Yes, it's the September That Never Ended again. It's fun to complain about the good ol' days, but I'd rather face the world as it is and find the joy in it.
The advantage of having so many ideas being tried and published is we are exploring the space of possibility faster, and so there's more to learn from. The disadvantage is that signal to noise is way down. Also, because the system is self-reflective and dynamic, there's a natural downward spiral as the common spaces get overrun and we cannot coordinate signal. The Tragedy of the Commons.
I guess I spent 10 years worrying about this in my MeatballWiki era in my 20s, and now I'm in my midlife crisis era and prefer to just have fun with the world that I have.
It doesn't feel like more ideas are explored, it feels like more variants of the same old things are produced. Ideas have always been hard and AI doesn't help with that.
It feels like people are more willing to give their agent a prompt than search the web for existing solutions.
I've noticed a crazy amount of clearly AI coded projects that do a small subset of an already existing and very trusted open source project. Comments usually point this out, and the OP never responds. I'm not sure what the end goal is, but the whole thing feels like a waste of time for everybody involved.
> It's fun to complain about the good ol' days, but I'd rather face the world as it is and find the joy in it.
This is a manipulative combination of condescension, gaslighting and emotionalization.
"It's fun to complain" trivializes and dismisses a valid observation about the content being submitted as self-indulgent whining.
"I'd rather face the world" implies that people who want to see carefully constructed projects and human-written articles about them are refusing to face the world, i.e. delusional.
"Find the joy in it" reduces the whole discussion to the question of self-imposed mindset, as if there is no possible rational reason to be unhappy about what's going on.
_Nobody_ has the right take. Believe it or not, being seemingly laissez-faire about something can be a well evaluated and rigorous position. I highly doubt that OP doesn't care about the potential negative ramifications of AI, and it's frankly disingenuous and confusing to see every clause interpreted in the worst way possible.
Each clause you've highlighted has a nugget of truth, but that nugget is not inherently negative, it's just a different perspective which you aren't picking up on.
One is a cybernetic system. It has sensors, a controller, a decision system, goals, and actuators. Arguably it's alive, but I think the definition of cybernetics is sufficient because it's objective.
I suspect 1M token context is questionable value because of the secondary effect of burning quota vs getting work done.
I think the model select that let me choose 1M made sense because I could decide if I was working on large documents and compacting more often was more effective.
GPU and RAM prices have definitely not made consumer PC's cheaper than they were before bitcoin blew up or before AI blew up.
Maybe you could make an argument that they are more cost efficient for the price point... But that's not the same as cheaper when every application or program is poorly optimized. For example why would a browser take up more than a GB or two of RAM?
And I'd postulate that R&D to develop localized AI is another example, the big players seem hellbent that there needs to be a most and it's data centers... The absolute opposite of optimization
We've had RAM shocks before. We nerds can't control the Wall Street or Virginians who like to break the world every so often for the lulz. However, a wobble on the curve doesn't change the curve's destination.
I think the mountain of things I don’t understand was already huge. It doesn’t stop me from getting a grip over the things I need to be responsible for and using tools to contain complexity irrelevant to me. Like many scientists have a stats person.
The risk is that civilization is over its skis because humans are lazy. Humans are always lazy. In science there’s a limit to bs because dependent works fail. In economics there’s a crash. In physics stuff breaks. Then there is a correction.
I am really enjoying this renaissance in CLI world applications. There's so much possible.
I'm working on a related challenge which is mounting a virtual filesystem with FUSE that mirrors my Mac's actual filesystem (over a subtree like ~/source), so I can constrain the agents within that filesystem, and block destructive changes outside their repo.
I have it so every repo has its own long-lived agent. They do get excited and start changing other repos, which messes up memory.
I didn't want to create a system user per repo because that's obnoxious, so I created a single claude system user, and I am using the virtual file system to manage permissions. My gmail repo's agent can for instance change the gmail repo and the google_auth repo, but it can't change the rag repo.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The advantage of having so many ideas being tried and published is we are exploring the space of possibility faster, and so there's more to learn from. The disadvantage is that signal to noise is way down. Also, because the system is self-reflective and dynamic, there's a natural downward spiral as the common spaces get overrun and we cannot coordinate signal. The Tragedy of the Commons.
I guess I spent 10 years worrying about this in my MeatballWiki era in my 20s, and now I'm in my midlife crisis era and prefer to just have fun with the world that I have.
reply