hyperadvanced

Yeah unemployment famously doesn’t include those who’ve given up… I fear there are many more than we’re willing to admit

Taken seriously how? People talk about this constantly, and the overall tenor of the tech blogosphere has basically accepted that LLMs are here to stay, and that this spells doom for tech workers, but what’s a guy to do? You can’t “ban” AI, I suppose you could tax tech companies, you can’t just give people jobs or money.

I suppose you could take the accelerationist stance and try to massively overinflate these companies to crash their funding apparatus by intentionally electing dullards who cause the cost of capital to far outpace its returns, which is what seems to have happened in the last 2 years.

No, in many of the games it’s not like she’s a damsel in distress, and usually helps like to defeat ganon

I struggle to understand this. I use AI quite regularly and find it frees up hours of my day to do consequential “understanding” work that previously got eaten up by there literally not being enough hours in a day to solve my own problems and understand others enough to help them solve theirs.

Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.

For all of this fear and loathing, I am just a regular guy with a regular tech job and there are dozens of people like me at work. They’re all there because they do good work.

For real. It’s such a weak cop-out of an argument to lead with that I clicked out, never to read this blog again.

We really don’t celebrate enough how much AI has saved us from terrible SO interactions. Not being entirely serious here, because the site had its good parts, but arguing in threads or having your questions randomly eviscerated or threads closed was a hard way to learn programming.

I think the next frontier for (knowledge) Workists is to use the AI to make sci-fi shit. Someone go make me a schematic for a 3d-printed battery. Someone go make me a an electric (flying?) skateboard kit. Someone go make me an at-home clothes printer. Someone go make me a flying car. Someone go make me an RPG that feels like Morrowind, EverQuest, or WoW did when I was a teenager - let me play it on the couch with my friends and our kids. There are so many possibilities… I feel like the doomers here are (rightly) mad that these kinds of problems are hard and not the same as “write me a web GUI that lets me search a database for music” or even “spend 80 hours writing a custom k8s operator to manage autoscaling for semi-persistent queues” but compared to what tech was 10 years ago, the ability to create anything and everything right now is amazing.

I have a friend who owns an organic farm (with a couple partners). They mostly scrape by and work long hours and there’s a lot of stress. People really really under-appreciate how nice the remote tech daily routine is: “I wake up, drink coffee, and solve a few abstract problems each day with an army of AGI bots at my fingertips, and for a high salary”. Compare to roasting in 95 degree heat and wildfire smoke to make sure your veggies don’t die, living in a trailer on the farm, and working retail in offseason/relying on GoFundMe to recover from the inevitable natural disasters.

Salary jobs let you pick your price. How much more as a % of your yearly would it cost you to commute every day, amortized over your ~2000 hours of expected work at said office? 10%? 20%? For me, it’s probably 10% for the right gig.

Granted, the availability and pain in the ass of actually getting a new job today is suffocating, so it’s not like everyone gets to pick their dream setup anymore

Well it all depends on whether you’ve ever thought Apple was any good at search, Siri, etc.

My own personal opinion is that they’re great at design, UX, hardware, and even some power user desktop software (lifetime Logic Pro addict here). I would say it’s a stretch to call anything they have ever done with ML to be anything near cutting edge compared to Google, for whom all of the “hard” problems of recommendation, search, NLP, and other ML have been the absolute focus of their SaaS, white papers, and web offerings for close to 30 years

That honestly sounds a lot healthier than “just ship what the CTO/Product team wants” with as much hand waving as is necessary to very roughly estimate ROI and then pray it hits with the market. In anything that’s not a startup operating in a new industry, the “old way” is a hard way to run a business

DJing is an interesting art. It’s not creative per se, but can be done creatively. Modern DJ software+hardware in particular allows for a ton of on-the-fly remixing, clever use of fx and stems, and even some custom on-the-fly production setups. But the average DJ (and even electronic music producer) is much closer to Guitar Hero than they are to writing their own songs for guitar.

In retrospect this is very similar to the Apple strategy: don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency, position for novel uses of the tech but don’t build it per se. Apple probably would have benefitted in the last 4 quarters from hyping a custom model stack but it doesn’t seem that this strategy paid off to even close to 20% ROI while Apple got to hold their cash and organizational focus on their main thing

Love how these bros always cop to “China bad” when they run out of good arguments.

Crossing out things you disagree with is the most insane part of this. You should highlight or comment those if you’re going to mark the book up at all.

My phone must have autocorrected. Ty and good joke :)

Normative determinism is the term for that

Agreed, starlink is obviously advantageous from the global (and extra-global) perspective. Running cables is expensive. But so is launching satellites, and it’s hard to see how you reach a tipping point where satellites gets cheaper than the standard boring cable networking that supports the terrestrial internet

I agree that “inherently political” is usually a thought terminating cliche. What kinds of technologies are conditionally political?

The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.

Autonomous vehicle, yes

Amazon’s AWS and core delivery business are fairly mature, and with consumer sentiment poor and non-AI tech contracting, having a growth vertical like Bedrock is good for shareholders. Without their own core tech, Amazon will be paying rent on AVs in a couple of years - or worse, they will lose all of the benefits or their logistics monopoly because an AV semi can afford to be inefficient

Expecting “transparency” out of a government trying to protect national interests seems like a tall order. They have to withhold or obfuscate things to do that job.

I do this several times per week. You can ask Claude to hunt down duplication, brittle scripty code, overly defensive fallbacks, and footguns.

I don’t know about your co but at my job we very much have non SWE shipping their own (mostly garbage) apps

This article is good but it presupposes the norm of democracy and it presupposes (somehow) that the collapse of western democracy will not result in war. Both of these are fundamental misunderstandings, and while I love neither democracy nor war, the dissolution of the American economic system would result in both less democracy and more war.

It’s hard to square this with the post 2024 AI-investment economy. Interest rates have stayed higher longer than expected, while many, many companies (Vercel, Cursor, Wave-whatever that got bought out last year, whatever Alexandr Wang’s thing) got billion dollar valuations with no path to profitability and no revenue.

It seems that ROI has become more important in the last 5 years, but then again you have these Space or Rare Earth shitcos trading at -200x PE while all of their industrial promise is directly undermined by rising costs from AI.

The likely forecast for this year is either rate hikes combined with further labor market deterioration and consumption somehow going negative, or inflation eating up all of the (still non existent) profits from AI mega caps themselves.

It’s hard to see how this ends well without a lowered cost of capital or more interest in taking on capex risk, which seems frankly unlikely. The worst case scenario seems to be a lot of bad debt with nobody except for perhaps Berkshire or China who would be interested or capable when it comes to salvaging it. Armchair economist here, grain of salts a plenty.

I think this is essentially Heidegger’s commentary on technology but reengineered from first principles

I think I might be going through withdrawal because I feel like I rarely get that fun feeling anymore with coding :(

It can be gratifying to get shit done but I love the feeling of coming up with a great reusable component and then making an entire app out of it