Julius Smith

Music/audio signal processing

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

Claude Opus 4.8 is out today. It's our strongest coding model yet: up on SWE-bench Pro (from 64.3 to 69.2) and noticeably more honest about its own work. It tells you when it's unsure and catches its own bugs instead of declaring victory early. Same price as 4.7.

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

There are generally 2 types of LLM users, those that use it to learn everything , and those that use it so they don’t have to learn anything.

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@ick_real Make three wishes

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

We are transitioning to managers overseeing what we used to do ourselves. We are becoming more productive. We still have to be the "humans responsible", and we still have to understand what's getting done. Don't get lulled into not testing and checking. When pushed into corner cases, the LLMs still create slop. The human responsible must catch this and address it somehow. Each of us is still needed at the top of our respective knowledge base. Maximize your knowledge base and don't get lazy.

[Big Brain AI @realBigBrainAI]

Marc Andreessen explains why AI coding won't replace programmers, but fundamentally change what they do.

He argues that AI coding is just the latest abstraction layer, and the job of a programmer has always evolved with each one.

Andreessen's key reframe of what's actually happening:

"AI coding actually abstracts away the process of actually writing the scripting code... This is the next layer of the task redefinition under the job of programmer."

He's clear that the best programmers aren't being replaced. They're already adapting, even if their day-to-day looks radically different now.

Their job has shifted from writing code line by line to managing dozens of AI agents working in parallel.

"The world's best programmers today will tell you, 'My job is I'm sitting there and I'm orchestrating 10 code bots running in parallel.' Their day job now is kind of arguing with the AI bots to try to get them to write the right code."

But @pmarca is adamant this doesn't make foundational knowledge obsolete — it makes it more important.

"You need to still fully understand and learn how to write and understand code, because if it doesn't work or it's not doing what you expect, you need to be able to understand the results of what the AI is giving you."

He draws a direct parallel:

Just as someone writing scripting languages still needs to understand how a microprocessor works, someone orchestrating AI bots needs to understand the code those bots produce.

"It's this upleveling of capability where you actually want the depth to go down and understand what the thing is actually doing, even if you're not spending your day doing that by hand."

The result, in his view, is transformative:

"Now programmers are going to be 10 times or 100 times or a thousand times more productive. And that is overwhelmingly a good thing."

The pattern: New abstraction layer emerges → tasks change → the job gets redefined upward → productivity explodes

It raises a question every programmer should be sitting with...

Are you building the depth to evaluate what AI gives you, or just accepting the output?

[Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross @alexwg]

https://t.co/hQ28jR2Tty

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@Matt_Pinner I am clearly hind-brain dominated

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

When someone forwards you a long email that you have to read backwards from the bottom, you can instead have Gemini in Chrome + gmail translate it into a play script. For extra laughs, ask for the style of Shakespeare.

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@godofprompt Reasoning is a learned skill that LLMs can learn to invoke much like we do - they can learn the rules and apply them directly, or use external tool calls to check hypotheses given various assumptions, etc.

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@xoaanya Not true - just elevated to a much higher level

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@_MAGA_NEWS_ No problem, just print it up

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@DigEconLab Can we estimate AI job enhancement (or displacement) in terms of the increase in productivity per employee beyond the trend-line prediction? This seems better than mandatory reporting as required in the AI-Related Jobs Impact Clarity Act.

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@BourbonCap How many orbiting solar panels does it take to measurably cool the planet?

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@geoffreyhinton One answer: Inexhaustible unemployment insurance and free schooling for life. In the worst case we just keep learning with our friends until we retire.

[Geoffrey Hinton @geoffreyhinton]

I just watched a great compilation of various people's views about what is coming:
https://t.co/OyvbzUqNKZ

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

We've always been told "Look before you Leap".
Now, with LLMs, it's
"Look before you Think before you Leap".

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

Regarding copyright, I favor a technical solution wherein we automatically measure similarity and require a certain distance in that space to avoid copyright infringement. The next step is automatic differentiation, i.e., you upload your work and some server tweaks it to be different enough from everything copyrighted. People can upload their images to be placed on a "do not resemble" list. Differentiation tweaks in a high latent-space layer should look/sound really good, but different. We could also use it to invalidate copyright claims where there is older, non-copyrighted material within the official "latent-space radius of infringement".

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@dccc @spencersalazar Update:

[Julius Smith @JOSmithIII]

@dccc @spencersalazar Welcome to Idiocracy