edanm

If ChatGPT has helped people be saved who might otherwise have died (e.g. by offering good medical advice that saved them), are all those lives saved also something you "attribute" to OpenAI?

I don't know if ChatGPT has saved lives (thought I've read stories that claim that, yes, this happened). But assuming it has, are you OK saying that OpenAI has saved dozens/hundreds of lives? Given how scaling works, would you be OK saying that OpenAI has saved more lives than most doctors/hospitals, which is what I assume will happen in a few years?

Maybe your answer is yes to all the above! I bring this up because lots of people only want to attribute the downsides to ChatGPT but not the upsides.

That is not what the Innovator's Dilemma is, as academically defined and researched by Clayton Christensen. His version is actually far more interesting, even though it often gets misrepresented, and explains why it's called a dilemma. The pop version is simply "some people refuse to innovate because of psychological reasons", which isn't a dilemma, it's just a way to call other people silly.

His insight was that in some cases, there can be a product that's worst in every way than a product a company is currently producing. Every way, except one. And that one way is not interesting to the company's customers, so the company almost categorically can't care about it. But that one improvement ends up being massive, usually because it unlocks a new product category that brings in new customers.

For example, think of the massive computers of the early era (and allow me some small liberties in this story). The only things that mattered were strength/speed and cost. But then much smaller versions of computers became available. Originally for hobbyists. No company that built computers cared about this development, because none of their customers cared! These computers were inferior in every way current customers cared about, and were only better for a tiny group of people who weren't customers and no one cared about.

But obviously, home computing ended up a much bigger deal than anything else, and eventually because it was so massive, improvements there led to improvements for the original customers.

That is the dilemma. Do you ignore existing customers who are perfectly happy with what you're building, to chase an illusive innovative growth in a new segment of the market which you have no idea will materialize or not?

I agree. I'm a big fan/proponent of AI assisted development (though nowhere near your amount of experience with it). And I think that 2x-10x speed up can be true, depending on what you mean exactly and what your task is exactly.

This article thinks that most people who say 10x productivity are claiming 10x speedup on end-to-end delivering features. If that's indeed what someone is saying, they're most of the time quite simply wrong (or lying).

But I think some people (like me) aren't claiming that. Of course the end to end product process includes a lot more work than just the pure coding aspect, and indeed none of those other parts are getting a 10x speedup right now.

That said, there are a few cases where this 10x end-to-end is possible. E.g. when working alone, especially on new things but not only - you're skipping a lot of this overhead. That's why smaller teams, even solo teams, are suddenly super interesting - because they are getting a bigger speedup comparatively speaking, and possibly enough of one to be able to rival larger teams.

I used to believe this (as did many people) but no longer do. The amount of extra calories burned with a higher muscle mass is just not significant enough to make this a relevant idea.

Of course, there are many, many other reasons to lift weights. Health and longevity aside, the reason most people want to lose weight is to look better - so what they should really aim for isn't to lose weight, it's to lose fat and increase muscle mass. For that, you need both a caloric deficit and weight lifting.

> The amount of mental gymnastics performed by these guys to justify hilariously stupid physical decisions is simply colossal.

This is a very ungenerous and incorrect take.

It is their prerogative to decide what outcome they want to maximize when it comes to their own body. I don't think any bodybuilder is under the delusion that they are particularly healthy when on the bodybuilding stage - they're not trying to be healthy, they're trying to win a specific competition with specific rules around it.

You might not like their goal or think it's stupid, but they are making the correct decisions for the outcomes they care about, and there's nothing wrong with caring about different things.

I'm going to push back on this a bit, though I agree with some of the sentiment.; to the average person wanting to lose weight, I think the best advice is obviously to eat less via whatever diet works for them (I personally recommend counting calories, but it's not for everyone).

That said, you write:

> Yes, and there are few such people. Extensive athletic physical activity, becoming an athlete, are at odds with working an office job.

First of all, office jobs are probably dominant in the industry, but there are still lots of jobs that aren't office jobs, and you seem to be excluding all of those.

Secondly, I know plenty of people with demanding careers (e.g. doctors), with kids, who nevertheless train for marathons and run almost every day. There absolutely are people who exercise enough to make a meaningful difference to their caloric expenditure.

> It absolutely is useful. Becoming an athlete or doing extensive athletics takes a huge time commitment. Eating less does not.

I'll reiterate that I agree with this and this is the correct advice for someone who wants to start losing weight. I just wouldn't discount the many people who do also exercise to the point of it making a difference.

> And I had to comment because it is beautifully ironic. Almost as if that paragraph in your comment is, itself, AI slop lol

Glad to be of service :) I think that's the first time a comment of mine has been accused of being AI slop. Sorry to say, every word - correct or incorrect - is mine.

> To qualify myself, I have a background in food service.

I'm just a person who watches cooking YouTube a bit, so right off the bat - I'll defer to your expertise on this.

I'm not sure we really disagree much though. My rough memory is that the guidelines specify temperature at which things are killed, I don't know if "instantly" or "15 seconds" really makes a difference in practice.

> Sous Vide cooking is the most widely understood method of preparation where we hold foods at temperatures that are FAR lower than what is typically recommended, but held for much longer.

Sous Vide is where I was first exposed to this concept, but I was more referring to things like chicken breasts, etc, which often aren't great at the minimal internal temperature, but I've seen YouTube "chefs" recommend cooking them to a slightly lower temperature, banking on the idea that they will effectively be at a slightly lower temperature, but long enough to still effectively kill bacteria. I've even seen criticism of the FDA charts for exactly this reason.

But to clarify, this is far outside any expertise I actually have.

> I think your comment is an application of the dunning kruger effect. You know a little bit and because of that you think you know way more than you actually do.

Absolutely possible.

Idk. Maybe that's true today (though even today I'm not sure) but how long before AI becomes better than just finding random text on a website?

After all, AI can theoretically ask follow-up questions that are relevant, can explain subtleties peculiar to a specific situation or request, can rephrase things in ways that are clearer for the end user.

Btw, "What temperature should a food be cooked to" is a classic example of something where lots of people and lots of sources repeat incorrect information, which is often ignored by people who actually cook. Famously, the temp that is often "recommended" is only the temp at which bacteria/whatever is killed instantly - but is often too hot to make the food taste good. What is normally recommended is to cook to a lower temperature but keep the food at that temperature for a bit longer, which has the same effect safety-wise but is much better.

I mean, Git was a massive improvement over those other systems though. It was absolutely worth learning, and worth pushing companies to adopt. (Same with Mercurial, obviously.)

Yes, I'm similarly surprised. Intuitively I'd think that it's much better to train on using Lean, since it's much easier to do RL on it (Lean gives you an objective metric on whether you achieved your objective). It also seems more useful in some ways.

But all the model providers are putting emphasis on the "this is only using natural language" angle, which I think is interesting both from a "this is easier for humans to actually use" perspective, but also comes from a place of "look how general the model is".

> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.

Why?

If I want to pick up many hobbies, not to mention lines of professional work, I have to pay for tools. Why is programming any different? Why should it be?

Complaining that tools that improve your life cost money is... weird, IMO. What's the alternative? A world in which people gift you life-and-work-improving tools for free? For no reason? That doesn't exist.

> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools.

Btw, I think this was actually less true in the past. Compilers used to cost money in the 70s/80s. I think it's actually cyclical - most likely tools will cost money today, but then down the line, things will start getting cheaper again until they're free.

> When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.

But that's not actually true.

The Silicon Valley Bank situation aside - because it was a unique situation, we can open it if you want - when have VCs asked to be bailed out on failed investments? This kind of moral hazard is absolutely a thing in banks and finance in general, but afaik, not in the VC industry.

Ah yes this is the "classic" bug that was in the Java standard library undiscovered for twenty years, iirc.

I find this topic really interesting, thanks for sharing. I doubt I could code a binary search without any bugs from scratch :)

You can say the same about most science research. In fact, many people do say the same, scrutinizing many different avenues of research as pointless. There are countless examples of "pointless" research ending up being useful.

(Note that it's much more legitimate to scrutinize scientific research, since it's mostly publicly funded, as opposed to VCs investing in startups.)

> Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.

I mean, the tech world has done a lot of good and advanced humanity a lot. More than most industries, IMO. Most of that is by inventing new things. A society could dial down useless spending by dialing down innovation, but it's not clear to me that there's a way to get more innovation with less waste than the current system.

I think many industries are far more of an "inefficient use of resources". I think if the world as a whole would spend 10x more on scientific and technological advancement, at the cost of less e.g. fashion, less investment in entertainment, less investment in (some forms of) finance, etc, the world would be far better off. (I'm not advocating that this should be forced on society, just stating my opinion on what a more optimal way of allocating resources would be.)

They don't "use" pension funds, pension funds can choose to invest in VCs if they decide to do so. I think most usually invest low single digits of investment in VCs, mostly as diversification.

Yes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).

Yes, same, that's a fascinating question that people are pretty tight-lipped about.

Note he was specifically on the team that was launching OpenAI's version of a coding agent, so I imagine the numbers before that product existed could be very different to the numbers after.

Yes. VCs invested money. It ended up a flop. And this hurts us... how exactly? Other than some VCs losing their money on a bad bet, who cares?

> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.

Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?

VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?

The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?

Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)

Oh interesting, where can we read about the bug that was there?

> Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community.

I completely agree. I just didn't think we were talking about that aspect, just how long it takes to actually build the code of WordPress.

You might be saying that making the technical-building aspects of most technical products go faster won't necessarily have as big an impact as many programmers believe. Programming isn't the core of most products to the degree most programmers think, and instead the core of most products/companies is more about product thinking, sales & marketing, etc. I agree with this sentiment a lot.

That aside, I think there's no question it's faster to program in Python or C++ right now, than it was 20 years ago. Things really have improved on the programming language front (and related libraries, and other advances).

> Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.

Roll to disbelieve on this one. There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy. I'm not even talking React/Next or whatever - this was before RoR, before Django (or at least very early versions of both).

I think it's pretty impossible to look around and not notice that technical advances have improved a lot of things in the world - why does it sound credible that programming itself hasn't improved at all in twenty years? Even look at languages like C++ today compared to 20 years ago, they're massively different - do you think all those changes to the languages are neutral or negative in terms of productivity?

I appreciate you keeping up the fight for correct terminology! I think at this point though there is a "standard" definition of agent - an AI that can actually utilize external real-world tools to do things on behalf of users. That fits coding agents, web-using agents, etc.

Do you think there's still confusion around it like there was a year ago?

Either humans are not generally intelligent, or they are, in which case they're an existence proof of general intelligence. Math really has nothing to do with it beyond the most basic statements of logic.

Umm, it's a pretty fundamental theorem (that's assumed to be true) that all computation is equivalent to Turing Machines. Unless we're very wrong about fundamentals of CS here, we'll never see anything that is more powerful, computationally speaking, than a Turing machine.

Yes, agreed on basically everything.

I've been programming professionally since around 2003. I'd say I caught the late-stages OOP craze (or maybe after-craze) though not really the origin or rise of OOP. My first job was in a C++ codebase, and I spent a lot of time learning the OOP design patterns (or really, the "how do we make C++ behave well" patterns).

That said, the rise of OOP is probably measured in a decade or two. It eventually "spawned" whole new programming languages, that eventually got a lot of popularity. But this is over a much longer time-frame than how quickly we went from no such thing as AI coding, to (now) coding agents. It also didn't affect the entire industry in the same way - hell, some people were still writing assembly in the 80s as the OOP craze was winding up. I don't have actual stats, but I imagine coding agents are far more ubiquitious across far more industries/languages/stacks, for more quickly.

> In my list I didn’t even mention the internet, the web, smartphones, and the cloud, all of which had a very broad effect on programming and programmers,

The internet (or maybe the web) I'd say was probably the more transformative thing. Cloud affected a lot of things too but not quite as much and didn't make quite as big a difference to the day-to-day work. I deployed things pre-cloud and post-cloud (though honestly mostly during the early-stage cloud), and there wasn't such a big difference.

Look, at the end of the day you can't just compare AI to other technologies blindly and say "well they were big hypes, this is the same". By actually looking at what it's doing and how it's affecting things, it's fairly clear it has a much bigger impact on the day-to-day work of programming, as opposed to anything else you mentioned.

I'm not saying this is the end of development, for all I know this will mean more developers! But I think software development will look fundamentally different in 5 years in a way that is far more widespread than in any other of these changes.

> I know with only 5 years experience this may not be obvious, but this is only the first of many “revolutionary” technologies making everyone around you lose their minds that you’ll have to deal with in your career.

While this has some truth, the size of the current "revolution" makes all the others look tiny, especially in terms of how it affects a programmer's day job. Nor did most of those "revolutions" affect every field of programming at once, like this one does. The percent of programmers actually impacted by blockchain is probably in the low single-digits. The percent of programmers using some version of AI tooling 3 years into this is probably >50%, and the more impactful tools will be used more very soon is my gues.

I think the Where's Waldo example, while not technically zero knowledge, gives a pretty good intuition of the idea behind it.

It certainly gives a "layperson" example of being able to prove you know something without revealing it, which isn't the whole definition of ZK but is the idea driving it.

I believe you meant to write "SEEKING WORK", not "SEEKING FREELANCER".