651–660 of 1001 posts
Investors are obsessed with moats, but people have to realize that the entire world runs on business that have no moats. There are no moats to being a plumber, a baker, a restaurant... The moat concept is predominant because the idea that everything must make billions have infected the debate about businesses. It's all about being a unicorn, a giant, a monopoly, making every body at the top billionaires, and it's lik…
The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…
The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…
There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…
The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…
There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…
Top 10 best reviewed android phones? Just put up a list generated by the LLM. Have a conversation with a product recommender that then collects fees from whoever it recommends.
Not that I think Google's got the executive capacity to do any of this anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can a company keep up with the speed of what is happening in the open? Open AI had years of advanced that almost vanished in a few months. And we will see the rise of specialized models, smaller but targeted, working in team, delegating (Hugging GPT) I would use a small and fast model that only speak english, is expert at coding an science and not much more. Then you fire up an question to another model if yours…
Will the average use know or want to use different models when they can just go to ChatGPT?
Look at the first uses of StableDiffusion. It was either "you know python or you use Dall-E". Now we have one-click installers setting everything up, and nice user interfaces on top of it.
Investors are obsessed with moats, but people have to realize that the entire world runs on business that have no moats. There are no moats to being a plumber, a baker, a restaurant... The moat concept is predominant because the idea that everything must make billions have infected the debate about businesses. It's all about being a unicorn, a giant, a monopoly, making every body at the top billionaires, and it's lik…
> There are no moats to being a plumber, a baker, a restaurant... This line is interesting to me, because actually I think there _is_ a major moat there: locality. I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, but for those examples specifically a lot of the value of specific instances of those business comes from their being in your neighborhood. If I live in Toronto, I'm not going to fly a plumber from Manhattan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…
> even coming out of the gate pretty strong by dominating the browser market They were out of the gate about as weak as could be, Windows didn't have a native tcp/ip stack for the longest time (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and they only dominated the browser market through grossly uncompetitive behavior after they had lost the initial 5 rounds of the battle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. I...kinda don't want this? UIs have already changed in so many different fits, starts, waves, and cycles. I used to have skills. But I have no skills now. Nothing works like it used to. Yeah they were tricky to use but I cannot imagine that a murky AI interface is going to be any easier to use, and certainly impossible to master. Even if it is easier t…
It was a sad day when I realized I was systematically overinvesting in skills on churning technology and that my investments would never amortize. Suddenly my parents' stubborn unwillingness to bother learning anything technological made complete sense and I had to adjust my own patience threshold sharply downwards.
in another browser tab i'm running jupyter (the renamed ipython notebook from 02011) to graph some dsp calculations with matplotlib (02003, but mostly providing the plotting functions from matlab (01984)) which i made with python (01991, but i've only been using it since 02000) and numpy (02006, but a mostly compatible reimplementation of numeric from 01995, which i've been using since 02003). in jupyter i can format my equations in latex (01984, but for equations basically the same as plain tex82 from 01982, but i've only been using them since 01999) and my text in markdown (02004, though jupyter's implementation supports many extensions). i keep the jupyter notebook in git (02005, but i've only been using it since 02009, when i switched from cvs (01986, but i've only been using it since about 01998)). the dsp stuff is largely applications of the convolution theorem (01822 or 01912) and hogenauer filters (01981).
i do most of my programming that isn't in jupyter in gnu emacs (01984, but i didn't start using it until 01994) except that i prefer to do java stuff in intellij idea, which i first used in 02006
earlier this year, my wife and i wrote our wedding invitation rsvp site in html (01990, but using a lot of stuff added up to 02000) and css2 (01998) plus a few things like corner-radius (dunno, 02006?) and a little bit of js (01995, but in practical terms 02004), with the backend done in django (02005) backed by sqlite (02000, but this was sqlite3 (02004), but sqlite mostly just implements sql (01974, first publicly available in 01979, but mostly the 01992 ansi standard) which in turn mostly just implements codd's relational data model (01970) and acid transactions (01983), all of which i've been using since 01996). and of course python, emacs, and git. most of the css debugging was done with chromium's web inspector (present from the first chrome release in 02008, a clone of firebug (02006)).
for looking up these dates just now, i used google's newish structured search results, which mostly pull information from wikipedia (02001); i also used stack overflow (02008) and its related sites.
the median of the years above is 01998, with 25% and 75% quartiles of 01987 and 02004, which i calculated using r (01997, but a reimplementation of s (01976)). if we assume that each new introduction listed above displaced some existing skill, then we can vaguely handwave at a half-life of about 25 years for these churning technology skills, which to me seems like enough time for a lot of them to amortize; but it seems like it's slowing down a lot, because the 25% quartile is in 01987 and not 01973
it's true that all the time i spent configuring twm, olvwm, fvwm, and afterstep, and working around bugs in netscape 4's javascript implementation, and maintaining csh scripts and informix ace database applications, and logging into anonymous ftp sites running tops-20, and debugging irq conflicts, isn't really serving me today. but you could kind of tell that those things weren't the future. the surprising thing is really how slowly things change: that we're still running variants of the bourne shell in emulators of the vt100
other still-relevant technological skills for me today include building a fire, qwerty typing, ansi c (my wife is taking a class), bittorrent, operating a gas stove, and making instant coffee. still beyond me, though, is how to turn this tv on
The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…
There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…
I would love to see what proportion of searches are questions that would benefit from natural language answers. The huge majority of my searches would not be improved by LLMs and in fact would probably be made worse. “Thai food near me”, “IRS phone number”, “golang cmp documentation”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…
> In Google's case they are still really focused on search whereas LLMs arguably move the focus to answers. I would love to see what proportion of searches are questions that would benefit from natural language answers. The huge majority of my searches would not be improved by LLMs and in fact would probably be made worse. “Thai food near me”, “IRS phone number”, “golang cmp documentation”