Sorry to hear that you viewed it as a "litany of crap", but if it's of any solace, if you had slopped it, the result would not have been immediately different -- but you would be marked in our system in such a way that subsequent applications would also be disqualified.
It sounds like we're not a fit for you either, though, so maybe just as well!
I'm not sure what else you're looking for; we are already explicit about the fact that we (like YC!) don't give detailed feedback. If you would like to DM me, I will look at the reviews of your materials and tell you what I can tell you -- but I think it's pretty clear that you and Oxide aren't really a fit for one another?
I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the future is especially uncertain right now, and will contain many surprises!
> […] but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM.
While it just came out, are you planning on reading Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas?
it is really very long. I was trying to read it on monday evening and an eyebrow was raised when, after some time, I saw CHAPTER ONE and realised that up until that point I had been reading the foreword!
Well, they are tools, aren't they? They aren't inherently good or bad, what people are doubtful of who will get to reap the benefits of the tools.
For the past few decades, slowly but surely, the recipients of the benefits of technologies have increasingly been corporations. Of course people are worried that this will move even more wealth out of their hand and into CEOs' coffers.
We really are living in technofeudalism, and we need to figure out how to stop it.
Perhaps the uncertainty is more to do with the public being able to see this new tech; think what's happened in those 30 years, some of which you as a techie would have been well aware of but most people were clueless about. Those of us using PDAs at the time, most of the public didn't imagine constant wireless connectivity and powerful computers in their pockets. Networked games, neat tricks bunches of geeks ran at the time; today everywhere.
Is AI really that much of an outlier other than public knowledge?
You don't own it. You can't own it. Access can be removed at any time.
This situation may not persist but it's not like traditional pillars of society have demonstrated any incentive or even a perception of obligation to act in the public interest lately.
I've done some tool-assisted ports (including without original source), the work you already did is probably 1/4 of the way to a web-hosted Rust BattleTris.
I'm curious whether you have any insights into why high quality LLM-assisted (or enabled?) projects seem so relatively rare? Instead it seems like the preponderant contribution is a deluge of low quality slop.
You didn't share yours and Adam's prompts in the post, so I'm left wondering how much of the success of this project is attributable to your collective ability and experience (both with this particular project and software in general) vs the capability of the model and harness itself? On that note, do you anticipate releasing LLMs at Oxide[1] (linked from RFD 0576)?
Personally I find credible success stories like yours interesting, if a little jarring. If they were commonplace, shouldn't software be generally getting a lot better?
There exist a great many people in the world who think that the only important thing is having a good enough idea, and everything else is almost valueless by comparison. You've probably met them, people who say things like "I just need someone to code it, can you sign this NDA, what do you mean you want to be paid, it's just coding?"
They exist in other formats too - blogs in the vein of "for exposure" cover the same premise, mostly.
Vibe coding has allowed them all to try and show everyone how right they were.
Right, but most of them don't already work as software engineers, at least it hasn't been my experience of my colleagues. However, companies that are aggressively adopting AI coding tools aren't (at least nobody has shown it) getting better by any metric. So, what gives? Why, generally, isn't this kind of success story common?
Because most tasks aren't "refresh this code from 10-20 years ago"?
If you needed an old piece of code at $WORK, you probably already paid the tax of refreshing it or replacing it.
This sort of task is similar in nature to something like "I have a 25yo unmaintained Linux driver, let's refresh it for modern Linux" - a great demonstration of the efficacy of these tools if you have the right-shaped task, but not a task that comes up repeatedly in most people's days.
That's a good point, this does seem qualitatively different. Like dialect translation. In that case the specification is really precise, it's just the old code. Building something new or adding functionality to existing software the spec is almost guaranteed to be more vague.
EDIT: this specificity seems important for language models but the harder I think about it the less sure I am that it's the right intuition..
My intuition is that what makes them well suited is that the transformations on the input desired are well-defined and frequent tasks - e.g. any other software that migrated from, say, SDL1 to SDL2, or had to move from gcc 3 to 4, or Sun cc to gcc, had to have these transformations in their source history.
IOW, "there is probably very little stopping you except time from having written Coccinelle patches to mechanically do most of these transformations".
for the same reason that there is so much bad writing online? you'd think that making it much easier to make large projects would mean a great many more people would make large projects - this will inevitably reduce quality.
The number of people with the time and dilligence, the people who previously would have been making them previously, is much fewer. They hide themselves away to find likeminded people anyway, but now its even harder to find them amongst all the deafening slop.
This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential.
As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1])
On the one hand, I admire (at some level) you sticking to your guns here, willing to take on all comers. On the other, though, I don't entirely understand the inference that you're drawing from the piece; what, exactly, is getting commoditized?
I was recently asked about our (Oxide's) disposition to Twitter on the Peterman Pod[0], and the rationale for why we're no longer active there is pretty simple: the platform has become a cesspool of hate -- and it's antithetical to promoting a business (or any message, really). Aside from the morality of it (which is significant!), the hate itself is repugnant; it's not something that normal people want to be a part of in the long term.
Twitter does have a significant amount of racist content, the antisemitism comment is interesting, because while it does exist, at least in my experience twitter seems to be the most supportive platform on Jewish and Israeli issues at the moment.
> [video] It's not free speech
It is though.
Of course it's your choice if you want to post your content there or not, but objectionable speech, _is_ free speech, and if you believe in free speech, then you should protect the speech that you don't like, because one day someone might decide they don't like your speech, and you won't be able to object to it without being admonished for the obvious hypocrisy.
You're taking me slightly out of context there, but my intent was: it's not about free speech. That is, I strongly support free speech (they have the right to be as racist as they want!), but that isn't what this is about: this is about consequences of deplorable (but non-criminal!) behavior -- and just as people have the right to be hateful, we have the freedom to not want to be associated with the racist biker bar that is what Twitter has become.
I appreciate you and other industry professionals taking a stand. The silence from so many of our colleagues is deafening.
Especially now, with the republican party fully embracing fascism, the impact of the digital world is surfacing in our own. Technology is enabling mass surveillance, suppression, and propaganda to an extent we have never seen before, and many in our own industry who should know better are standing by or worse - contributing.
Fantasizing about having someone fired, making no effort to try and understand the viewpoint of the object of one's contempt, does not seem empathetic to me.
As a side note, I found it ironic, that Keith's email that Bryan linked to making the argument that "Empathy is a core engineering value", uses the word "retarded", which by 2013 was already something you could get "cancelled"(or at least chastised) for, because it's not empathetic to the mentally disabled.
Whenever the lawnmower thing comes up, I try to also mention dtrace. As far as things to be remembered for, they make some strange bedfellows... although it's better than anything I've managed so I guess congrats.
Hey friend, check the user name of the person I'm responding to (and perhaps check out the people responsible for dtrace and larry ellison lawnmower comparisons). I might appear more coherent afterwards.
For whatever it's worth (perhaps not much?), I was actually asked about this three-decade-old post (!) recently on the Peterman Pod[0], which allowed for a slightly more nuanced discussion.
I really can't think of a better way to respond to this situation. It is clear to me that over the next decade the amount of people who will have been hot-headed kids on the internet who grow up to fully-fledged adults who have said they no longer agree with things in ways that are not kind is going to be a lot higher. I've no doubt said things that I no longer agreed with that made sense in the context of when they were posted.
Thank you for being a good role model and setting the example that saying "that was bad, here is the context, but I don't like that I said that."
Oh! This is a great explanation, thanks. I remember your original exchange (and
I found it baffling and uncharacteristic), and I remember the William Shatner SNL Trek convention sketch, but I never made the connection between them.
I would second the black bar for Kidder -- The Soul of a New Machine constitutes the literary foundation of our craft: it is our Odyssey. Speaking personally, I have spoken and written about Soul many times ([0][1][2]) -- and I know that its impact from me is far from unique.
RIP Tracy Kidder -- and thank you for giving us all permission to feel passion for the machine.
There's a lot of confusion here about the way VC operates (or companies, for that matter), but just to clarify one point: an IPO is not an "exit" -- it is a public offering. That is, an Oxide IPO, were we to be so lucky, would be a milestone towards being the generational company that we aspire to be.
It sounds like we're not a fit for you either, though, so maybe just as well!
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