I run a small lab that does large data analytics and web products for a couple large clients. I have 5 developers who I manage directly, I write a lot of code myself and I interact directly with my clients. I have been a web developer for long enough to have written code in coldfusion, php, asp, asp.net, rails, node and javascript through microsoft frontpage exports, to jquery,to backbone, angular and react and in a lot of different frameworks. I feel this breadth of watching the internet develop in stages has given me a decent if imperfect understanding of many of the tradeoffs that can be made in developing for the web.

My work lately is on an analytics / cms / data management / gis platform that is used by a couple of our clients and we've been developing for a couple of years before any ai was used on it all. Its a react front end built on react-router-7 that can be SPA or SSR and a node api server.

I had tried AI coding a couple times over the past few years both for small toy projects and on my work and it felt to me less productive than writing code by hand until this January when I tried Claude Code with Opus 4.5. Since then I have written very few features by hand although I am often actively writing parts of them, or debugging by hand.

I am maybe in a slightly unique place in that part of my job is coming up with tasks for other developers and making sure their code integrates back, I've been doing this for 10 years plus, and personally my sucess rate with getting someone to write a new feature that will get use is maybe a bit over 50%, that is maybe generous? Figuring out what to do next in a project that will create value for users is the hard part of my job whether I am delegating to developers or to an AI and that hasn't changed.

That being said I can move through things significantly faster and more consistently using AI, and get them out to clients for testing to see if they are going to work. Its also been great for tasks which I know my developers will groan if I assign to them. In the last couple months I've been able to

- create a new version of our server that is free from years of cruft of the monorepo api we use across all our projects. - implement sqlite compatablity for the server (in addition to original postgres support) - Implement local first sync from scratch for the project - Test out a large number of optimization strategies, not all of which worked out but which would have taken me so much longer and been so much more onerous the cost benefit ratio of engaging them would have been not worth it - Tons of small features I would have assigned to someone else but are now less effort to just have the AI implement.

  I think the biggest plus though is the amount of documentation that has accrued in our repo since using starting to use these tools. I find AI is pretty great at summarizing different sections of the code and with a little bit of conversation I can get it more or less exactly how I want it. This has been hugely useful to me on a number of occasions and something I would have always liked to have been doing but on a small team that is always under pressure to create results for our clients its something that didn't cross the immediate threshold of the cost benefit ratio. 

I have encouraged my team to use these tools but I am not forcing it down anyone's throat, although its interesting to give people tasks that I am confident I could finish much quicker and much more to my personal taste than assigning it. The reactions from my team are pretty mixed, one of the strongest contributors doesn't find a lot of gains from it. One has found similar productivity gains to myself, others are very against it and hate it.

I think one of the things it will change for me is, I can no longer just create the stories for everyone, learning how to choose on what to work on is going to be the most important skill in my opinion so over the next couple months I am going to be shifting so everyone on my team has direct client interactions and I am going to try to shift away from writing stories to having meetings where I help them decide on their own what to work on. Still part of the reason that I can afford to do this is because I can now get as much or more work done than I was able to with my whole team at this time last year.

That's a big difference in one way, and I am optimistic that the platform I am working on will be a lot better and able to compete with large legacy platforms that it wouldn't have been able to compete with in the past, but still it just tightens the loop of trying new things and getting feedback and the hardest part of the business is still communication with clients and building relationships that create value.

For example, you could describe how to render your own domain specific markup language as HTML. Which is then happily viewed by the browser as a regular webpage, that can of course also be styled with CSS as usual.

Or how to render Markdown as HTML without a Markdown generator (might require rarely implemented XSLT 2.0 with XPath 2.0). See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3549827/converting-simpl...

Or render HTML as some other markup language.

This is only scratching the surface, really. But it does powerful transformations from one markup language to another.

This can of course be very useful as you get the browser able to present any markup without actually supporting said markup; without scripting or server side components.

Client side XSLT transforms are very rarely useful. It was intended for a vision of the web as a multiude of different XML formats served to end users. Since this didnt happen (for good reasons), XSLT becase less useful. In reality it is only ever used to tranform into XHTML.

It was also touted as a more powerful style sheet since it could rearrange elements and transform semantic elements into tables for presentation. But CSS supports that now in a much better way, and most significantly CSS can react to dynamic updates.

Serving XML to end users only makes sense if someone actully understands the XML format. But only very few XML formats beside XHTML and SVG have any broad support. RSS is one of the few examples, and seem to be the main use case for XSLT.

Still needs some work on the documentation side. There will be a separate announcement when it is done. We have a newsletter that we share on all the common social networks. https://maplibre.org/news/

Aside from getting the encoding side ready so tile providers can start to make MapLibre Tiles available, we are focussed on integrating the decoder in MapLibre GL JS (MapLibre for the web) and MapLibre Native (Android, iOS and other platforms). ETA is sometime near the end of 2025.

I work as a maintainer for MapLibre, let me know if you have any other questions about the project!

Github shows java, js, rust, and typescript folders, though I didn't poke any further beyond literally just looking at the folder names. [2]

[1] https://maplibre.org/roadmap/maplibre-tiles/

[2] https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec

In the article, the author mentions that Chess centaurs (a human player consulting an engine) can still beat an engine alone. But the author is wrong. There was a brief period a while ago when that was true, but chess engines are so strong now that any human intervention just holds them back.

I've been programming 30+ years, and am an accomplished programmer who loves the craft, but the writing is on the wall. ChatGPT is better than me at programming in most every way. It knows more languages, more tricks, more libraries, more error codes, is faster, cheaper, etc.

The only area that I still feel superior to ChatGPT is that I have a better understanding of the "big picture" of what the program is trying to accomplish and can help steer it to work on the right sub-problems. Funnily enough, is was the same with centuar Chess; humans would make strategic decisions while the engines would work out the tactics. But that model is now useless.

We are currently enjoying a time where (human programmer+AI > AI programmer). It's an awesome time to live in, but, like with Chess, I doubt it will last very long.

You will also have to provide a source for 'chess engines are so strong now that any human intervention just holds them back', a cursory search suggests this is by no means settled.

https://gwern.net/note/note#advanced-chess-obituary -- here is a reference about centuar/advanced chess. The source isn't perfect as the tournaments seem to have fizzled out 5-10 years ago as engines got better and it all became irrelevant. Sadly this means we don't have 100 games of GM+engine vs. engine in 2023 to truly settle it but I've been following this for a while and I have a high confidence that Stockfish_2023+human ~= Stockfish_2023.

I guess it's possible that just being "smarter" might in some cases get a better solution from a seeies of text prompts but that seems too vague an argument to hold much water for me.

True up until the point that you want to do something that hasn't really be done before or is just not as findable on the internet. LLMs only know what is already out there, they will not create new frameworks or think up new paradigms in that regard.

It also is very often wrong in the code it outputs, doesn't know if things got deprecated after the training data threshold, etc. As a funny recent example, I asked ChatGPT for an example using the openAI nodejs library. The example was wrong as the library has had a major version bump since the last time the training data was updated.

> The only area that I still feel superior to ChatGPT is that I have a better understanding of the "big picture" of what the program is trying to accomplish and can help steer it to work on the right sub-problems.

Which probably is based on your general experience and understanding of programming in the last 30+ years. As I have said elsewhere, I really don't think that LLMs in their current iteration will be replacing developers. They are however going to be part of the toolchain of developers.

Today I asked it a question and it was wrong.... then it ran the code, got the same error as me, and then fixed it (and correctly explained why it was wrong), without me prompting further :)

Really though, how long until that training update goes from every so often, to constant. Now that half the internet is feeding it information, it doesn't even need to scour other sources -- its becoming its own source, for better or worse.

OpenAPi is actively actively taking steps to minimize the changes of that happening as that would be rather bad given how LLMs work.

Programming is only superficially about code. The trick is really figuring out how to approach problems.

Do you think that all areas of engineering will be impacted? I feel like the job of an EE or a ME is still inherently out of reach of LLMs.

That being said, I think this peice is a bit of an overreaction and there seem to be many earnest actors in the EA community really thinking about how they can do good in the world. SBF is very unfortunate for EA, but to jump from him example to saying all EA practitioners care exclusively about the ends over the means is a bit of a leap, imo.

If any of these people actually walked the talk, we'd see a lot more one-way tickets to Africa for them to finally be able to employ their beautiful minds on real problems.

I guess I’m just suspicious of any community or movement that labels itself as “effective,” because it is hard to believe that they were the first ones to think of the idea of not being ineffective, haha.

* $5 goes towards breast cancer research. (IIUC, cancer researchers are somewhat skeptical of the idea that cancer could be "ended" as such, but that's a minor quibble.)

* $8 goes towards treatment and screening. Not exactly what was promised, but still saving lives, so close enough.

* $14 goes towards administering the Susan G. Komen foundation.

* $22 goes towards raising funds for the Susan G. Komen foundation.

* $51 goes towards "education". They say this includes patient support services, not just telling people about the Susan G. Komen foundation, but don't offer a further breakdown.

And my understanding is that, in non-EA philanthropic circles, this breakdown isn't considered particularly egregious. At least they're doing something! An ineffective charity would be something like One Laptop per Child, which raised money and press attention from a fake crank-powered laptop and accomplished nothing of note before technological innovation outpaced them.

To my neighbor, SJK's efforts yielded as much as OLPC's vaporware. As a career nurse, she's well-educated about the breast cancer she has, that she will soon die from because she can't afford to treat it.

SJK amounts to little more than a goddamn fortune-teller. Not one cent of that $8 has bought her a single extra minute of life.

It really forces us to have hard conversations about how we use our collective effort to help each other, based on more than just feelings in the moment. Feelings are an important part of the end goal, but feelings about some particular intervention are not a good way to evaluate it. We're also forced to be clear about what good we think an intervention will provide, and to whom.

The idea that you really believe that as an EA you are having “harder” conversations and you are more “forced” to be clear about what you do than other non-effective altruists is just baffling to me.

With the latter I could support quite a few people at the soup kitchen for that day.

You can take that to whatever extent you desire. Should I donate to guineaworm eradication or local libraries? And so on and so forth.

And the general EA community rates lives highly. So max lives saved usually trumps everything else.

It is a bit like the way feminists think of themselves as the only line of fight for women’s rights, or right-wing extremists and populists keep labelling themselves as “freedom fighters”. All of a sudden if you’re opposed to them you become a woman-hater, or a freedom-hating socialist (because they can’t understand that there are other alternative ways to defend the same ideas). These are just political groups with one specific ideology who are marketing themselves as the solution. Thankfully nowadays with the fall of SBF people are dismissing EA as the fad that it is, but there was a time when opposing EA would elicit reactions such as “oh so you’re against effectiveness/transparency?” or “so you are in favor of corruption?” Sigh.

What do people donate money to charity for? It's certainly not all to the poorest or desperate people amongst us. It get donated to a church, or to an art museum. Beyond a certain point, they don't really need the money.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world people lives in abject poverty or they're dying to famine or war.

I certainly don't act like an effective altruist. My money goes to things I cared about, like open source projects, but not necessarily to people who need the money to live another day or help people who could help other people live another day.

Let's put it this way. Is it wrong to not save people's lives, especially when it is of no inconvenience to you? I am not talking about donating so much money that I am a beggar on the street, but donating a substantial enough money but still retain a 'middle class' lifestyle.

Then the next question is whatever you doing effective or counterproductive? I think it should be no surprise that a large amount of people don't give such thought to the questions. Imagine the vast scientific illiteracy that pervades our world, like anti-vaxxers asking for money to help spread their messages.

I used to think so. Later events then taught me that proactively helping people doesn't necessarily keep their knife away from your throat. You see people's true colors when you try to disengage.

I only save the lives of animals these days. People are scum. Animals never did me wrong.

At the end of the day, people don't follow some sort of pure moral philosophy like some sort of platonic ideals.

Just use your freewill.

Delightful.

The new stuff is better, by a lot, and with implications more to come.

But those of us paying attention then had a frame of reference where “so much better it’s crazy” still stops short of “it’s out of control”.

It’s a lot better.

If you are going to to set up that infrastructure you could just use an mbtiles file which has been around for years.

The interesting thing to me is that this stuff is all built on the open source technology of mapbox, and it seems like a real threat to large parts of their business model. Interested to see how it plays out.

As most storage systems like S3 aren't free and have per-request fees, the price is pretty comparable to this CDN deployment.

Protomaps is very intentionally built with little in common with Mapbox; the main shared parts are using the same Protocol Buffers vector tile format, because there's no reason to write another one; and compatibility with the fork of Mapbox GL 1 (MapLibre GL). See https://protomaps.com/docs/faq#mapbox

In my work we are looking at switching from mbtiles hosted with tilserver-gl(https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) to pmtiles to remove a server process. But we were self hosting already and we are already using maplibre-gl 2.

I can see why the implementation in the blog post would be better for high traffic deployments (ours isn't). It also points out to me I don't understand how a CDN would handle range request for hosting the pmtiles file directly, it probably doesn't?

As far as the mapbox stuff,in my mind, pmtiles is a direct competitor (successor) to the mbtiles format, which was a revolution in comparison to everything that came before it. A successor I welcome because it makes it even easier for me as a developer to self host and not be dependent on a SaaS to run my maps.

The modern opensource map stack wouldn't exist without mapbox and I'm personally grateful to them for that. Most people who use pmtiles will use mapbox's opensource style spec to style them, and descendants of their open source code to render them. But as a developer now its an obvious choice to not use their services after years of using them.

However I'm not doing high traffic stuff and they never made much money off me anyway.

Protomaps actually has its own vector renderer different from Mapbox GL or MapLibre at https://github.com/protomaps/protomaps.js . It does use a handful of low-level Mapbox JavaScript libraries, but otherwise was consciously developed to be 100% separate from existing Mapbox rendering and styling code, and has an objectively inferior (Leaflet) user experience.

In practice, most serious uses of Protomaps are now using MapLibre GL, so there will be more focus going on that in the project going forward.

The biggest danger with Open tiles is a basemap is the gateway to other data services with higher costs and an easier path to a defendable technical moat. Swapping a basemap can literally be a 10 minute job

I'll take a fast deep clone for my case over one that handles all cases.