Thank you, Claude, very interesting.
I agree but I believe it is still well thought out and worth a read, which is rare.
The Religion of Speed
111–120 of 166 posts
Re: The Religion of Speed
#112The biggest joke of the entire things is that no one wins by being first anymore. It is not the 1990s. If anything, you win by being a good second. Facebook won because it watched MySpace mistakes and fixed them. There is even less value in being first with this AI-driven nonsense. The first mover just creates the template everyone else feeds into an LLM. You do the hard work. Someone else collects the reward.
Not sure that this is universally true. Youtube, Uber, Airbnb and others all have massive first-mover advantages.
Ubers advantage was selling under price for years and being willing to break laws worldwide. And before someone brings up medallions, Uber was selling under price and breaking labor laws where in countries where taxis worked as a normal competitive market.
They did not had to be first. They were not first either.
Re: The Religion of Speed
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but if they do make money and profit, your concern would have been invalid in hindsight wouldn’t it? Your concern seems to be profitability of OpenAI but that’s easily falsifiable. I’m not saying it’s 100% but I’m saying if they do turn out profitable, your concern wouldn’t have been valid.
depends on the exact chain of events, but if the economics are indeed solved, and AI labs are found to have a sustainable business model, that concern would be addressed. I would still see the technology as anti-human and would still see the concept of an agentic economy as deeply unserious, wasteful, and risky. Not exactly sure what your point is though. FWIW my concerns aren't only for OpenAI, it's just the poster-…
Here’s what you said earlier
> It's a capital misallocation problem, a number problem, that has nothing to do with subjective feelings regarding LLMs
Now you say
> I would still see the technology as anti-human and would still see the concept of an agentic economy as deeply unserious, wasteful, and risky. Not exactly sure what your point is though.
You can see how someone might be confused with this. Is it your subjective feeling? Or objective economics? I’m not interested in your subjective feelings on AI.
On objective economics: your concern would be invalid if the AI companies overall make profit. If they don’t, then you would have been right on the point of being careful.
Re: The Religion of Speed
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course! The article agrees with you > Real speed exists. Real speed is what happens when the work is understood, the constraints are clear, the people involved know what they’re doing, and the decisions have been made cleanly enough that execution can happen without constant re-litigation. I think the article is arguing against speed preventing the kind of planning and alignment that makes smooth delivery possible…
So then the article boils down to, doing things well is good and doing things poorly is bad? Not arguing against speed, just poorly-executed speed.
If you assign speed-based KPIs to everything, you will get both the good speed and the bad speed.
Re: The Religion of Speed
#115From an engineering perspective slow is smooth is fast, but from a sales perspective slow is smooth is slow. If you quote superior quality with 6 months later delivery your competitor will get to sign a contract that could very well last 5-10 years and comes up just so rarely. Missing out on that contract doesn't always mean you get to focus on other projects, it could mean you have to fire whole teams of people that you don't have anywhere to assign anymore.
From my perspective a failure point is when companies do delegate time to make things correct, but demand results from the get go. Billing and tracking becomes weird for them if you work on infrastructure, design systems, component libraries, system design etc and you have nothing to show for after 6 months or a year. "But the future development will be super fast" doesn't fly past upper management unfortunately.
Re: The Religion of Speed
#116The religion of speed is the religion of VC investment backing, because VCs have set time horizons for delivering returns to their own investors. You can only get their interest if you can make them believe you can deliver 10x growth on their schedule . Committing to that schedule — and really believing in that commitment — is what turns someone into the sort of person who sets arbitrary project timelines that disreg…
If you want to feel real urgency, try working at a company attempting to bootstrap without VC funding. Unless your company is very lucky to strike gold early on, the pressure to deliver fast and get money coming in is even more real. Everyone wants to start getting paid real salaries instead of eating ramen noodles. Everyone wishes they could hire a few more people to spread the workload around.
Startups are very hard, period. In my experience, the ones that get VC funding are a less stressful than those that don’t because you start with a generous buffer of money in the bank and you have investors who might backstop the company’s bank account if you run out. They do want returns, but bootstrapped companies also want returns too. That bootstrapped founder who sacrificed potential earnings for years to get their startup off the ground wants employees delivering fast, too.
It’s not a religion or cult. It’s the reality of startups. Something is risked to start them and the people who risk it expect a larger reward than they would have received. For VCs, that larger reward has to be better averaged returns than investing in the stock market or other investments. For founders, that large reward needs to be larger wealth than what they could have gotten working for FAANG. The pressure comes either way.
Re: The Religion of Speed
#117Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. My learnings about speed: * people tend to not measure things and when they actually do bother they tend to measure the wrong things, the things of immediate comfort * measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect * people tend to guess at measures…
>Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing... Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and…
Weird analogy. Nonsensical from both physical standpoint (the only energy input when swinging is the person on the swing "pumping their legs"), and practical one (you usually sit down with the swing already at an angle and then kick off, so a good 50% of the arc/momentum is there from the setup).
Re: The Religion of Speed
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing... Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and…
Weird analogy. Nonsensical from both physical standpoint (the only energy input when swinging is the person on the swing "pumping their legs"), and practical one (you usually sit down with the swing already at an angle and then kick off, so a good 50% of the arc/momentum is there from the setup ).
You clearly didn't read this. It's about rowing. Not being on a playground.
Re: The Religion of Speed
#119You can fail a project not because you were technically wrong about anything, but because you burned your customer out by taking 6 months instead of 6 weeks to find a viable solution to their problem. Speed is a feature from the perspective of your customers. There is economic value associated with it. Consider your state of mind when you call the HVAC tech to fix your broken condensing on an August afternoon in Texa…
I like this argument, but I don't think the article argues against taking urgency into consideration. Do you have anecdotes about companies or people that actually ignore urgency? I've experienced enough business-critical incidents (or requests) where people across all seniority are just randomly trying stuff, making a mess, without taking time to coordinate, understand the problem, and solve it. It almost always res…
Businesses fake urgency all the time. I guess I have never worked in any of these 'high stakes' companies. My whole career, everything was reportedly urgent, but when you missed the deadline, nobody dies, nobody got fired, you just slipped a little and leadership pretended even more urgency. And if you slipped a lot, people got burned out and quit and leadership would institute 'war rooms' and 'crunch time'. And if you slipped a hell of a lot, the project would probably get canceled and the rest of the team was absorbed into various other projects. Nothing matters, the company's stock goes up and down randomly--having nothing to do with your project's failure or success, yet the message from above is always "FAST FAST RUSH URGENT!!!"
Re: The Religion of Speed
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing... Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and…
Weird analogy. Nonsensical from both physical standpoint (the only energy input when swinging is the person on the swing "pumping their legs"), and practical one (you usually sit down with the swing already at an angle and then kick off, so a good 50% of the arc/momentum is there from the setup ).
It's not bad I think. We must be open-minded and humble, like a child, and learn how the system actually works in order to be effective.
Often times our first instincts will not work, so we must observe, experiment, and try again. And not be afraid of looking foolish with our legs flailing around. Find the underlying rhythm and flow with it, not against it.