Imagine SUBPROGRAMs that implement well-specified sequences of operations in a COmmon Business-Oriented Language, which can CALL each other. We are truly sipping rocket fuel.
...hmm, at some point we'll need to find a new place to draw the boundaries, won't we?
Until ~2022 there was a clear line between human-generated code and computer-generated code. The former was generally optimized for readability and the latter was optimized for speed at all cost.
Now we have computer-generated code in the human layer and it's not obvious what it should be optimized for.
Same. I hope this was written by hardened greybeards who have dedicated their lives to weather prediction and atmospheric modeling, and have "weathered" a few funding cycles.
> But the final bit in this post is really where I'm at: I have no idea where to go from here.
That's a good question. Mozilla has something like a half-billion dollars of assets, which is more than twice what the Linux Foundation reports. Does maintaining a web browser cost more than twice as much as maintaining an operating system? Hopefully not, but maybe it's time we find out.
Quite a few come to mind: chemical and biological weapons, beanie babies, NFTs, garbage pail kids... Some take real effort to eradicate, some die out when people get bored and move on.
Today's version of "AI," i.e. large language models for emitting code, is on the level of fast fashion. It's novel and surprising that you can get a shirt for $5, then you realize that it's made in a sweatshop, and it falls apart after a few washings. There will always be a market for low-quality clothes, but they aren't "disrupting non-nudity."
So are beanie babies, NFTs and garbage pail kids -- Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology. I think that's part of the difficulty, how could you roll back knowledge without some Khmer Rouge generational trauma?
I think about the original use of steam engines and the industrial revolution -- Steam engines were so inefficient, their use didn't make sense outside of pulling its own fuel out of the ground -- Many people said haha look how silly and inefficient this robot labor is. We can see how that all turned out.[2]
> Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology.
That's true. Ruby still exists, for example, though it's sitting down below COBOL on the Tiobe index. There's probably a community trading garbage pail kids on Facebook Marketplace as well. Ideas rarely die completely.
Burning fossil fuels to turn heat into kinetic energy is genuinely better than using draft animals or human slaves. Creating worse code (or worse clothing) for less money is a tradeoff that only works for some situations.
That pretty much sums up the problem: an "AI" button is about as useful to me as a "do stuff" button, or one of those red "that was easy" buttons they sell at Home Depot. Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read. Fine, add a button to do that. Mediocre page summaries? That can live in some submenu. "Agentic" things like booking flights for an upcoming trip? I would never trust an "AI" button to do that.
Machine learning can be useful for well-defined, low-consequence tasks. If you think an LLM is a robot butler, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what you're dealing with.
The more ways people mess with scrapers, the better -- let a thousand flowers bloom! You as an individual can't compete with VC-funded looters, but there aren't enough of them to defeat a thousand people resisting in different ways.
> Wee knead two fine-d Moore Waze too Poisson there date... uh.
Yes. Revel in your creativity mocking and blocking the slop machines. The "remote refactor" command, "rm -rf", is the best way to reduce the cyclomatic complexity of a local codebase.
It's wild how often we rediscover that executing untrusted code leads to decades of whack-a-mole security. Excel/Word plus macros, HTML plus JavaScript, SVG plus JavaScript, ...
It's a great reminder that while room-temperature-IQ AI pumpers like Sam Altman talk about "solving physics" or whatever, the actual value of large language models is generating spam marginally cheaper than Filipinos.
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