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The answer is "it depends". If someone printed out the documentation and bound it together to sell without permission? Yes. The mere act of converting from one medium to another usually isn't transformative.

The test for writing a book is whether the author applied their own judgement in the creation of the book. Even if some explanations of concepts are inevitably similar the structure of the book, the example code, etc. will reflect the author's judgement and experience.

An LLM is incapable of authorial intent. It's not synthesizing the docs with a career of experience and the input of an editor. It's playing madlibs with the work of one or more prior authors.

"a superhuman AI that can brainwash people over text" is the dumbest thing I've read this year. It's incredible to me that this guy has some kind of cult following among people who should know better.

The real answer is that people are lazy and as soon as a security barrier forces them to do work, they want to tear down the barrier. It doesn't take a superhuman AI, it just takes a government employee using their personal email because it's easier. There's been a million MCP "security issues" because they're accepting untrusted, unverifiable inputs and acting with lots of permissions.

I have a 2018 Forester and it holds a surprising amount of furniture or 8' lumber. My only regret is that it won't fit 4x8 sheet materials well - if only they had designed the interior plastic cladding a little better it would be a great workhorse.

The difference is that in a large organization the people documenting the procedure, the people doing the procurement, the people receiving the order and the people packing the drums are all different people. Potentially in different buildings. You can't expect the original scientist who wrote the white paper based on experiments in a glovebox to be present every time they pack waste into drums.

It really depends on the movies you're watching and how you watch them. I've watched "It Follows" like 4 times in the past year to show it to different people. I would watch The Shining every year at Halloween, and It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. On the other hand, sometimes you just want to throw on one of your comforting favorite movies in the background.

There's also a media preservation angle - you can imagine the monopoly media companies of the next decade not wanting to stream "My Own Private Idaho" or "Female Trouble".

Is anyone actually doing that level of fine-tuning? My understanding of LLMs is that they shovel in all the code they can find regardless of quality and let the Lord sort it out.

To be clear this is me making the most generous case for LLMs, which is that some people really do just want a shitty app to check a box. In my experience fixing LLM-produced software is worse than just writing it from scratch.

I think LLM writing replacing actual authors or AI "art" is fundamentally worthless though, so at least coding is worth more than "worthless"

People don't just ask AI to produce a Tailwind app, they also ask AI specific questions that are answered in the docs. When the AI regurgitates the answers from the docs they don't visit the actual docs. Like the Google answer box in search results stealing clicks from the pages that produce the content.

I can understand recurring subscriptions and ads in MCP being a bright line that the team doesn't want to cross. You will probably say it's a bad business model to not make everything a recurring charge and packed full of ads.

I've experienced this in my own life - I ran my own business and I had to choose between doing a worse job and enshittifying the product to make more money, or doing a good job but risking bankruptcy. I choose bankruptcy, because I believed strongly in doing a good job and not enshittifying the product. I don't regret it.

> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained.

This stuck out to me too. There's nothing more frustrating for the actual leadership than someone with soft power who says they don't want to lead trying to come in and obstruct every decision.

As an armchair quarterback I feel like if he had kept his tinder dry he probably could have gotten some of what he wanted? He could have advocated to head up the casual spin-off app as a small team. Giving a founder who wants to step out of leadership a pet project is a very common way to handle this situation.

Instead it sounds like he got caught up picking fights on every decision and wasted his credibility. Talking to leadership is a skill and part of that skill is packaging things concisely and effectively. Even if the leadership used to be your confounders.

The AI issue was that their docs advertise their paid offerings. When AI plagiarizes the docs it doesn't include the ads.

AI coding has massive factors that should make it the easiest to drive adoption and monetize.

The biggest is FOMO. So many orgs have a principle-agent problem where execs are buying AI for their whole org, regardless of value. This is easier revenue than nickle-and-diming individuals.

The second factor is the circular tech economy. Everyone knows everyone, everyone is buying from everyone, it's the same dollar changing hands back and forth.

Finally, AI coding should be able to produce concrete value. If an AI makes code that compiles and solves a problem it should have some value. By comparison, if your product is _writing_, AI writing is kind of bullshit.

Most people's problems aren't the cutting edge of computer science. They're "what does this log mean" or "how do I do X in Y framework". These are answers LLMs are great at regurgitating based on a big corpus like Stack Overflow.

As the underlying software evolves the log messages will change and the APIs will change and the answers won't make sense anymore.

Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today. In 10 years what will the LLMs train on?

So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young people feel disillusioned and are increasingly focused on gambling and "investing" in meme stocks.

Whenever I hear people talk about rocket flights I think of the Stephen King short story "The Jaunt". Humans develop near-instant transportation but you have to be unconscious while travelling. A kid avoids being sedated and is driven insane by whatever interdimensional stuff he sees in transit.

Likewise for every fit 20-something being launched at Mach 5 you'd have 10 octogenarians dying of cardiovascular complications.

Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people. Our payment rails are so effective many people don't even read their credit card statements, they just have vampires draining their accounts monthly.

Starting with a low subscription price also has the effect of atrophying people's ability to self-serve. The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-intensive - if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection. If you want to cancel your thin client you have to build a PC. Most modern consumers live on a knife edge where $20/month isn't perceptible but $1000 is a major expense.

The classic VC-backed model is to subsidize the subscription until people become complacent, and then increase the price once they're dependent. People who self-host are nutjobs because the cloud alternative is "cheaper and better" until it stops being cheaper.

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

Always have been. Ever since the SaaS revolution of the early 2000s high-growth software businesses have been motivated to chase subscription revenue over one-time sales because you get a better multiple.

From an economic perspective The Market would like the average person to spend all their money on rents, and the only option is how you allocate your spending to different rentals. Transportation, housing, food, entertainment (which is most of computing) are just different fiefs to be carved up by industry monopolists.

Mexico, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Hawaii, Guam, Cuba, Panama, and the Philippines?

In the last 100 years the trend has been been for America to invade a country and try to install a friendly government rather than formally annex them - Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria.

Oh plus all the overseas military bases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea...

At the time we didn't know prion disease could be transferred between species. There's no evidence that scrapie (sheep prion disease) or CWD (deer and moose prion disease) can be transmitted to other species. BSE is seemingly a unique prion disease that can affect other mammals.

Cuts aren't "natural" but they're part of the language of filmmaking, and most peoples experience of them is consistent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect#:~:text=The%20...

One anecdote, but I have a brick and mortar business and Adwords leads have fallen off a cliff year over year. Since AI stuff started getting pushed harder we've gotten fewer impressions and fewer conversions. Some of it is economic headwinds but also Google is just a black box we throw money into and pray it will send us business.

Thankfully the EU at least has regulations requiring compensation. On my last business trip to Europe I got 650 euros for an overnight delay. The last time I got delayed in the US I got a hearty "fuck off" from the gate agent.

As a North American it's fun to read a story about trains "being bad". The light rail in my city routinely just breaks in the winter. Everybody is afraid to use it and drives instead. A 20-60 minute delay would be unexceptional, and it wouldn't even take you close to where you're actually going.

Their country is cash strapped and needs to be independent because of US sanctions. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in the 50s which led to the Islamic Republic.

TFA seems to claim that the benefits of "nice buildings" outweigh the externalities of desolate, character-less street levels in cities. It doesn't seem very on brand for Strong Towns.

This phenomenon is going on in the downtown of my city - decreased foot traffic leads to tenants leaving, and the cycle continues. It's a miserable place to live or work that basically becomes a ghost town at 5pm. They're trying to do some office-to-residential conversions, but they're not very desirable because the entire neighborhood feels hollow and abandoned.

Instead of delaying these defaults and accumulating systemic risk until there's a massive correction, someone should be enforcing accounting that marks to market the actual rental value. That would force banks to be honest about the real level of risk on their balance sheets.

To be more charitable to TFA, machine translation is a field where there aren't great alternatives and the downside is pretty limited. If something is in another language you don't read it at all. You can translate a bunch of documents and benchmark the result and demonstrate that the model doesn't completely change simple sentences. Another related area is OCR - there are sometimes mistakes, but it's tractable to create a model and verify it's mostly correct.

LLMs being applied to everything under the sun feels like we're solving problems that have other solutions, and the answers aren't necessarily correct or accurate. I don't need a dubiously accurate summary of an article in English, I can read and comprehend it just fine. The downside is real and the utility is limited.

Super Mario 64 was an N64 launch title. Resident Evil 4 was a late Gamecube title. In my mind that's probably the biggest gap in graphical fidelity between generations of console. But I can see how going from NES games like Super Mario Bros to SNES games like Star Fox would be a close contender.

PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 or Xbox -> 360 feel more iterative because they started after the 3D era had already begun. We haven't had a new dominant paradigm for gaming since then (besides mobile gaming).

Americans simply need to release chickens into the urban environment the way they released domesticated pigeons. Soon any swift child will be able to catch a feral chicken and break it's neck on the way home from school, providing protein for the whole family.

The funniest part of this site is talking about how important design is, and then having one bad quality video of a US flag and a bunch of giant text fading into view while scrolling. It's giving "graphic design is my passion"

I'm shutting down my retail business and being able to delete Instagram is a huge win.