If one reads the dialogue, Socrates is not the one "saying" this, but he is telling a story of what King Thamus said to the Egyptian god Theuth, who is the inventor of writing. He is asking the king to give out the writing, but the king is unsure about it.
Its what is known as one of the Socratic "myths," and really just contributes to a web of concepts that leads the dialogue to its ultimate terminus of aporia (being a relatively early Plato dialogue). Socrates, characteristically, doesn't really give his take on writing. In the text, he is just trying to help his friend write a horny love letter/speech!
I can't bring it up right now, but the end of the dialogue has a rather beautiful characterization of writing in the positive, saying that perhaps logos can grow out of writing, like a garden.
I think if pressed Socrates/Plato would say that LLM's are merely doxa machines, incapable of logos. But I am just spitballing.
The public domain translations are pretty old either way. John Cooper's big book is probably still the best but im out of the game these days.
AI guys would probably love this if any of them still have the patience to read/comprehend something very challenging. Probably one of the more famous essays on the Phaedrus dialogue. Its the first long essay of this book:
Roughly: Plato's subordination of writing in this text is symptomatic of a broader kind of `logocentrism` throughout all of western canonical philosophy. Derrida argues the idea of the "externality" of writing compared to speech/logos is not justified by anything, and in fact everything (language, thought) is more like a kind "writing."
You'd think this would be more known! I feel like general sentiment says the opposite is the case.. What can one point to in the future to show what you are saying here?
I hear you but still just struggle what we are supposed to take from this. If I worked for McDonalds and came up with a way to make 1000 bad hamburgers in the time it takes for them to currently make 10 good ones, no one would be that impressed.
"Hello world" is self-justifying, you know it when you see it, and it is what it is because it shows something unambiguous and impossible to mistake.
The thing I took from this is that you can arrange a set of coding agents in a tree of planners and workers and have them churn away on much larger projects than if you use a single coding agent.
This is a new capability - this likely would now have worked prior to GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5, so we've had models that can do this for less than three months.
It's extremely new: the patterns that work are just starting to be figured out. Wilson had an effectively unlimited token budget from Cursor and got to run experiments that most teams would not be able to afford.
The fact that it is new is meaningless: the output is useless even as a proof of concept web engine and should be discarded, alongside the agent engineering pattern that produced it.
That project I consider a proper POC of a web engine, even though it doesn't even run javascript. Why? Because it has a nice architecture built around a clear idea--radical modularity--which could scale-up to a full web engine one day, despite major challenges remaining.
I think that with AI assistance, if you had some idea, you could reshuffle components of Blitz and have your own thing rendering to the screen within a day.
let's say you had a more ambitious goal, like taking Blitz and adding a JS engine like Boa. Well if you had some clear idea on how to do it, you could get a nice little POC in a week or two.
Basically what I'm saying is that yes the AI would save you a ton of typing and you'd be able to iterate on your idea. There are plenty of layout/graphics/Js components out there to choose from, so you could ensure a relatively small and clean POC.
Someone doing that, with or without AI but with a good idea, would impress me.
FastRender on the other hand is just this humongous pile of spaghetti, and my guess is it still is entirely dependent on existing libraries for actually showing something to the screen.
So that's the clear fail of the agent in my opinion: why produce so much code when it could be done so easily otherwise. Also, why bs yourself into these architecture docs and pretend you are following the specs when in fact you are not?
Everytime I try to browse the code I give up, mostly because when I look at something to try to understand how it fits into the whole, I end-up realizing it's only used in some unit-test.
Wouldn't you want to be in control of your dependencies in this case anyway? Like why would you ever want it to autodownload sdkmanager? Doesn't this seem like bad idea?
I think the architectural mistake is letting the agent execute the environment setup instead of just defining it. If you constrain the agent to generating a Dockerfile, you get a deterministic artifact a human can review before any license is actually accepted. It also saves a significant amount of tokens since you don't need to feed the verbose shell output back into the context loop.
If an analogy is an "obvious" analogy that makes it definitionally a good analogy, right? Either way: don't see why you gotta be so prescriptive about it one way or the other! You can just say you disagree.
Anything that can be compared or is comparable can be an analogy. That means any two things in existence can form an analogy. From a practical standpoint only things with at least one similar attribute needs to be picked as what is the point of comparison with no similar attributes?
Discarding practicality, the next line of demarcation is a good analogy versus a bad analogy. This is a very subjective thing but humans tend to agree on what this is. Typically it’s two things that on the surface sounds dissimilar but upon examinations reveals that that they are intricately connected. AKA: not obvious.
You would have to have next level brain damage if you can’t see why the analogies I presented analogies are too obvious. You obviously don’t have brain damage, so it’s more likely you’re just unaware of certain terminology and definitions related to the concept.
“Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know which one you’re gonna get” is a famous analogy that fits what it means to be a “good analogy”.
Listen I appreciate you taking the time. And Ok, if we must treat "analogy" as a kind of formal linguistic unit like this, then sure, I guess I was dumb about this.
I will say, it does seem to lose all meaning in this definition. Or just, your argument makes it seem redundant as a concept to simply a "comparison". Maybe it's the brain damage, but I come from a world of shared, natural language where an analogy is somewhat defined by the actual bearing on the two terms, or how as you say, how "good" it is. Also lost in your concept here to me is that analogies are also definitionally asymmetrical: you're using one concept to explain another. It is why we are called to make analogies at all. It's a synthetic intellectual act bringing disparate things together. That's why we say that we "make" analogies. It's also why none of your "analogies" to me are really that good or obvious, save maybe the wagon one.
But hey, you do sound like you know what you're talking about, so maybe I should just learn from this!
You are probably right but without all the context here one might counter that the concept of authenticity should feature predominantly in this kind of document regardless. And using a consistent term is probably the advisable style as well: we probably don't need "constitution" writers with a thesaurus nearby right?
Perhaps so, but there are only 5 uses of 'authentic' which I feel is almost an exact synonym and a similarly common word - I wouldn't think you need a thesaurus for that one. Another relatively semantically close word, 'honest' shows up 43 times also, but there's an entire section headed 'being honest' so that's pretty fair.
What is the scandal supposed to be in the first one? No water in the dam? Mismanagement? Nationalization itself?
The Derwick one seems pretty light too, at least the article here just mentions an accusation from a journalist. And even then, if we are using corruption/overbilling with regard to a government contractor as an "atrocity" now.. That's going to have wider repercussions than here.
And ok, Venezuela took bribes from another government contractor, along with many other countries. I wouldn't call that an atrocity, but if that's what it is I guess I will give you the benefit of the doubt about it.
I give you benefit of the doubt about everything really! I just don't know if you have packaged your case here well is all.
The scandal is that the energy crisis was declared in 2009, and 17 years later, after investing $100 billion of which up to $80 billion disappeared, there are still blackouts across the country. That's all in the first article. The Derwick one is not just one reporter either, there's local and international reporters involved including claims from Reporters Without Borders where reporters received "threats, pressures, bribe offers". That's also in the article.
As for the attrocities I meant the Maduro (and current) government in general. There are currently over 1000 political prisoners in the country, a mix of protesters, politicians, reporters, etc. A lot of them have been tortured and many have died in custody. Most of the sources from NGO are in Spanish but the Wikipedia is a good start, specially the section about the Maduro government [1]
If you check the news right now you'll see that only in the past month about 50 have been released. There's a huge effort in the country right now to get the hundreds of others out.
Ultimately, what I want to say is that while we can express disdain for the US government we can do the same for the Venezuelan one, even if they claim to be against each other. Maduro and his gang are not the victims here, they've oppressed the Venezuelan people for 27 years, let's not give them an easy out
Perhaps there's more at play here than pretending like Maduro is a uniquely bad guy but also so hilariously incompetent his corruption scheme blacked out the country.
Let's be clear here, there are many evil states in this world. But Maduro isn't exactly Mohammed bin Salman or Donald Rumsfeld.
>> But Maduro isn't exactly Mohammed bin Salman or Donald Rumsfeld.
Just showed you an article describing all the human right abuses, tortures and forced disappearances done under the Maduro regime and this is your take away? I can only assume you're not arguing in good faith.
Check the news right now, about the prisoner releases happening as we speak and the hundreds still to go. One died only last week in captivity. Guess we can tell their families at least Maduro is not bin Salaman. Such cruelty, man
Even if we assume for a moment everything you are saying is true and/or reasonable, can't you see how comments like these paint your position here in a bad light? It just reads a little desperate!
It might be just different viewpoints people don't understand?
I'm advocating for spending time with AI because it works already good enough and it continues to progress surprisingly fast. Unexperienced fast for me tbh.
If i say "AI is great" i also know when AI is also stupid but i'm already/stil so impressed that i can transform basic text into working go/java whatever code, that i accept that its not perfect just because I highly appreciate how fast we got this.
And it feels weird too tbh. It doesn't feel special to talk to an LLM and get code back somehow while this was unthinkable just a few years back.
Somethimes it likes you just forget about all these facts and have to remind yourself that this is something new.
Just because it’s “new” doesn’t mean it’s going to fulfill all our wildest fantasies. It’s becoming clear that these things are just… tools. Useful in certain situations, but ultimately not the game-changer they’re sold as.
For me its getting clear that there is so much broad ways of continues improvement, and constant speed, that if this continues like this, even a basic LLM can do a lot of jobs.
Just today cursor released a blog were they run an agent for a week and it build a browser.
Claude Code with subagents and hooks are really good too.
And it takes time to just get it and roll it out to everyone, it takes time to do research, experiments, it takes time to install GPUs and make them etc.
We are currently only limited by things we can progress on.
This is something people spent a lot of time on, is trained lovingly on only their own stuff, and makes for some great music.
It's "AI" but in an almost unrecognizable way to us now: its not attached to some product, and its not about doing special prompting. It is definitely pop/electronic music, but it follows from a tradition of experimentation between what we can control and what we can't, which is here their bespoke stochastic program.
It is not about how the computer or the model enables us, which is so silly. (As if art is simply about being able to do something or not!) Its about doing something with the pieces you have that only those pieces can do.
I get Kate Bush and Dead Can Dance vibes, filtered through a mechanical chorus with a bit of glitched breakbeats.
It's empathically not the forgettable, bland averaged pastiches that LLMS emit on lazy command. Even if it's not your favourite, I'm sure that it's something.
Its what is known as one of the Socratic "myths," and really just contributes to a web of concepts that leads the dialogue to its ultimate terminus of aporia (being a relatively early Plato dialogue). Socrates, characteristically, doesn't really give his take on writing. In the text, he is just trying to help his friend write a horny love letter/speech!
I can't bring it up right now, but the end of the dialogue has a rather beautiful characterization of writing in the positive, saying that perhaps logos can grow out of writing, like a garden.
I think if pressed Socrates/Plato would say that LLM's are merely doxa machines, incapable of logos. But I am just spitballing.
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