and using it right now. So much absolutely existential competition between companies (even within them!) and geopolitically.
Yeah they are, even if you don't have one yet. We can rathole into whether the need to hit level 5 before it "counts", but Waymos drive around multiple cities, today, and Tesla FSD works well enough that I'd rather drive next to a Tesla with FSD than a drunk driver.
If your evidence that AI isn't something to be worried about is saying self-driving cars aren't here, when they are, will then, we're fucked.
The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. For cars, this manifests as they're physically not available everywhere yet. For programming, it's unevenly distributed according to how much training data there was in that language and that domain to scrape across the whole Internet.
Oh wait I’m not sure if I was clear I just mean: yes we’ve gotten lots of hyped claims like “FSD will be here in 5 years” in 2014 wrong but it is to our peril not to take the very short AI timelines seriously
Also — I think the arguments of yourself and another comment are also great analogies to AI situation, we can haggle over “ok but what is {FSD, AGI} really and in many ways it’s already here!”
I agree totally and I would just point out we’re at an even more intense moment in the AI space
That's one of my triggers that we've reach AGI. In may senses, self driving cars are here. In the vast majority of tasks self driving likely works fine. It's when you get to the parts where you need predictive capabilities, like figuring out what other idiots are about to do, or what some random object is doing in the road that our AI doesn't have the ability to deal with these things.
The particular problem here is the past has very little predictive power on when something is going to happen in the future.
There were plenty of people in 1890 saying heavier than air powered flight was never going to happen.
>humans love to do things, just for the sake of them.
This said, it doesn't prove a negative. How many things would people be doing if they could get paid for it. It's easy to say these things in generalities, but you do any specific things, especially for a living, those could dry up and disappear.
> AI will replace every humans in performing every cognitive task
Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?"
>unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case.
How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)
Will we be able to construct a supercomputer/datacenter that can match or exceed human intelligence? Possibly, even probaby.
But that would only be one instance of such an AGI then and it would be very expensive. IMHO it will take a long time to produce something like that as a commodity.
So far it looks like AI will go the same road as other technological analogues of biological systems: not a self-contained unit (powered by currently technologically unreachable nano-mechanisms), but infrastructure that produces and maintains specialized units.
A tractor can't reproduce or repair itself, but it is better than a horse for farming. A self-driving car can't learn by itself, but a datacenter can use its data to train a new version of the car software. A humanoid robot by itself might not be flexible enough to count as AGI, but it can defer some problems to an exascale datacenter.
Remember when a digital computer was not a device, but the entire floor of a building?
We will be able to construct a datacenter that exceeds human intelligence. And every year after that the size of the datacenter will get smaller for the same intelligence output. Eventually it will be a rack. Then a single server. Then something that is portable.
> Remember when a digital computer was not a device, but the entire floor of a building?
Well I don't actually remember, because - depending on your definition of digital computer - it was around 80 years ago and I wasn't born yet. Which is kind of my point. Eventually, we might get there. And I can imagine that simpler AI systems will help to bootstrap more AI systems. But there is still a lot work to be done.
>>>AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.
Because humans will want them to in order to outcompete the other human who currently has the most powerful AI, unless we show restraint and cooperation the kind of which we’ve never displayed in our existence.
We might end up answering the Fermi paradox within our lifetimes.
The cost of iteration here is so high that we will likely remain in a bioengineering winter until there is a way for individuals to iterate on these compounds in their own self-directed research.
We need a ham radio equivalent for synthetic molecules.
Every time I read something like this, it strikes me as an attempt to convince people that various people-management memes are still going to be relevant moving forward.
Or even that they currently work when used on humans today.
The reality is these roles don't even work in human organizations today. Classic "job_description == bottom_of_funnel_competency" fallacy.
If they make the LLMs more productive, it is probably explained by a less complicated phenomenon that has nothing to do with the names of the roles, or their descriptions.
Adversarial techniques work well for ensuring quality, parallelism is obviously useful, important decisions should be made by stronger models, and using the weakest model for the job helps keep costs down.
My understanding is that the main reason splitting up work is effective is context management.
For instance, if an agent only has to be concerned with one task, its context can be massively reduced. Further, the next agent can just be told the outcome, it also has reduced context load, because it doesn't need to do the inner workings, just know what the result is.
For instance, a security testing agent just needs to review code against a set of security rules, and then list the problems. The next agent then just gets a list of problems to fix, without needing a full history of working it out.
Which, ultimately, is not such a big difference to the reason we split up work for humans, either. Human job specialization is just context management over the course of 30 years.
I’ve found that task isolation, rather than preserving your current session’s context budget, is where subagents shine.
In other words, when I have a task that specifically should not have project context, then subagents are great. Claude will also summon these “swarms” for the same reason. For example, you can ask it to analyze a specific issue from multiple relevant POVs, and it will create multiple specialized agents.
However, without fail, I’ve found that creating a subagent for a task that requires project context will result in worse outcomes than using “main CC”, because the sub simply doesn’t receive enough context.
So two things.. Yes this helps with context and is a primary reason to break out the sub-agents.
However one of the bigger things is by having a focus on a specific task or a role, you force the LLM to "pay attention" to certain aspects. The models have finite attention and if you ask them to pay attention to "all things".. they just ignore some.
The act of forcing the model to pay attention can be acoomplished in alternative ways (defined process, commitee formation in single prompt, etc.), but defining personas at the sub-agent is one of the most efficient ways to encode a world view and responsibilities, vs explicitly listing them.
You can create a context that includes info and instructions, but the agent may not pay attention to everything in the context, even if context usage is low.
IMO "Attention" is an abstraction over the result of prompt engineering, the chain reaction of input converging the output (both "thinking" and response).
If so, one benefit is you can quickly and safely mix up your set of agents (a la Inverse Conway Manoeuvre) without the downsides that normally entails (people being forced to move teams or change how they work).
I think it's just the opposite, as LLMs feed on human language. "You are a scrum master." Automatically encodes most of what the LLM needs to know. Trying to describe the same role in a prompt would be a lot more difficult.
Maybe a different separation of roles would be more efficient in theory, but an LLM understands "you are a scrum master" from the get go, while "you are a zhydgry bhnklorts" needs explanation.
-Tested 162 personas across 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise, with 4 LLM families and 2,410 factual questions
-Adding personas in system prompts does not improve model performance compared to the control setting where no persona is added
-Automatically identifying the best persona is challenging, with predictions often performing no better than random selection
-While adding a persona may lead to performance gains in certain settings, the effect of each persona can be largely random
Fun piece of trivia - the paper was originally designed to prove the opposite result (that personas make LLMs better). They revised it when they saw the data completely disproved their original hypothesis.
Persona’s is not the same thing as a role. The point of the role is to limit what the work of the agent, and to focus it on one or two behaviors.
What the paper is really addressing is does key words like you are a helpful assistant give better results.
The paper is not addressing a role such as you are system designer, or you are security engineer which will produce completely different results and focus the results of the LLM.
I would be interested in an eval that checked both conditions: you are an amazing x Vs. you are a terrible x. also there have been a bunch of papers recently looking at whether threatening the llm improves output, would like to see a variation that tries carrot and stick as well.
Most model research decays because the evaluation harness isn’t treated as a stable artefact. If you freeze the tasks, acceptance criteria, and measurement method, you can swap models and still compare apples to apples. Without that, each release forces a reset and people mistake novelty for progress.
Fair point on the date - the paper was updated October 2024 with Llama-3 and Qwen2.5 (up to 72B), same findings. The v1 to v3 revision is interesting. They initially found personas helped, then reversed their conclusion after expanding to more models.
"Comprehensively disproven" was too strong - should have said "evidence suggests the effect is largely random." There's also Gupta et al. 2024 (arxiv.org/abs/2408.08631) with similar findings if you want more data points.
A paper’s date does not invalidate its method. Findings stay useful only when you can re-run the same protocol on newer models and report deltas. Treat conclusions as conditional on the frozen tasks, criteria, and measurement, then update with replication, not rhetoric.
Developers do want managers actually, to simplify their daily lives. Otherwise they would self manage themselves better and keep more of the share of revenues for them
Unfortunately some managers get lonely and want a friendly face in their org meetings, or can’t answer any technical questions, or aren’t actually tracking what their team is doing. And so they pull in an engineer from their team.
Being a manager is a hard job but the failure mode usually means an engineer is now doing something extra.
It shows me that there doesn’t appear to be an escape from Conway’s Law, even when you replace the people in an organisation with machines. Fundamentally, the problem is still being explored from the perspective of an organisation of people and it follows what we’ve experienced to work well (or as well as we can manage).
I do think there is some actual value in telling an LLM "you are an expert code reviewer". You really do tend to get better results in the output
When you think about what an LLM is, it makes more sense. It causes a strong activation for neorons related to "code review", and so the model's output sounds more like a code review.
i guess, as a human it’s easier to reason about a multi-agent system when the roles are split intuitively, as we all have mental models. but i agree - it’s a bit redundant/unnecessary
> there is no entity or force on this planet that can decrypt them.
At this point I think all of the modern, widely used symmetric cryptography that humans have invented will never be broken in practice, even by another more technologically advanced civilization.
On the asymmetric side, it's a different story. It seems like we were in a huge rush to standardize because we really needed to start PQ encrypting data in transit. All the lattice stuff still seems very green to me. I put P(catastrophic attack) at about 10% over the next decade.
Yes, and this is unfortunately the best move in many situations given how hard it is to fire people. The ideal thing to do is fire the incompetent manager who is a tax on their team rather than a multiplier. That unburdens the highly competent engineers on their team to do good work.
However, that might not be possible or even a good idea. A failed hire might reflect badly on the upper manager, or prevent them from hiring a replacement. It might require a lengthy performance improvement plan, which means you have a burdened team for that whole duration. It's often easier to de-claw the bad manager, and take back on their responsibilities yourself. Not ideal, but the best of a bad situation.
> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.
The second red flag in all of this is that an engineer doing good work on their own is labeled "rogue". Management's job is to make people productive, if they can't realize that the best configuration for their team involves some individuals working largely separate from the managers own mediocre day-to-day ceremonies/projects, then they aren't doing their job. People that don't need to be managed are the best kind of people, if you can't spot them and leverage them, get out of management.
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