PostOnce

On the one hand, this would (without automation) not be possible financially or temporally in the modern world with the amount of money a church now brings in.

On the other hand, was the work not the point? The dedication to do this on behalf of one's deity?

It almost feels just short of having a machine pray on your behalf, so you don't have to. Claude or GPT perhaps?

No, in this analogy, gold is the theoretical work that AI can perform. Once we realize it's not that huge a percentage of all work, demand for AI compute dries up.

Compute is the shovel.

You use the shovel (GPUs) to dig for the gold (work AI can do). However, the AI can't do as much as was hoped, so the demand for GPUs dries up.

The demand for shovels in a gold rush is high, but, once we realize the amount of gold available isn't that much, the demand for shovels at any price falls off a cliff?

The "ads" for other articles in the middle of the comic are jarring, disruptive, and keep making me wonder if that was it but then you scroll way down and there's more

So what are they going to review the slop in? Or are they just not gonna bother checking?

We are gonna see some Knight Capital level fuckups shortly.

And yet a million programs were written and sold for it, and it became legendary, and begat a computer revolution.

It's so primitive that it can be understood.

Relevant fun:

https://monster6502.com/

https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/

It's still going to be a differentiator, in the way that being beautiful is still a differentiator after face filters were invented.

We know it's a filter, and we know it's an idiot parroting Claude.

> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!

The rich want us to give up, so we would be smart to give up!

I can think of quite a few other courses of action.

You don't get to be great by thinking your work is already good enough; then you don't push yourself to make it better

If even your good work is crap in your own eyes, and you keep pushing well beyond that because you think it still isn't good enough, you can (but won't necessarily) end up in the pantheon of your artform

Contrast this with publishing an LLM's first response to a query, which is the polar opposite course of action

Of course, and if it were those users, we wouldn't have noticed

but it's the 99% that don't care who are responsible for the low contrast websites we're talking about

Those 99% are going to make it harder to find the good 1%, too

c'est la vie

For that to matter, the user has to bother setting it up, but the user is too lazy to do that, the user doesn't want to do anything at all, which is why they asked Claude to do it

Too late to edit to clarify:

I mean Claude literally does not have eyeballs, it cannot feel discomfort, it does not need to squint, it cannot be annoyed by low contrast, and it cannot desire something better, it will not seek to improve this unprompted as a human would to "scratch its own itch".

This is because Claude made them, and Claude doesn't have eyeballs.

Low effort looks like low effort, even if you have an AI helping.

$8100 doesn't include the negative value of all the knowledge not gained along the way, and perhaps never to be gained in the future, since there is "no reason" to take the road to a known solution.

Many discoveries were made in search of something else.

I'll leave you with this:

"When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did."

What might we miss out on?

SaaS is dead, superseded by SaaS: Shovelware as a Service

And yet still misunderstood how much a grain is.

I was referring to the LLM giving the wrong definition of grain (i.e. not an individual grain), which while not as popular as it once was, is still widely used for ammunition.

A person leans on the titanic intellect of a trillion dollar company's most fearsome LLM, only to be corrected by a random commenter with a link to Wikipedia.

We live in interesting times.

"decades" is a stretch.

The original A-12 took 4 years (or less) to design and build from scratch with slide rules and manual machine tools.

Surely we can match that with our 70 years of advanced knowledge and equipment?

Maybe our risk tolerance is low now, and we don't have Kelly Johnson.

There is an area where an AI audit can add some real value: the huge multitude companies that have never looked at security at all. Small businesses.

Choosing to build an application around a framework whose top contributors are Claude and Copilot may have catastrophic consequences for your project, especially if it's a business.

All software has limitations, that's why we keep writing more software.

Kivy is great, and the contributors are friendlier than most. I particularly like it for Android, but it's definitely way up there in terms of "easy reliable multiplatform python framework".

It also gives you a ton of options for how you want to use it, more than one way to skin a cat philosophy.

These people are over 100, and have been paying tax to the Japanese state since before world war 2. They lived through world war 2, and they rebuilt japan afterwards.

You're proposing to tell them they haven't "done enough", saved enough, paid enough tax, worked enough, sacrificed enough. You're assuming they all have kids to care for them.

20-something billion dollars can pay for a lot of medicine and care that F-35s can't deliver.

Defence is necessary to protect the people. But so is everything else. Medicine, food, affordable housing, education...

If the state wants tons of money and sacrifice, then what is the point of protecting it if it provides nothing in return?

This extends to everyone else in the developed world: if we're fucked anyway, why bother doing all this stuff the government wants? To protect the assets and incomes of the rich? So we can give all our life and labor to the lords and landlords?

I'm not buying it, and I doubt the centenarians are either.

You could've asked that about people saying we want 8 hour work days, sick leave, and safer work 100 years ago, and yet we got them.

John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this:

Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be?

It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite?

I remain a skeptic.

No, but a shocking amount of unappreciated software can cost a TON of money if it fails, even briefly, which is another disaster scenario.

More software than you'd think can get people killed, though.

And more software than you'd think is running inside a barely-understood SCADA package that runs user scripts, which can now be authored by AI the user doesn't understand, and that can result in either or both of the above outcomes. This is true in just about every city in the world, several times over.

"Everyone is an engineer" sounds like something you hear right before a building collapses and kills 300 people

However, Ikea furniture does not tend to collapse a critical moment 90 days after it's been put together because it was unforeseen that the cup you sat on the table would be green, which it wasn't designed to account for.

Software isn't furniture, in other words.

This is fascinating, but also makes me wonder about smaller scale printing from back in that era.

Does anyone know where I might find out more about small-scale printing, what we would call desktop publishing now, but prior to the advent of personal computers and photocopy machines?

It's easy to find some information, but hard to find detailed information like this article presents.

They make 200 billion dollars a year, 60 billion of which is profit, so they could afford to hire a million more moderators at first world wages (50k/yr) and still be making 10 billion dollars a year in profit, and that's assuming nothing else changed, if they stopped spending money on VR, AI, and other horseshit, they'd have even more money for moderators.

They can also choose to show fewer ads, i.e., only show manually human reviewed ads, and if there are too many to review, charge more per ad until there aren't too many.