wcfrobert

To borrow a concept from Simon Willison: you need to "hoard things you know how to do”. You need to know what is possible; you need to be able to articulate what you want. AI is a fast car, but it’s empty and still needs a driver. As long as humans are still in the loop, the quality of the driver matters.

Good advice to the younger folks. You can afford to look stupid. So go ahead and do that thing you wanted to try. There's more acceptance because of your age. You're expected to fail in some ways.

Once you have a mortgage, a reputation to maintain, an image of competence to uphold at work, you pretty much can't afford to look stupid in my opinion.

My solution to this is to prioritize. There isn't enough time in a person's life to learn everything anyways.

Selectively pick and struggle through things you want to learn deeply. And let AI spoon-feed you for things you don't care as much about.

Yes, what I find beautiful is the craftsmanship, dedication, and the singular, almost monastic focus required to become a master in some human pursuit, whether its software, sushi, or making watches. I find dedication and sacrifice deeply moving and eternally beautiful.

I disagree. It's worth asking why some people find brand watches beautiful? Where did they get their sense of aesthetic? Were they born with a congenital preference for RM 16-01 Citron?

Culture shapes our taste. Companies go on multi-decade billion-dollar campaigns to shape our culture. We like certain things because famous actors or athletes endorse them; because hip hop artists rap about them; because influencers talk about them; because Hollywood portrays them a certain way. This extends to all modern aesthetic preferences from architecture to watches to cars to furniture to dating.

I think the argument pg is making is that brand-obsessed cultures are not maximally truth/beauty-seeking and gets really weird. e.g. Japanese Ohaguro, Chinese foot binding, various cranial deformation practices from the Mayans to the Huns, high-heels, ugly (to outside observers) watches.

It's a really thought-provoking essay. But it's too heterodox and "autistic" to share with most of my friends. Socially speaking, it's best to outwardly embrace the current zeitgeist.

Software scales. Customer support doesn't. SaaS companies do not want to deal with customer support at all. It's only gotten worse with AI agents.

It's incredibly frustrating to spend a good 10 minutes navigating a website's complex web of menus to get a phone number (I think they deliberately try to hide it...). Then spend another 5 minutes listening to bots telling me to press 1 for English, only to fall into the wrong menu where the bot repeats some useless information I already know, say goodbye, then hang up.

Having a bot say to me: "we care about your concerns, and we value your business" is absurd and oxymoronic.

Compare this to say Chase, Amex, or Geico. I call, someone answers within 2 minutes and addresses all my problems/concerns in fluent English. I'd happily pay a premium for that.

Ad duopoly with Google.

Half of all humans on Earth uses Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Threads). These products are free for you to use. But for Meta, your attention is the product which they sell to advertisers.

99% of their revenue comes from ads, and 1% comes from VR stuff.

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you.

1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything.

2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how the total addressable market (TAM) for AI is the entirety of human labor market (i.e. your wage). First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance. The value of your mental labor will continue to plummet in the coming years.

Please talk me out of this...

It just occurred to me that I chat with LLMs like I'm a CEO.

This is hilarious. Reminds me of the commandments revisions in animal farm.

No animal shall sleep in a bed. Revision: No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.

No animal shall drink alcohol. Revision: No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.

No animal shall kill any other animal. Revision: No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

All animals are equal. Revision: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

> When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite?

I hadn't thought of this implication. Crazy world...

Apple's commitment to privacy and security is really cool to see. It's also an amazing strategic play that they are uniquely in the position to take advantage of. Google and Meta can't commit to privacy because they need to show you ads, whereas Apple feels more like a hardware company to me.

LLCs can't go to jail though

> "First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays—it is economical, and one can drink it without milk—but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea."

These are some of the worst tea-making tip I've ever seen. I get that taste is subjective and all, but come on... This is like saying:

"Al Pastor street taco in Mexico has its virtues - it is economical, and one can eat it without salsa - but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after eating it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a great taco' invariably means Taco Bells"

CTC tea [1] is inferior in quality. They are mass-produced, brews quick, and tastes way too strong (hence the milk). Tea was invented in China and tea culture goes back thousands of years. India and Sri Lanka only started producing tea in the mid 1800s. Robert Fortune literally dressed up as a Chinese merchant, snuck into some rural village in Fujian, and smuggled some teas back so the British East India Company can cultivate it in and around India.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush,_tear,_curl

This exercise is pointless.

Of course software can affect the physical world: Google Maps changes traffic patterns; DoorDash teleports takeoff food right to my doorstep; the weather app alters how people dress. This list is un-ending. But these effects are always second-order. Humans are always there in the background bridging the gap between bits and atoms (underpaid delivery drivers in the case of doordash).

The more interesting question is whether AI can __directly__ impact the physical world with robotics. Gemini can wax poetic about optimizing fertilizers usage, grid spacing for best cross-pollination, the optimum temperature, timing, watering frequency of growing corn, but can it actually go to Home Depot, purchase corn seeds, ... (long sequence of tasks) ..., nurture it for months until there's corn in my backyard? Each task within the (long sequence of tasks) is "making PB&J sandwich" [1] level of difficulty. Can AI generalize?

As is, LLMs are better positioned to replace decision-makers than the workers actually getting stuff done.

[1] http://static.zerorobotics.mit.edu/docs/team-activities/Prog...

But isn't living in a stable society, where everyone can find employment, achieve some form of financial security, and not be ravaged by endless rounds of layoffs, more desirable than having net productive co-workers?

I don't see how AI can bring about 10%+ annual economic growth, let alone infinite abundance, without somehow crossing the bit-to-atom interface. Without a breakthrough in general-purpose robotics - which feels decades away - agents will just be confined to optimizing B2B SaaS. Human utility is rooted in the physical environment. I find digital abundance incredibly uninspiring.

For me, cafes are essentially libraries; except cafes actually have reasonable opening hours. I can't get work done at home (too many distractions), so I switch up my environment to one where I am forced to work.

Go to any coffee shop in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and you're bound to see students and tech workers sitting alone, typing away on their laptops. Even in LA, you'll see people editing videos and posting stuff on social media.

I think it's perhaps very American to go to cafes alone, especially if you are going there to get work done. Anecdotally, I had a French tennis partner back in 2022. One time, after our match, we went to a neighborhood cafe to chat and talk about life. He remarked to me how strange and foreign it is that Americans work so hard. He finds it stupid, even off-putting, that people work in cafes, which to him is a place to relax and socialize. He used slightly stronger language than stupid, so I didn't have the heart to tell him I plan to work in a cafe later that day. Maybe it's just a cultural thing.

Well there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose.

(1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head.

(2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred.

Here's a good David Foster Wallace quote in his interview with Bryan Garner:

> "there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.

> I’ve never seen a team fail because they chose Ruby. I have seen them fail because they chose complexity. Because they chose indecision. Because they chose “seriousness” over momentum. Ruby just needed to stay out of the way so people could focus on the real work.

I am entirely indifferent to the topic of Ruby, but this sentence really resonated with me. I'll take momentum over premature optimization for scale any day of the week.

There's that Jerry Yang quote:

Middle class is a state of mind

> some people communicate in order to exchange facts, and some communicate in order to find connection.

I love this quote. Excellent and very relatable piece.

Social skills can be acquired through practice. But being an introvert, I've specifically picked my profession so that I can focus on ideas over people. Tinkering and solving problems excited me, whereas staying in touch with friends, noticing social dynamics, networking, reading people, being good at remembering everyone's birthday, etc felt tiring to me and was less appealing.

I'm at a place in my career where I'm managing more and doing less. It's a weird transition because I've spend a decade acquiring technical skill, only to discover soft skills are equally if not more important (perhaps increasingly so with AGI) .

I actually prefer reading this type of writing on the internet. It's more interesting.

Of course it's complicated. Just give me a take. Don't speak in foot-noted, hedged sentences. I'll consider the nuances and qualifications myself.

Reminds me of that one scene in Equalizer. It's cheesy and I will never admit to liking the movie in real life. But it's one of those scenes that's really stuck with me over the years.

Robert: "I think you can be anything you want to be."

Teri: "Maybe in your World, Robert. Doesn't really happen that way in mine."

Robert: "Change your world."

Bitcoin is different.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? How come his Bitcoin holdings - now worth more than $100 billion dollars - have remained untouched since 2010? How can any one human resist that kind of temptation? I would be digging landfill sites if I lost my wallet worth $100 billion. The launch of Bitcoin also coincided with the 2008 financial crisis. The first block had the text: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" embedded, etc.

None of the altcoins have this level of myths and legend. You need this kind of supernatural story to start a new fiat, digital gold, religion, and whatever collective fiction you can think of.

I disagree. I think it might even be a positive signal, especially for startups.

Imagine a startup with an engineering team that has this much creative energy, ingenuity, and vision unencumbered by bureaucratic processes, committees, and all-day meetings.

A sense of "play" is so important in creating fantastic software. Some of the best products are the result of engineers having full creative control and the liberty to "play". See, for example, Google's "20% time policy" in the early 2000s which birthed Gmail, or 3M's "permitted bootlegging" policy which birthed Post-it notes.

> he already wanted to buy it before he even stepped in. So not only is your job easier than the guy in the Honda dealership, it's also much better paid.

Luxury brands spend millions on marketing and brand awareness. In some sense, all the "sales work" have already been done before a person sets foot into a Bugatti dealership. Reputation takes decades to build but just a few missteps to destroy. Brand is way more fragile than people think. As soon as Bugatti stops making great cars, they'll fall into a place where they can't compete in the luxury market, nor the mass market Japanese car brands like Honda or Toyota.

In that sense, luxury fashion seems to be a easier market than watches or cars. You don't need an innovative engineering team. Just spend millions on marketing to uphold the common narrative you are a luxury brand. And that shirts with your logo on it costing 10x more than a similar product at say H&M, is not only justifiable, but sensible.

I love that Eisenhower quote which I feel is quite relevant here.

"plans are useless, planning is essential."

The results are obviously predictable, but it's nice that the authors took the time to prove a thing everyone already knows to be true with the rigors of science.

I wonder how the participants felt writing an essay while being hooked up to an EEG.

I don't think it would be trivial to increase demand by 10x (or even 2x) that quickly. Eventually, a publicly traded company will get a bad quarter, at which point it's much easier to just reduce the number of employees. In both scenarios, there's no need for any new-hire.