Interesting article, though is there really much new there?
Also it discounts the alternative hypothesis of some bright spark acquiring wolf pups and doing it purposefully because that would take 'weeks'. Weeks, you say?
Surely some enterprising hunter-gatherer had sufficient time on their hands. I can't help but think strutting around with a feared predator at your beck and call would have been the ultimate status symbol, and once you saw it would have to be the must have accessory for the self-respecting hunter. Aficionados would no doubt breed their stock amongst themselves to save the hassle of having to abduct more wolf cubs, which would naturally tend to the more suited specimens (friendliness being one trait as you don't want them eating the kids). Once it was realised what an incredible force multiplier they are in hunting and their utility in defence, any time investment would pay for itself many times over.
I find this no less as unlikely as thinking humans would let wolves help themselves to their excess food. Fascinating subject all round, no matter the reason. I hope they can figure out more.
> I find this no less as unlikely as thinking humans would let wolves help themselves to their excess food
Wolves can extract nutrition from animal tissue which humans discard, such as bone and the tougher cartilage/connective tissue. Modern dogs still absolute love bones.
They also have much better night vision than humans, sense of smell and hearing.
So, follow human tribes and pick off the remains when they move camp. Maybe eventually escalate to sneaking in at night. The human tribes now become a "resource" which the wolves will start guarding from other predators, such as bears or competing wolf packs. The humans eventually catch on that the wolves are providing a benefit at very little cost - food remains which they are not eating anyway. They even start to share kills - the wolves being better at tracking game while the humans finish the kill with spear/bow.
When animal and crop domestication occurs, you get another benefit - protecting the flocks/herds/crops from marauders. Especially at night.
Reminds me of Werner Herzog's autobiography. In the introduction, he muses on a life being cut short by a snipers bullet, and when he sees a bird flying past his window as he is writing his book makes him imagine it is a bullet and he thinks it would be a nice device to cut his final chapter short at that exact moment, so he is giving fair warning that the book will end abruptly.
And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book as I indicated in the foreword".
I dunno, man. You get to work for months to completion on a deeply fulfilling project, get well compensated, and then the plug gets pulled before it goes to production? That's living the software engineering dream!
Jokes aside, the article resonated with me (before the LLM vibes got overpowering) as I am learning Irish as my own personal challenge, which as a minority language is similarly derided by some as useless (there is essentialy no Irish speaker that does not also speak English) but which I have found tremendously intellectually invigorating and the most pumped I have been for a project in a long while. So it rang true for me before half way through a distinct "linkedin parable" nature started to come to fore. So alas I rather doubt the author is learning Sumerian at all. Cynical perhaps.
Some missing context (pun intended) is that Augment code has recently switched to a per-token instead of per-message pricing model. This hasn't gone down particularly well, but that's another story. But it may well be that users drop back to older models in the expectation it will use less tokens.
Personally, I stopped using GPT-5 as it would just be tool call after tool call without ever stopping to tell you what the hell it was doing. Sonnet 4.5 much better in this regard. Albeit it's too verbose for the new token based world ('let me just summarise that in a report')
I have to get better at interrupting Sonnet 4.5 when it starts going down a rabbit hole I didn't ask it to, it's too bad the incentives are mixed up and Anthropic gets more money the longer the bot spirals.
I was wondering if it was a way to 'flaunt' his avoidance of LLMs. Could be in future genuine human conversation will be so rare that we will seize upon mistakes and typos like finding a shiny jewel in mud.
(But then I saw he used the formation - 'Honestly?' which made me think he WAS using LLMs!)
Interesting. Though it seems they are themselves building Agentic AI tooling. It's vibe coding all the way down - when's something real going to pop out the bottom?
An LLM salesman assuring us that $1000/mo is a reasonable cost for LLMs feels a bit like a conflict of interests, especially when the article doesn't go into much detail about the code quality. If anything, their assertion that one should stick to boring tech and "have empathy for the model" just reaffirms that anybody doing anything remotely innovative or cutting-edge shouldn't bother too much with coding agents.
Inspired by the recent post to describe relativity in words of 4 letters or less, I asked ChatGPT to do it for other things like Gravity. It couldn't help but throw in a couple 5 letter words (usually plurals). Same with Claude. So this could be a good one?
I think any software engineer can identify with the feeling you get at the moment you do the first run of the solution you have implemented that you are 100% sure has to fix it only to find nothing has changed.
Corollary: the relief/anguish when you discover that the reason none of your fixes have worked, nor your debugging print statements produced output, is because you were editing a different copy of the file than was getting built/run because you moved or renamed something and your editor didn't notice.
This reminds me of when I was trying to do Minecraft style chunking in Bevy. I was in a situation where (instead of doing the not-so-obvious fix) I threw parallelization, compiler optimization, caching, release flags etc. at my project and nothing made it go faster. I could not figure out why it was so slow. Turns out what I was doing was so unoptimized that I might've as well loaded the whole world per frame.
I was genuinely concerned that everything I was doing with mango and Pixman was going to turn out to be pointless. It wasn't, thankfully, there was a noticeable difference after introducing them. But it was a gamble for sure, because there was no smaller test I could really do to know it was worth it in advance - if I wanted to replace that DLL, I was going to have to replace the whole DLL because it was C++, the DLL exports were all mangled names for classes that all kind of interacted with each other, so I couldn't just cleanly replace one call and see that it was a good idea. I try to gather as much evidence as I can to back the idea it'll work before I make the leap, but I've learned that if you really want to get stuff done sometimes you just have to go for it and assume there is a way to salvage it if it fails
This has happened to me so many times. Especially in the distributed database I work on ... "hmm maybe I need to let the experiment run for longer, this data is noisy so it probably needs more time to show a trend line".
My father grew up in a somewhat rural Irish village and there was one farmer who would take his horse and cart to the pub (fairly anachronistic even in his day) in the knowledge that no matter how passed-out drunk he got the other patrons would load him into the cart and the horse would take him home. Take that, self-driving cars!
I read that as him trying to move his money to another bank that would allow him to make the transfer. His current bank suspected this and wouldn't let him even close his account. So they confiscated his money to prevent someone else supposedly stealing his money - pretty Kafkaesque I think
Surely some enterprising hunter-gatherer had sufficient time on their hands. I can't help but think strutting around with a feared predator at your beck and call would have been the ultimate status symbol, and once you saw it would have to be the must have accessory for the self-respecting hunter. Aficionados would no doubt breed their stock amongst themselves to save the hassle of having to abduct more wolf cubs, which would naturally tend to the more suited specimens (friendliness being one trait as you don't want them eating the kids). Once it was realised what an incredible force multiplier they are in hunting and their utility in defence, any time investment would pay for itself many times over.
I find this no less as unlikely as thinking humans would let wolves help themselves to their excess food. Fascinating subject all round, no matter the reason. I hope they can figure out more.