When did people start thinking it was ok to assume that the viewpoints of characters in a work of fantasy are what the author actually believes? Why is this so common in modern literature criticism? what is going on?

> and the overt assumption that emperors are a good thing was unsettling

God forbid a piece of literature explores a concept you find unsettling.

Fair points. But it wasn't so much the viewpoint of any individual character as the assumptions underlying the entire cast.

But you're right - I should read her other works precisely because this one unsettled me

I’m not sure why you seem so interested in vetting the beliefs of the author of a fantasy series. Just engage with the text.

It's not so much vetting their thoughts, as dealing with my own inner voice ranting at the beliefs I see in their writing.

There's a few other books that I've been unable to finish purely because I disagree with the author so much that I just can't read their work. I end up shouting at them (sometimes actually shouting at the book) so much that that forms my engagement with the text and it becomes pointless trying to read any more. At least I managed to finish Terra Ignota.

given this, is it safe to assume that inference pricing is barely related to cost to serve at this point and there is considerable margin?

the whole point of arc-agi 3 is that if models are AGI then they should be able to solve the same tasks as humans do given the same information, but they cant. allowing scripts and harnesses and whatnot completely defeats the purpose.

Humans haven't interacted with computers by typing in "5 columns right, 3 columns down" since before I was born. They use a mouse and keyboard.

Meanwhile AI agents are expected to guess pixels and fail each time.

But humans aren't just a "reasoning component"; our nervous system (and body in general) provides us with significant capabilities that would be considered a "harness" for our frontal lobe. It just seems silly to me to try to solve all of this in a single leap. But I guess that they just feel burned by how relatively quickly ARC-AGI 2 was solved

im a java guy, but it simply takes too long to start up and uses too much memory to be a reasonable language for ai agent development.

However, the cause it not really Java as such, but massive frameworks and tooling (e.g. Maven). Maybe AI will bring some fresh air to Java, because old truths might no longer be valid. But it will be hard to get rid of old habits because it manifested in AI training data.

"AI guys" use Claude CLI that renders to a terminal via freakin' react.

Come on, java starts up fast enough and the memory usage can be set (better throughput vs less memory, it's a classic tradeoff. Go just defaults to worse throughput).

Really, without some fat framework doing all kinds of initialization stuff, java code starts up practically instantly.

Java takes flags for min/initial/max memory that, as a strict law of nature, are always wrong the first time you try. And it holds onto unused memory unless you pass another flag. Idk exactly why there's no reasonable default for that, but probably cause it's in a VM. No other language has this problem.

It does give back memory nowadays.

And it's not really a VM in that sense of the word. It's a runtime, Go also has such a runtime it's just bundled.

The Java "compiled" code isn't a native binary like in Go, it really does run in a VM. I honestly don't know if that's why they handle memory differently though.

> Come on, java starts up fast enough and the memory usage can be set

Yeah it can be adjusted, on the other hand you have a language that just works. Starts instantly and memory usage is bounded by usage, not guesstimate of how much the JVM will need.

> Really, without some fat framework doing all kinds of initialization stuff, java code starts up practically instantly

Have you many java projects that didn't use some fat framework? Good for you if you did, but 100% of java project I had the displeasure of touching were huge mess with deprecated frameworks on ancient java versions.

is your job to write code or develop software that works?

have fun keeping a job doing 1/3 the work of people getting paid the same as you :)

I’m from Europe, so I’ll do just that. Thankfully labor laws are strong enough here to withstand this absurdity.

why does every AI skeptic assume that everyone is lying to them. theres millions of developers using AI to be more productive and you just keep plugging your ears and screaming, claiming its only dumb managers, meanwhile Linus Torvalds is vibe coding stuff.

Who said anything about that? The argument was "if you're not using AI RIGHT NOW, you will fall behind forever"

This is the nonsense management and CTOs are pushing. Use it now if you want, I do. Wait for things to cool down if you want. You'll be fine either way. The comical view that it'll be a "winner takes all" subset of developers who some how would have figured out secret AI techniques that make them 10Kx more productive and every other developer will be SOL is laughable.

knowing how to properly use AI is a skill, there are new tools, new patterns, new primitives etc. you will be unpracticed.

i agree, and its strange that this failure mode continually gets lumped onto AI. The whole point of longer term software engineering was to make it so that the context within a particular persons head should not impact the ability of a new employee to contribute to a codebase. turns out everything we do to make sure that is the case for a human also works for an agent.

As far as i can tell, the only reason AI agents currently fail is because they dont have access to the undocumented context inside of peoples heads and if we can just properly put that in text somehwere there will be no problems.

The failure mode is getting lumped into AI because AI is a lot more likely to fail.

We've done this with Neural Networks v1, Expert Systems, Neural Networks v2, SVM, etc, etc. only a matter of time before we figured it out with deep neural networks. Clearly getting closer with every cycle, but no telling how many cycles we have left because there is no sound theoretical framework.

At the same time, we have spent a large part of the existence of civilisation figuring out organisational structures and methods to create resilient processes using unreliable humans, and it turns out a lot of those methods also work on agents. People just often seem miffed that they have to apply them on computers too.

yeah, thats why people just use Teams