ryandvm

It was weird because it seemed authentic, but was not. There was nothing technically uncanny about it - the illusion was complete. Ten years ago I would have absolutely thought that it must have been Feynman's own voice.

I find it weird in the same way that I feel about AI services that will let you chat with deceased relatives. It's the principle of the thing that is unsettling. Perhaps future generations will find these objections quaint.

I suspect nobody's legacy survives the microscope.

I'm a huge fan of Feynman and his autobiographies - some of my favorite books. There are a number of YouTube videos that purport to be Feynman's audio lectures, but they're actually AI generated readings of his script. Against my better instincts I listened to a couple and it was surreal experience.

On one hand, they were actually pretty decent simulacra and I loved hearing Feynman's voice and mannerisms; but on the other hand, they... weren't... real. What am I even listening to?

We are in for a weird future.

I always liked the idea of a micro-deposit that the sender puts up for each email (say $0.001). If the recipient blocks your email and it ends up in their spam folder then you lose your deposit; if they read it then you get your deposit back.

The lost deposits would then be used to pay for the infrastructure.

I think we both agree that I need to spend less time in intellectual ghettos.

Okay, and you're not wrong, but it sounds like you're filtering out most of the shit that humanity is producing and then lecturing folks that say LLMs are smarter than most people.

It's kind of like you hang out in a Buddhist monastery saying, "I don't know what you guys are talking about - people are so peace-loving!"

Man, I appreciate your optimism, but I don't know how you can spend even 5 minutes on Facebook looking at the absolutely bonkers shit one's own relatives and neighbors post and still come away thinking that most people are "thoughtful".

Are humans capable of profound creativity? Of course. Are they actually doing it? No, not very often.

Precisely, it takes a special kind of psychopathy to have 100 million dollars and decide that you need to "keep going".

> on the other, whatever shady crap these guys do after it all goes ‘boom’ to save their wallets is only gonna reward people in the market

Yup. That's kind of my feeling. Are we in a bubble? Obviously. But the people who have the most to lose have never been more intertwined with the rule makers and have never been so shameless about it.

"Don't bet against the house" has never been more appropriate. We may well be on the verge of the 2nd Great Depression, but you can be damn sure that the last ones to lose will be the billionaires hanging out in the new ballroom. We'll be burning poor people for warmth before they allow the asset prices to collapse.

This gives "let's close the patent office"

They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.

I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out cookie cutter CRUD apps.

I have my doubts about whether the state of the industry is going to advance as long as we're having LLMs do all the creation, but that's another diatribe.

Eh, his promises are ambitious.

And the gullibility of his investors is bottomless.

I too plan on increasing my revenue 100-fold by 2030.

The human brain has 80 billion neurons and a 100 trillion synapses. I think you're underselling the processing power of that warm chunk of meat.

The real message of the last 15 years has actually been the opposite: if you throw enough processing power at it, intelligence emerges.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

It costs $30M/unit because our trillion dollar defense budget is mostly just a jobs program (25%) and wealth transfer apparatus (75%). Killing people is just a side effect.

Yup. You can either A) ban AI (good luck) and teach students to understand CS fundamentals deeply - which will of course make them totally unsuitable for an industry that is demanding tokenmaxxing from every engineer; or B) embrace AI at the university and produce students that are nothing more than prompt "engineers".

I hate the AI revolution timeline even more than I was hating the political timeline.

> "Well, we were just responding to our business competition" The business knows no humanness, because it is not a human.

Yup. Except, by God, we ought to make sure the business has unlimited free speech (i.e. campaign contributions).

None of them go bankrupt. The whole thing will just get stuffed into a larger Matryoshka egg that IPOs for eleventy trillion dollars in 10 years.

Okay, let's give software engineers a break for a bit and focus on obsoleting other high-linguistic context occupations.

To be fair, at this point in my life I think unions are a net positive and probably the most effective protection workers have from predatory management, but the 25 year old libertarian take on this is issue is based on things like unions lobbying states to require licensure. Restricting entry obviously benefits incumbents, which is the very definition of gatekeeping, and it would have specifically hampered a self-taught engineer like myself.

There are enough cases of unions protecting bad actors (cops, prison guards) or lazy, tenured individuals that it's easy for a mildly privileged autodidact to decide they don't need the hurdle - or the help.

Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work.

Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*.

Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.

It's a fair question, but it irritates me because it suggests that we should accept the self-destruction of vast swaths of the population in the name of perfect liberty.

The reality is that we have a lot of institutions that prey on consumers' biology in a way that is overpowering for the average individual. Social media, ragebait news, and junk food are good examples of legal products that hijack human tendencies for the purpose of commercial exploitation.

We do not allow unrestricted access to opiates because the average person does not have the fortitude required to resist addiction. It's becoming increasingly clear that some of these media products are able to induce drug-like dependency - and harm.

Fortunately, for the media products, I think the answer is fairly obvious. Sitting at the bottom of all this is advertising. Meta needs people looking at their screens 6 hours a day because they don't make money from subscriptions, they make their money per-view from the advertisers. FOX News or MSNBC are the same, if you're not holding your iPad with white knuckles wondering how democracy is going to end, they're not making money.

I dunno. Billionaires are wont to pick up a lot of fanciful special interests like rockets or climate change or ending world hunger, but Brian Johnson deciding that he's going to devote his fortune to his own immortality is like 7 red flags rolled into one - not to mention that it's like 50% of the comic book villain arcs.

Because I haven't been allowed to program for 6 months. Now I'm just an AI manager.

I think software "engineering" is far more susceptible to fads than other engineering disciplines. Best practices in engineering evolve with respect to advances in material sciences, whereas best practices in software engineering are mostly just vibes and reactions.

* Object oriented / functional * Thick client, thin client * Blockchain * NoSQL vs relational * Enterprise SOA * Framework churn

This industry is continually rediscovering ancient paradigms and revisiting them in a way that would drive normal engineers nuts. I suspect it's because software engineering doesn't actually have requirements around licensure and education that slow and stabilize the arrow of progress.

Nobody in this industry with a modicum of applicable expertise believes that orbital data centers make sense financially. Like colonizing Mars and most of Elon's pipe dreams, it's not the stated goal they believe in, it's getting fabulously wealthy from fat government contracts along the way.

Once you understand this about Musk, you realize that everything he is involved with works that way.

No joke. I go to the gym a couple times a week so that I'll maintain mobility and won't injure myself as I age - unfortunately 80% of my injuries come from the gym.

I dunno. I would be surprised if a 30 year old telecommunications network is going to be technically competitive with a SpaceX's LEO network that is still launching satellites as we speak.

How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?

because X is a dumb name

Nobody (with money to invest) actually believes that SpaceX or Tesla will ever catch up to their valuations. People investing in things like this only believe that somebody else believes it.

This will continue to work until they run out of morons willing to buy a stock with a PE of 300 at which point it will contract spectacularly.