So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.
>Friends that worked their described the "beef" as being a weird loaf of pressurized mewt-like protein before its sliced
It's just deli meat. Arby's is extremely open that their roast beef is deli meat roast beef. It's no different from what you find at the deli counter in your local krogers.
Have you or your friend never seen deli meat before?
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
I was just thinking about the A thing the other day.
A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.
But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.
I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.
Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
> Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal
You can't make that assertion when these same people made the LLM revolution happen, by securing the capital and human resources to realise their dream / nightmare
The people who made the LLM revolution happen were by no means exclusively rationalists--but more importantly, lots of people have lots of dreams about the future and even when pursued very, very few of those dreams pan out in anything like this way. LLMs are not what they are because of rationalists' sheer force of will.
I agree - it is hard not to be cynical. Funding is becoming scarce; IPOs are getting harder.
The hedge funds are trying to back out. I think they realise the web of financing makes them double (triple? quintuple?) exposed.
Amodei wants to manage the narrative and make the slowdown look at least semi-deliberate.
The cynic in me would argue the safety and alignment play has always filled a role of plausible deniability when plans go off track. "Oh well we had to pull the model", etc
I'm not going to criticise you for using Claude to build this. Honestly, for me as a consumer, it is a neutral thing provided the software is high quality
What I would ask is this: why should I use your software when I could generate my own?
For a relatively low cost in tokens, I could use Cursor & Fable 5.1 to generate a decent text editor of my own, if I constrained it to use high quality dependencies
So this is kind of the real quandary of OSS development: is there really any point creating tools for developers any more?
I think yes because there are people who prefer picking up something rather than building their tool. Recreating just everything from scratch or make custom solutions are not the one way to go. I do not want to create editor/IDE because it is not in my interests. I choose VS Code, Kate, Notepad++, Nano instead. If I have paid LLMs I will use them different way than reinventing editor lol.
Also keep in mind that it is software which requires a little bit maintenance from time to time. And access to LLM (mostly paid) and (or - depends on if we want to understand something) domain knowledge (in this case how to build editor, how to do parsing etc.).
However if somebody wants to do custom things then let him/her do it. And yeah first editor, then programming language, then... OS and so on.
> The continued React Native tax of unnecessarily difficult upgrades,
My very first experience of RN was having to update an app to handle the mandatory change to 64 bit APKs
Which required a massive update not only to several dependencies but also xcode, iOS frameworks, the weird objective C caches that get smuggled into node_modules, _as well as_ all the rigmarole or making the 64 bit APK build work
It's still like this and now they release new versions and breaking changes way faster. Not to mention they nudge you to Expo now and outsourced nearly everything to other (outdated) dependencies and companies. Stay far away from RN if you value your sanity, it lead to my burnout.
This is not true, the last few releases have had almost no breaking changes. There was a really bad period during all their big refactors but they've since corrected for that.
And as for outdated dependencies, breaking changes, and unfriendly companies, the reason I ever got into RN was after trying to build an iOS app using SwiftUI (and then bailing to UIKit to no avail). Talk about a borked ecosystem.
The frameworks, developer tools, languages, and iteration speed of RN hands down beat any one platform, and you have one model for your data and state which is an unequivocal win. I agree it has plenty of warts, but the arc of progress is that they have been going down steadily.
If you're a 3k person developer team where 200ms can cost millions a year, then by all means go purely native. Though I bet if they'd just gone to the new architecture and spent 1/5 of the cost in agents optimizing things and building a few native bridges they'd have nicer apps and be shipping faster.
This unearths some thoughts, back from my English degree twenty years ago
But basically I don't think those problems are all meant to be solved
Yes, the supernatural events described on stage are very difficult to pull off even with modern effects. But they were impossible with Jacobean setups. And that's kind of the point
There is always a tension between what is seen and spoken in that play. We're meant to get the sense that Macbeth is partly talking himself into his frenzy
Supernatural events happen but they kind of have a bathetic, eye-rolling quality to them, like the prophecy that "Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him"
Which YEAH, it does, in that Macbeth's enemies construct a bunch of battering rams from the forest timber. You are supposed to groan at that. Magic is way weaker than any of the human beings and their ordinary vices
> the supernatural events described on stage are very difficult to pull off even with modern effects. But they were impossible with Jacobean setups
Speaking generally, as a former theatre professional, using onstage "effects" is less effective than firing the audience's imagination, and inviting them to do the work - which, of course, Jacobean artists were well able to do, and their audiences arguably more prepared to accept. The best plays - and I do think Maccers is among them, although the three productions of it I've been in were mediocre to dire - give huge scope for that.
This was a wonderful article, that nails what's wonderful - and frustrating - about the show.
>Which YEAH, it does, in that Macbeth's enemies construct a bunch of battering rams from the forest timber
My memory might be failing but I thought it was that the soldiers were disguising their movements using branches cut from the trees so it gave the impression that the trees themselves were moving towards Macbeth's castle.
I have found this extremely relevant as a (primarily) non-verbal thinker.
I don't, generally, think in words, more in - I guess I would call it something like meta-shapes? A sense of a shape but not things I can exactly visualise.
(You might be surprised to read this and then hear I have an English degree. Surely I thought about Shakespeare in words?! Nope. Shapes, movement, structures)
For me, having to write is critical because it is the only way I practice serialising my thoughts in a way other people can understand.
If I do not then I get very "deep" into my own way of sensing ideas and it's difficult to dig myself back out.
This might also be why I have never been very enchanted by LLMs? They only seem to "think" verbally. So it is always a translation effort for me.
I never can really enter any "flow" state with an LLM. My intuition is that highly verbal thinkers can enter flow with LLMs very easily
Interesting. I have designed code that way. And the shapes aren't UML diagram elements or anything like that, they're just... shapes. I'll slowly walk around, in the hall or outside, and be kind of seeing these shapes and vaguely moving my hands around as I sort out the relationships between them.
I think I have produced reasonably good designs. Don't ask me to teach anyone how I do it, though.
I find this and the parent comment highly relatable with the caveat that I also find it extremely intuitive and rewarding to get good outputs from quality LLM's like Sol or Astra, and I haven't had any trouble with "flow state".
One of the most rewarding things for me is figuring out a good shape for a system and how it would interoperate with the other systems, especially in a way that reframes other parts of the codebase in a way that bring clarity and makes it more intuitive to work with. Creating the right ontologies can make all the difference in what you can do with a project. It's a form of creating mathematical objects.
For example, a Unity game I work on has quest and dialog systems driven by visual scripting graphs. We had two way dialog with different units for player response choices and npc dialog. But we wanted to expand to letting NPC's have dialog with each other as well as conversations with more than two participants. I went outside and thought it over, which largely amounted to visualizing a dialog node graph and a feeling in the back of my mind like it was trying to perform a kind of geometric shape-fitting exercise. A fitment solution jumped out at me to have only one "Dialog" node shared by all participants, with a "participant" value on it. If the player parses this node then the options go on-screen as responses, while if an NPC parses this node with multiple options in it, it picks one. And this lets you voice the player if you want, and enables some things like overhearing other NPC's talk to an NPC then talking to that NPC yourself and having the same tree.
And for quests, the quests had just been for the player, but I was thinking about how to make scripted events in-game easiest to work with for script team who primarily works in visual scripting. Similar story - let the NPC's have their own little quests, with task stages, which are easy to track and make branching choices from, and let the NPC's definition for how to use that quest contain a collection of actions to override the typical actions available to it, so an NPC in a specific "quest" can't do things you don't want it to do, a common enough case that it's preferable to making a series of conditions on the general action planner like "not in quest A"
And timing myself, it took 1-2 hours each time to write out the detailed plan for how I wanted each thing implemented in the game with some other tasks thrown in, and it paid off after Astra worked on it until it was done. It was awesome coming back to something pretty much exactly what I asked for each time.
"I don't, generally, think in words" is not the same as "I don't think in words".
Like I already said, if thought was exclusively in words for humans, humans wouldn't have the "It's on the tip of my tongue" problem. It's blindingly obvious that thought does not occur exclusively with words.
+1... this is me as well. Using LLMs in a conversational mode does not fit my thinking. I use AI help in my editor through targeted code generation, explanations, etc. and I'm writing my own harness to hopefully get a better feel for the shape of LLMs that way. How are you adapting?
This is one of the things that did in Jan Hendrik Schön.
I can't remember the exact measurement but he was showing a set of curves that were simply too neat for a relatively small sample size - roughly 100 or so plastic transistors. In reality you cannot get that neat an effect without a huge sample population
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