madrox

It's a landing page trope, and I wonder if it emerges out of overtraining on the front door of web sites.

I made this argument at my previous company a year ago and was shouted down by most of the mobile engineers. I have since departed, but knowing how much Shopify's engineering blog is worshipped there they will now say this is the future.

I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have.

I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.

I believe if react had made inline styling of components less verbose then tailwind wouldn't exist

Statements from OpenAI about it:

https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310

https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140

I tend to believe OpenAI on this. Their stated desires seem rational, and Buckmaster's account makes them sound like cartoon villains. It sounds like there may have been some things lost in translation along with some bruised egos. Seems like the most plausible explanation for what Buckmaster is claiming.

The difference for most people against AI is that there is no world where someone with intent and skill can engage with AI to make anything approaching art. If your process includes AI, it is impossible to be an artist.

Even engaging with the nuance is beyond the pale.

We are largely having a reckoning with whether a discipline is the process or the outcome.

Music didn't enter the conservatory so much as the relative interest in various styles have changed over time. I get that the author was implying that by talking about pop music, but what was music doing before Mozart came around?

Every field is having this existential crisis right now, from art to math. Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.

The need for research-level math isn't changing (if anything, it may accelerate), but how we do it is. The languages, systems, and process I used to write code has changed a lot since I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1994. Mathematicians, I expect, have not encountered nearly the same amount of disruption in academia. I feel for them.

There's a million ways a bad configuration can take down a network. Especially if the part that gets squirrley is a black box.

Even if it isn't precisely this, the fact that no one is saying anything is quite surprising.

Edit: I don't want do contribute to FUD, so want to call out this comment and its replies that identify the shared layer as probably being xAI's infra: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568622

This is the real danger of AI skeuomorphism. The drivers stop feeling responsible for the car.

Maybe it's useful for modeling behavior, but it isn't useful for assigning consequences.

There are a lot of things in my toolchain pre-AI that I did not own and relied on to make a living. Mobile developers are in even worse shape, and iOS developers doubly so. The idea we were somehow less beholden before AI, I think, is silly.

None of us can wholly do our trades without support. Local inference is a fun idea, but you'll be out-competed by the serfs, as you call them.

If you take away the cynical edge, though, if this actually happens we're talking about an age of mom-and-pop businesses in industries that have not traditionally had them. It can't/won't be all software, but mom and pop stores were only about serving their neighborhood to begin with.

I think people who long for pre-Netflix era are looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Distribution was terrible compared to now without a lot of choice. Anyone who thinks that time was better and the quality was higher don't actually remember it. They just remember the best of the era and TV shows they liked when they were younger.

That's honorable, but software has been used in no small way to disrupt traditional business. Uber. Doordash. Netflix. Tesla. Airbnb. Zillow. And yes, AI is coming for another round.

It's a part of the culture. You can say that isn't what you signed up for, but I find it hard to believe that you don't know it's part of the culture you're participating in, which is the "we" here.

When we've used software to disrupt other industries to deliver more with fewer people we called that a good thing. And it is, because consumers tend to win. Games are a hit-driven business, so they're going to feel the squeeze faster than, say, SaaS, but it's coming for all of us. Software is now being disrupted. Reap the whirlwind.

I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side.

As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.

I am finding that I am now less interested in better models than I am in token budgets. My issue with Anthropic models now is that I don't feel like I can rely on them as a daily driver because they'll dry up before my quota resets.

I am becoming dependent on AI to make a living, and I need predictable spend on it. If I know I can't use a model regularly all month, my enthusiasm is limited.

I urge Anthropic to get better at this aspect of their business so I can come back to it.

I have noticed fads in rhetoric as I've gotten older and lived through many of these moments. The rhetorical fads are mostly about structuring an argument where to disagree makes you appear beyond the pale.

What fascinating about these is that they eventually turn on themselves, because rhetoric has no logical foundation and can be twisted to mean anything.

Reacting to the tone of the article

There have been so, so many attempts to decentralize in my lifetime. I used to be a huge believer and worked on these problems, but have to admit I'm somewhat exhausted. The technology is not the problem. The problem is always quality, effort, and cost.

If decentralization is ever going to win, it needs to be turnkey, explained without showing a network diagram, be basically free to run on your laptop, and actually have the content people want to see and not just be a bunch of people who speak lojban. [1]

While I'm not sure how much of a legal leg X has to stand on, I understand why they'd rather Nitter not exist. Twitter tried (valiantly, imo) to stay open. What ultimately began the API lockdown was the need to stop bleeding financially. Ads were inevitable, and there being no reliable way to do that via API access.

Twitter solved those three problems, and no one spends nearly as much time talking or caring about the technology used to do it than people who talk about decentralization. Myself included in my younger days. Now they're just defending their moat.

1: https://xkcd.com/191/

You misinterpret "want" here. My intuition is that you create huge problems for people context switching like this repeatedly for quick tasks.

This is what I meant by full stack AI companies. I don't think you could get humans into the loop fast enough if they didn't have some idea of the type of task involved. I don't want people to be asked to fold a tshirt one moment and do a difficult traffic merge the next.

It could require listing your credentials to get you the proper tasks: doctor, lawyer, or tshirt folder

I'm unsure. If it does, it will be work that is too expensive or inaccurate or regulatory for current AI methods. For example, you want a doctor to sign off on some AI output on a diagnosis.

However, I'm not sure a single platform will be how it emerges

Mechanical Turk had a good run, but not surprised it's shutting down. I'm sure the platform was getting flooded with people doing task arbitrage and using lots of AI anyway.

I believe the issue is that this can no longer be a horizontal play. MTurk was mostly for unskilled tasks...the kind AI can do well enough that it isn't worth the cost differential to verify it or keep farmed to humans. The "trust but verify" AI output is now the kind that requires domain expertise. This is what most full stack AI companies are bringing to industries.

Curious if this kind of work will come around again one day or was just a moment in time. If it does I'm sure it will be specifically about generating training data.

I have a lot of sympathy for the people working at GitHub trying to keep it going, but I do not have sympathy for GitHub. That's what they're paid for. I have things to get done, and it has no sympathy for me.

I wasn't sure how specific to be in my comment, but I'm glad the people who knew him know who it is. Speaks a lot of the man. I'm also 100% ready to believe he was not a good roommate by the condition of his car ;)

Cheers to Dan.

A friend died of diabetic ketoacidosis. He loved technology and seeing people succeed. Thinking of him with this news. Miss you Dan.

Grateful we're moving forward on so many fronts in the world.

My alma mater, Cal Poly SLO, I think, already does a lot of this, and are working on getting better. They have the CIE, something I wish I had back in the day: https://cie.calpoly.edu/

I do wonder if entreprenuership would be higher if we gave students more gap years, because I find it rare that someone who has not been in the world knows they want to start their own business. Tech is an exception because it's more of a lifestyle and culture than other STEM-based business.

Ever heard of an MBA?

Not sure why you got downvoted. You're mostly right.

Happy to hear someone else say this. Similar story. I could never live in SF again but roaming around it was nostalgic in a way going back now just isn't