It sounds similar to the more thoughtful critiques of AI in programming. Treating AI as a lines of code (LOC) generator, where actual human beings end up not engaging with the domain the software is working in, and there is then little to no understanding or care to understand the resulting code, we call "slop." The term slop is definitely pejorative, but since most software is commercial, it ends up raising questions as to how much quality and domain knowledge matter if the goal is primarily marketplace success. Then we get those thorny questions of what is software for, anyway -- do we really accept the premise that "marketplace success" is the best, and perhaps only relevant, criteria?

The declaration here, as I understand it, is taking the premise that the point of mathematics _is_ the domain knowledge, and that using "solves math problems" as a benchmark is exactly the kind of shallow, domain-eroding approach to AI that in software we label "slop."

Not just the largest city, but also the city where much of our national media is based or has a very large presence. It's so bizarre when I visit friends and family in other parts of the country and they know more about my local news stories than their own cities.

Grocery stores aren't evenly distributed throughout the city, though, and there are neighborhoods were either there is no store at all nearby, or the store that exists has poor quality and high prices. In those locations, the dynamic of a city-owned store undercutting a "normal" store isn't really going to apply since there isn't really a "normal" store in the area.

So much, of course, depends on the execution -- a crappy city store won't be a help to anyone -- but the concept isn't inherently bad on its face.

Ya but some rich dick like Buffet might notice that and a government store would stop them from swooping in and exploiting it

It runs into the Mississippi river, which runs into the sea.

Sure, some small amount of it may go down the 2000+ mile trek from rural MN to the gulf, but that's not what anyone imagines when someone uses the term "dumped into the sea".

Given that each planet seems to have one species, except that humans live everywhere, I always kind of assumed that the Galactic Empire was one with humans at the core.

That is a possible reading, especially given the way the Empire's xenophobia manifests, if you assume all humans are culturally homogeneous in Star Wars, but I think the movies are somewhat clear that humans are culturally diverse. The human cultures in Tatooine seem very different to Alderaan or Naboo, for two somewhat specific notes in the films. The Imperial accent often being more "British" (RP) implies cultural differences with the periphery that at least mirror somewhat, say, the differences between Britain and much of its former Empire.

The Galactic Empire showing a clear citizenship "caste" favoritism of Citizen/Officer Humans, General Humans, Cloned Humans, Aliens, and then Droids, but also working with all of those at the same time in its military efforts (there are a few aliens in the Empire's military, there are a lot of droids) does seem imperial in the way the article suggests, especially because that core of clear "Citizen/Officer Humans" seems so relatively small versus they armies they command of all the other types.

I first learned about New Sweden several years ago from reading The Barbarous Years[0]. Now I always think about it whenever I drive south toward Maryland and DC when I cross the Delaware and see signs for towns like Swedesboro (NJ) and various Cristiana/Christiana place names in DE.

[0]https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-barbarous-years-the-peoplin...

A graffito, or a pack of graffiti ;-)

> Imagine telling workers at a construction company that the hard problem was never building stuff but figuring out what needs to be built.

Isn't this kind of true, though? Housing construction, for instance, isn't bottlenecked by the technical difficulties of building, but by political and regulatory hurdles. Or look at large, capital-intensive projects such as the always-proposed, never built new Hudson river train tubes. Actually building these will take billions of dollars and many years, but even they would be long built by now were it not for their constantly being blocked by political jockeying.

Building stuff _does_ often involve difficult technical challenges, but I still think that as a general aphorism the observation that this isn't the _hardest_ part holds true.

That may be the future, but we're not there yet. If you're having the LLM write to a high level language, eg java, javascript, python, etc, at some point there will be a bug or other incident that requires a human to read the code to fix it or make a change. Sure, that human will probably use an LLM as part of that, but they'll still need be able to tell what the code is doing, and LLMs simply are not reliable enough yet that you just blindly have them read the code, change it, and trust them that it's correct, secure, and performant. Sure, you can focus on writing tests and specs to verify, but you're going to spend a lot more time going in agentic loops trying to figure out why things aren't quite right vs a human actually being able to understand the code and give the LLM clear direction.

So long as this is all true, then the code needs to be human readable, even if it's not human-written.

Maybe we'll get to the point that LLMS really are equivalent to compilers in terms of reliability -- but at that point, why would be have them write in Java or other human-readable languages? LLMs would _be_ a compiler at that point, with a natural-language UI, outputing some kind of machine code. Until then, we do need readable code.

Me: My code isn’t giving the expected result $y when I do $x.

Codex: runs the code, reproduces the incorrect behavior I described finds the bug, reruns the code and gets the result I told it I expected. It iterates until it gets it right and runs my other unit and integration tests.

This isn’t rocket science.