The most common reply to this is: “people said the same about Books/TV/Comics/Games/Facebook stop being such a Luddite”
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored, while it is possible to effectively carry around a device that lets you watch YouTube/TikTok at all times. I think this is an important factor.
I think the only thing that matters is whether the people on the team care deeply about the product; whether they care more about the product than their own careers (in the short term). Without that, any metric or way of thinking can and will be gamed.
Unfortunately, even with all the management techniques in the world, there are just some projects that are impossible to care about. There’s simply a significantly lower cap on productivity on these projects.
It’s funny, I think most people roll their eyes when Trump says things like “you’ll be tired of winning, you’ll say ‘please no more winning’”.
But recommendations to tax efficiency are unironically that (just dressed in more serious language). “Please stop giving us what we want so efficiently, we want to work more for it!”
Those winning and those asking for this to stop are two different categories of people. The former are the capital holders and the latter are those with no source of capital in their future. If you can merge the two categories, we may talk again. Until then, you need to come up with something better than trickle down in a world where there is no trickling.
> But recommendations to tax efficiency are unironically that (just dressed in more serious language). “Please stop giving us what we want so efficiently, we want to work more for it!”
You're trying to make it sound ridiculous, but most people aren't pure consumers. They're laborers and consumers. Policies that hurt while wearing the consumer hat may be more than justified by the benefits while wearing the labor hat.
It's also a context-specific scale. I work in computer vision. Building the surrounding app, UI, checkout flow, etcetera is easily Level 6/7(sorry...) on this scale.
Building the rendering pipeline, algorithms, maths, I've turned off even level 2. It is just more of a distraction than it's worth for that deep state of focus.
So I imagine at least some of the disconnect comes from the area people work in and its novelty or complexity.
This is exactly true in my experience! The usefulness of AI varies wildly depending on the complexity, correctness-requirements, & especially novelty of the domain.
This attribute plus a bit of human tribalism, social echo-chambering, & some motivated reasoning by people with a horse in the race, easily explains the discord I see in rhetoric around AI.
Far from solved! Though, like seemingly everything, it has benefited from the transformer architecture. And computer vision is kind of the "input", it usually sits intersecting with some other field i.e. cv for medical analysis is different to self driving is different to reconstruction for games/movies.
But why are you making projects in so many languages? The language is very rarely the barrier to performance, especially if you don't even understand the language.
I try to pick the language best to the situation rather than giving into my own biases. I need to broaden my horizon to be able to cover the full stack of stuff that I need, not just the things I've been doing myself a lot for years. There's a lot of stuff that used to be out of my comfort zone that I can now tackle easily. Stepping over my own biases is part of that.
I know not everybody is quite ready for this yet. But I'm working from the point of view that I won't be manually programming much professionally anymore.
So, I now pick stuff I know AIs supposedly do well (like Go) with good solid tool and library ecosystems. I can read it well enough; it's not a hard language and I've seen plenty other languages. But I'm clearly not going to micro manage a Go code base any time soon. The first time I did this, it was an experiment. I wanted to see how far I could push the notion. I actually gave it some thought and then I realized that if I was going to do this manually I would pick what I always pick. But I just wasn't planning to do this manually and it wasn't optimal for the situation. It just wasn't a valid choice anymore.
Then I repeated the experiment again on a bigger thing and I found that I could have a high level discussion about architectural choices well enough that it did not really slow me down much. The opposite actually. I just ask critical questions. I try to make sure to stick with mainstream stuff and not get boxed into unnecessary complexity. A few decades in this industry has given me a nose for that.
My lack of familiarity with the code base is so far not proving to be any issue. Early days, I know. But I'm generating an order of magnitude more code than I'll ever be able to review already and this is only going to escalate from here on. I don't see a reason for me to slow down. To be effective, I need to engineer at a macro level. I simply can't afford to micro manage code bases anymore. That means orchestrating good guard rails, tests, specifications, etc. and making sure those cover everything I care about. Precisely because I don't want to have to open an editor and start fixing things manually.
As for Rust, that was me not thinking about my prompt too hard and it had implemented something half decent by the time I realized so I just went with it. To be clear, this one is just a side project. So, I let it go (out of curiosity) and it seems to be fine as well. Apparently, I can do Rust now too. It's actually not a bad choice objectively and so far so good. The thing is, I can change my mind and redo the whole thing from scratch and it would not be that expensive if I had to.
Yes because in most contexts it has seen "caveman" talk the conversations haven't been about rigorously explained maths/science/computing/etc... so it is less likely to predict that output.
Do you have any evidence at all of this? I know how LLMs are trained and this makes no sense to me. Otherwise you'd just put filler words in every input
e.g. instead of: "The square root of 256 is" you'd enter "errr The er square um root errr of 256 errr is" and it would miraculously get better? The model can't differentiate between words you entered and words it generated its self...
It's why it starts with "You're absolutely right!" It's not to flatter the user. It's a cheap way to guide the response in a space where it's utilizing the correction.
If only there were some system where the incentives could freely flow through and permeate every level of the sector. Where those organisations that provide sub-standard care die and those that excel receive outsized funding...
Unfortunately, a system with these qualities doesn't exist in practice. You just end up with the same too-big-to-fail macro organization minimizing their point-of-care labor spend and maximizing their management spend either way.
I first learned when reading about Steve Jobs, how the Japanese never use "quality" in their advertising. Yet people still view(ed, at least) Japanese manufactured goods as superior quality. It turns out people don't judge quality based on what you tell them but based on their experience.
All this to say: I wouldn't stress about it too much. In the consumer space the best usually does win, and people will simply vote with their feet.
Yeah, well, that's how capitalism was meant to work, but mostly seems to have been implemented with various thumbs on scales (which is also true for most of the -isms).
Feels kinda like the thumbs on the scales resulted in the (d)evolution towards techno-feudalism.
My answer to this is approximately: “yes they’re all relatively bad compared to the thing that came before so they were all right!”
Even books. If the option were between my child reading about blacksmithing/compsci and DOING blacksmithing/compsci I’d choose the latter every time. It gives you real experience and opinions.
The difference with each successive new wave is that it becomes increasingly addictive. It’s possible to read one book and stop for a while. Shorts can hook you for hours and then draw you back the next day with no natural stopping point.
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