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Low-hanging fruit

artagnon.com

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Re: Low-hanging fruit

#11

Post by MichaelRo »

Maybe the IT recession is also related to the low hanging fruit having been picked. See the "IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023" thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38912125

No point hiring 20,000 people and having them work 10+ hours per day including weekends to do what? The Metaverse that noone asked and noone uses? And there's only so many social platforms specialized on people with curly hair one can make.

I know every generation said "this time this is is, there's not much to be invented anymore" but if we add "with little effort" (i.e. reaching for the low-hanging fruit), we might actually be it.

Re: Low-hanging fruit

#12

Post by sigilis »

The idea that picking low hanging fruit is bad is very confusing. We should pick those fruit and explore the possibilities of what we have now.

It’s not like big ideas are illegal. Anyone who has one finds themselves in an incredible environment to try them. Money may be less free than a few years ago, but you can still get funding for promising sounding stuff without having to deliver much in advance. More people than ever have access to the types of equipment needed to make hardware and software. Heck, today’s Phillip K Dick could self publish if others didn’t see the value in their work.

We do have incredible new technologies and big projects happening right now, too. Decarbonizing the electrical grid is a truly gigantic project that seems to be happening despite the best efforts of some to stop it. Personalized cancer antibodies are saving lives that would not have made it otherwise. We’re making strides into understanding what it means to be conscious and intelligent through AI research, even judging current efforts to be insufficient is a kind of philosophical argument that is common now. Talking about the death of space exploration as we launch more sophisticated and numerous payloads than ever into orbit is just absurd. Private companies are in a space race, for crying out loud.

This article seems to be misguided, an assessment of someone who is looking at two decades of progress in the past and judging it against this year, which just started. Look at 2004 to now and tell me that the world hasn’t changed.

Re: Low-hanging fruit

#13

Post by southernplaces7 »

mcbishop wrote: post #9

> we're consuming tons of compute power to build bullshit-spewing chatbots ChatGPT has become really valuable for me during novel programming... so this sentiment annoyed me a bit.

Doesn't change the fact that AI has indeed spawned no shortage of bullshit-spewing chatbots across the board.

Re: Low-hanging fruit

#14

Post by mcbishop »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #13
mcbishop wrote: post #9

> we're consuming tons of compute power to build bullshit-spewing chatbots ChatGPT has become really valuable for me during novel programming... so this sentiment annoyed me a bit.

Doesn't change the fact that AI has indeed spawned no shortage of bullshit-spewing chatbots across the board.

Yeah, true.

Re: Low-hanging fruit

#15

Post by aredox »

> like in the 60s and 70s, an overwhelming majority of advances originate in the US

A lot of those advances were due to European immigrants educated pre-WWII in the best European universities emigrating just before, during and just after the war.

The US space program relied heavily on those scientists. Same for the US nuclear program. Two icons of the 60s-70s progress.

Re: Low-hanging fruit

#17

Post by 20after4 »

javajosh wrote: post #6

The urge to do more and explore exists, but it is not the centralized monolith it once was, nor does it occupy the mainstream imagination like it once did. In fact, I believe that the internet has destroyed the very notion of "mainstream". Culture is reduced to is lowest common denominator: money-mediated commerce. Capital does battle with itself in the infospace to manufacture consent, and capital's tools are so eff…

This sounds wonderful. What is step 1?

It seems overwhelmingly difficult to make real progress towards anything like this with so much money/power entrenched behind the status quo.

Re: Low-hanging fruit

#18

Post by javajosh »

20after4 wrote: post #17
javajosh wrote: post #6

The urge to do more and explore exists, but it is not the centralized monolith it once was, nor does it occupy the mainstream imagination like it once did. In fact, I believe that the internet has destroyed the very notion of "mainstream". Culture is reduced to is lowest common denominator: money-mediated commerce. Capital does battle with itself in the infospace to manufacture consent, and capital's tools are so eff…

This sounds wonderful. What is step 1? It seems overwhelmingly difficult to make real progress towards anything like this with so much money/power entrenched behind the status quo.

The idea is just a seed. To make it grow, first you must articulate it, and share it, and - this is important - try to approximate it in your own life. Eat your own dogfood, so to speak. It means ignoring paid-for speech in all mediums in your own life. Find out how it feels, what the trade-offs are. It will also highlight the ambiguities of the rule, something to keep in mind when articulating an actual law (which should be short, like the first 10 amendments.)

Changing the law within current bounds will be difficult, because of money. However I believe that the body politic is ready for extreme change, and going against vested interests would be a selling point, rather than a weakness. There should be an organization with a good name, a catch phrase, a logo, a hashtag, akin to, for example, the FSF or EFF, but for speech in general. "Money doesn't speak!" for example. "Hush, money!" is a fun pun. "Get capital out of the capitol!" It's not clear if this could be done at a local level, since opponents can challenge such laws in court and probably win. It may require an actual amendment. Note that, as a happy side-effect, such an amendment would immediately obviate Citizen's United.

Re: Low-hanging fruit

#19

Post by netsharc »

>There is one major non-commercial entity on the internet making encyclopedic information available freely, and another for making research available freely. Both have high operating costs, and time will tell if donations will be enough to support them.

I'm not sure what the second org is, but isn'it so that the first org is filled with leeches pretending the org needs donations, while filling their pockets with those donations...

OK, maybe not directly filling their pockets... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=don%27t+donate+to+wikipedia&&ia=we...

Re: Low-hanging fruit

#20

Post by mnky9800n »

082349872349872 wrote: post #10
unsupp0rted wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, in Star Trek humans “grew out of our infancy” by having WW3 and the eugenics wars, then by one genius creating a propulsion technology just to get rich, which luckily drew the attention of coincidentally passing benevolent space aliens. It was all carnage + greed + razor-thin luck. None of it was intentional growth.

Not to mention that we seem to be in the Mirror Universe (including the popularity of goatees)...

Who has a goatee?
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