To clarify, the more accurate description would be "Testing how well LLMs can follow the rules of Magic", right? There is no actual evaluation of how "well" they are playing?
This is basically just the normal dynamic with American tax law where tax jurisdictions are terrible at coordinating, so they end up approving things and agreeing to tax things at a very low level in order to win the competition. Even when states/counties try to work together on this stuff there's a huge defector problem, like "hey I can back out of this multistate tax compact agreement and get 500 new jobs which will let me win local reelection".
I suppose you can reduce a lot of both good at bad things about the country to "because federalism".
I wonder how Paradox handles this stuff in their games like Europa Universalis. Have they ever made a "the pope wants you to switch calendar systems" event which changes the actual in-game date?
Sounds like they just ignore any calendar weirdness. I don't envy anyone the task of trying to properly program this. You basically have to decide for everything time related in the simulation whether it is tied to the calendar or the physical passage of time. Sometimes you would have to split variables, like characters are legally older, but no closer to old age. Bonus points if your solution allows characters to get into conflict with each other about stuff like when a treaty ends or whether their loans are due 15 days sooner.
My initial thought was that that would probably be taking the simulationism too far. My second thought was how funny it would be to swap calendars to get out of a truce early.
“My Lord, you can attack them until March of next year!”
> My second thought was how funny it would be to swap calendars to get out of a truce early.
Congress did something similar last year - National Emergencies declared by the president, such as for tariffs, are required by law to be reviewed within 15 days by Congress. So Congress redefined the calendar so that the remainder of the days during that session are not officially considered to be calendar days. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/congress-johnson-calen...
EU3 and EU4 at least had no leap years. I assume 1, 2 and 5 are the same.
Checking the wiki, eu5 has an advance (guess these are like the nation ideas in eu4?) for Julian calendar which gives you +10% to orthodox or miaphysite nations. I doubt it has any effect in the calendar system in the games UI.
Paradox's Clausewitz game engine seems to handle "negative" years very poorly, so stuff like historical Roman emperors in Crusader Kings have some oddities. It's probably also why Imperator: Rome uses ab urbe condita dating (aside from immersion).
The Elder Kings 2 mod actually has custom date handling (it's actually a custom date localisation system) to enable transitioning to the 3rd era on founding the Empire of Tamriel.
I really fundamentally do not understand what problem Gas City solves that is not already solved by normal subagent orchestration patterns. If you want to call your main LLM session the "mayor" and have it delegate its work out to planners and coders and reviewers and QA and so on, this is already a thing you can do! If you want to do this in a reusable way you can create skills and subagent definitions and use /commands, etc. Why do we need hundreds of thousands of lines of opaque Go code to accomplish any of this?
I listened to his podcast on Pragmatic Engineer. I don't think he specifically addressed what it solved, but he talked about shifting the Overton window in regards to what's possible with AI agents. I'm not arguing that he actually accomplishes this -- just noting that his goal seems to be less "create something useful" and more so "create something that gets people's attention and maybe gets them to thinking about AI in a different way".
Cynically, he published a book on vibe coding recently, so he may just be grabbing attention as some effort to boost book sales.
I'm trying to make the phrase "AI DDOSing" happen.
ex. someone's GitHub repo with a ton of code and a README written by AI claiming fantastical features not present in the code.
Or, more subtle someone, "self-DDOS'ing via AI" - thats for when "LLM psychosis" is too strong, i.e. for "I went too far down a rabbit hole with the interactive chatbot for a month and now I have 1M LOC and 95% test coverage and an app that I don't understand"
I quit my job at Google in 2023 and have spent 2.5 years working on an LLM-based agentic app.
To me, this looks like an unfortunate self-AI-DDOS'ing by someone with even more runway than my seemingly infinite runway.
It's well-meaning, like, in 2030 I'm fairly sure we'll have a meta-layer and simplistic "here's a bug, read files, edit, fix" will seem slow/strangled. But he's at least a couple years ahead of the models, and whatever metalayer exists won't have the bizarre UX model.
This is true, without people trying, we wouldn't know what doesn't work yet - for all I know he's cracked something big and in a month we'll see the first AI-built operating system (I'm not being sarcastic)
Claude Code released agent teams in Feb. that was the first of the major players to have separate process/context agent orchestration that I know of. Who did it before that of the major IDEs?
There's a real hobbyist vs professional distinction with Claude Code. For professionals, including when I use it at work, we're generally super happy to have Claude spawn as many subagents as possible and burn more tokens to get a better result. Hobbyist users on a $20/month plan, though, generally want more conservative behavior.
It's hard for Anthropic to cater to both sets of users with one model.
I don't think that's what this issue is talking about. I have the Max $200/mo plan and have noticed starting yesterday that my quota drains much much faster, to the point I'm about to use the $50 credit Anthropic gave away to everyone.
True enough. But to be clear, that's a separate issue from what users are reporting here.
Both hobbyists and professionals are understandably frustrated that tokens are being consumed quickly without justification, or at least in ways that seem entirely avoidable.
No "max" or "pro" equivalent? I wanted to get a new Macbook Pro, but there's no obvious successor to the M4 Max available, M5 looks like a step down in performance if anything.
No doubt the "wider" versions of the M5 are coming.
My hope is that they are taking longer because of a memory system upgrade that will make running significantly more powerful LLMs locally more feasible.
Apparently not until early next year. I was surprised by this too, but I hadn’t really been following the rumors at all, so I didn’t really have any grounds for being surprised by this.
Does the "caching containers for Codex Cloud" mean I have some chance of being able to reuse build artifacts between tasks? My Rust project takes around 20 minutes to set up from scratch in a new Codex environment, which seems extremely expensive.
I think this is up to the user. I actually found tab so annoying that it was a big reason I quit cursor and cancelled my sub. I couldn't think straight with it constantly suggesting things to put in after every key stroke and caused a few annoying bugs for me.
I find pure claude and neovim to be a great pair. I set up custom vim commands to make sharing file paths, line numbers, and code super easy. that way I can move quickly through code for manual developing as well as have claude right there with the context it needs quickly.
It doesn't have Junie (Jetbrains AI Agent) yet, but I'm talking about the agents. I'm happy with Claude Code. I just want Cursor Tab in there. I use it for quick edits & refactoring, not writing new code, and it's damn good at what it does.
I didn't think much of it until I canceled Cursor to try out copilot, which is slower and yet also worse quality. I reluctantly resubscribed to Cursor.
Generic Semaglutide is already produced on a massive scale throughout the world. However, it is unlawful to import and sell and will remain so until 2032 in the USA.
In other markets, where it is under patent, it is significantly cheaper than the $500/month or more in the US currently. For example in the UK it is roughly $150/month USD privately (i.e. not through the NHS).
In China it will be out of patent within two years.
There's a whole little online subculture of people in the US importing the precursors and making it themselves at home for dirt-cheap.
I gather it's extremely easy and basically fool-proof, as far as producing the desired drug and not producing some other, undesired drug. Much easier than, say, home-brewing beer. The risk is all in contamination, which presents a vector for infection.
[EDIT] I don't mean to downplay the risks or suggest people go do this, only to highlight that there's enough demand for this that we're well into "life, uh, finds a way" territory, and also just how lucky (assuming these hold up as no-brainers to take for a large proportion of the population) we are that these things are so incredibly cheap and simple to make, if you take the patents out of the picture.
Not just the current generation of drugs, but they also import and use the next generation that is still in clinical trials and won't be on the market for at least a year. I had it reccomended to me online in a very casual as if it were a supplement. The risk with the is not just contamination but also if you get side effects there's no recourse to sue because you bought it from a chemical factory in China. The new generation of glp peptides is similar to the old one, but still can have unintended side effects as they do work on three receptors rather than the two that the current generation does
Iirc, that pricing will change in the US as Trump will require that the price of drugs to Medicaid patients must match or be less than that of any other developed nation.
Since about 1/4 of the people in the US are on medicaid, close to 90 million, that means the drug manufacturers will probably raise the price for everyone else in the US because they got to get their profits somehow...
That would be pretty , unusual - Congress has shown an exceptionally strong bias to support medical industry profits over health Care through the decades.
I wonder if the bribery (campaign donations) has anything to do with it?
- Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity
- Predicting the future is famously difficult
- Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence
- Even a 1-in-1000 existential threat would be extremely serious. If an asteroid had a 1-in-1000 chance of hitting Earth and obliterating humanity we should make serious contingency plans.
Second question: how confident are you that you're correct? Are you 99.9% sure? Confident enough to gamble billions of lives on your beliefs? There are almost no statements about the future which I'd assign this level of confidence to.
You could use the exact same argument to argue the opposite. Simply change the first premise to "Super intelligence is the only thing that can save humanity from certain extinction". Using the exact same logic, you'll reach the conclusion that not building superintelligence is a risk no sane person can afford to take.
So, since we've used the exact same reasoning to prove two opposite conclusions, it logically follows that this reasoning is faulty.
That’s not how logic works. The GP is applying the precautionary principle: when there’s even a small chance of a catastrophic risk, it makes sense to take precautions-like restricting who can build superintelligent AI, similar to how we restrict access to nuclear technology.
Changing the premise to "superintelligence is the only thing that can save us" doesn’t invalidate the logic of being cautious. It just shifts the debate to which risk is more plausible. The reasoning about managing existential risks remains valid either way, the real question is which scenario is more likely, not whether the risk-based logic is flawed.
Just like with nuclear power, which can be both beneficial and dangerous, we need to be careful in how we develop and control powerful technologies. The recent deregulation by the US admin are an example of us doing the contrary currently.
Not really. If there is a small chance that this miraculous new technology will solve all of our problems with no real downside, we must invest everything we have and pull out all the stops, for the very future of the human race depends on AGI.
Also, @tsimionescu's reasoning is spot on, and exactly how logic works.
It literally isn't, changing/reversing a premise and not adressing the point that was made is not a valid way to counter the initial argument in a logical way.
Just like your proposition that any "small" chance justifies investing "everything" disregards the same argument regarding the precautionary principle of potentially devastating technologies. You've also slipped in an additonal "with no real downside" which you cannot predict with certainty anyways, rendering this argument infalsifiable. At least tsimionescu didn't dare making such a sweeping (but baseless) statement.
Some of us believe that continued AI research is by far the biggest threat to human survival, much bigger for example than climate change or nuclear war (which might cause tremendous misery and reduce the population greatly, but seem very unlikely to kill every single person).
I'm guessing that you think that society is getting worse every year or will eventually collapse, and you hope that continued AI research might prevent that outcome.
The best we can hope for is that Artificial Super Intelligence treats us kindly as pets, or as wildlife to be preserved, or at least not interfered with.
Isn't the question you're posing basically Pascals wager?
I think the chance they're going to create a "superintelligence" is extremely small.
That said I'm sure we're going to have a lot of useful intelligence. But nothing general or self-conscious or powerful enough to be threatening for many decades or even ever.
> Predicting the future is famously difficult
That's very true, but that fact unfortunately can never be used to motivate any particular action, because you can always say "what if the real threat comes from a different direction?"
We can come up with hundreds of doomsday scenarios, most don't involve AI. Acting to minimize the risk of every doomsday scenario (no matter how implausible) is doomsday scenario no. 153.
> I think the chance they're going to create a "superintelligence" is extremely small.
I'd say the chance that we never create a superintelligence is extremely small. You either have to believe that for some reason the human brain achieved the maximum intelligence possible, or that progress on AI will just stop for some reason.
Most forecasters on prediction markets are predicting AGI within a decade.
Why are you so sure that progress won't just fizzle out at 1/1000 of the performance we would classify as superintelligence?
> that progress on AI will just stop for some reason
Yeah it might. I mean, I'm not blind and deaf, there's been tremendous progress in AI over the last decade, but there's a long way to go to anything superintelligent. If incremental improvement of the current state of the art won't bring superintelligence, can we be sure the fundamental discoveries required will ever be made? Sometimes important paradigm shifts and discoveries take a hundred years just because nobody made the right connection.
Is it certain that every mystery will be solved eventually?
Aren't we already passed 1/1000th of the performance we would classify as superintelligence?
There isn't an official precise definition of superintelligence, but it's usually vaguely defined as smarter than humans. Twice as smart would be sufficient by most definitions. We can be more conservative and say we'll only consider superintelligence achieved when it gets to 10x human intelligence. Under that conservative definition, 1/1000th of the performance of superintelligence would be 1% as smart as a human.
We don't have a great way to compare intelligences. ChatGPT already beats humans on several benchmarks. It does better than college students on college-level questions. One study found it gets higher grades on essays than college students. It's not as good as humans on long, complex reasoning tasks. Overall, I'd say it's smarter than a dumb human in most ways, and smarter than a smart human in a few ways.
I'm not certain we'll ever create superintelligence. I just don't see why you think the odds are "extremely small".
> Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence
I think you realise this is the weak point. You can't rule out the current AI approach leading to superintelligence. You also can't rule out a rotting banana skin in your bin spontaneously gaining sentience either. Does that mean you shouldn't risk throwing away that skin? It's so outrageous that you need at least some reason to rule it in. So it goes with current AI approaches.
Isn't the problem precisely that uncertainty though? That we have many data points showing that a rotting banana skin will not spontaneously gain sentience, but we have no clear way to predict the future? And we have no way of knowing the true chance of superintelligence arising from the current path of AI research—the fact that it could be 1-in-100 or 1-in-1e12 or whatever is part of the discussion of uncertainty itself, and people are biased in all sorts of ways to believe that the true risk is somewhere on that continuum.
>And we have no way of knowing the true chance of superintelligence arising from the current path of AI research
What makes people think that the future advances in AI will continue to be linear instead of falling of and plateau? Don't all breakthrough technologies develop quickly at the start and then fall of in improvements as all the 'easy' improvements have already been made? In my opinion AI and AGI is like the car and the flying car. People saw continous improvements in cars and thought this rate of progress would continue indefinitely. Leading to cars that have the ability to not only drive but fly as well.
We already have flying cars. They’re called airplanes and helicopters. Those are limited by the laws of physics, so we don’t have antigravity flying vehicles.
In the case of AGI we already know it is physically possible.
You bring up the example of an extinction-level asteroid hurling toward earth. Gee, I wonder if this superintelligence you’re deathly afraid of could help with that?
This extreme risk aversion and focus on negative outcomes is just the result of certain personality types, no amount of rationalizing will change your mind as you fundamentally fear the unknown.
How do you get out of bed everyday knowing there’s a chance you could get hit by a bus?
If your tribe invented fire you’d be the one arguing how we can’t use it for fear it might engulf the world. Yes, humans do risk starting wildfires, but it’s near impossible to argue the discovery of fire wasn’t a net good.
Since the internet inception there were a few wrong turns taken by the wrong people (and lizards, ofc) behind the wheel, leading to the sub-optimal, enshitified tm experience we have today. I think GP just don't want to live through that again.
> Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity
I disagree at least on this one. I don't see any scenario where superintelligence comes into existence, but is for some reason limited to a mediocrity that puts it in contention with humans. That equilibrium is very narrow, and there's no good reason to believe machine-intelligence would settle there. It's a vanishingly low chance event. It considerably changes the later 1-in-n part of your comment.
So you assume a superintelligence, so powerful it would see humans as we see ants, would not destroy our habitat for resources it could use for itself?
> There are almost no statements about the future which I'd assign this level of confidence to.
You have cooked up a straw man that will believe anything as long as it contains a doomsday prediction. You are more than 99.9% confident about doomsday predictions, even if you claim you aren't.
reply