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Some things just take time

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Re: Some things just take time

#121

Post by bigstrat2003 »

titanomachy wrote: post #6

> We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.

It would be more accurate to say "we value these things highly". Most people don't give a damn about your sweater, but it's probably extremely valuable to you precisely because of the time your grandmother put into it.

Re: Some things just take time

#122

Post by mgfist »

roughly wrote: post #107
nabbed wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.

It's still faster and cheaper to just build the right thing to begin with. As the old saying goes, spend your time sharpening your ax.

Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right

Re: Some things just take time

#123

Post by vessenes »

titanomachy wrote: post #6

> We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.

The point of the essay is good. You called out exactly my reaction; we value those things because of the marketing dollars that went in to them. As a wealthy friend from Geneva said to me once, “Look around this dinner party - the Swiss here have either an Apple watch or nothing on their wrist.” Swiss watches are an export good, and Hermes is a luxury brand. Both of generally good quality. And much, much better marketing.

Re: Some things just take time

#124

Post by fc417fc802 »

nabbed wrote: post #102
Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.

The outcome of that approach depends entirely on the broader process. Imagine golf but you refuse to swing with anything less than maximum strength to avoid wasting time.

Discovery is great and all but if what you discover is that you didn't aim well to begin with that's not all that useful.

Re: Some things just take time

#127

Post by Lerc »

Is this not an observation bias?

Consider the idea of trying to determine how quickly an unknown number of timers will go ping, It could be 10,000 timers that go ping when finished or 1,000,000 timers that go ping when finished. I don't know when they are going to go ping, just that they all the timers are running at different speeds spread over some distribution.

After one time period, 5,000 pings have been detected. Should you conclude that timers are pinging fairly quickly?

You cannot tell the overall duration of timers if you don't know the number of timers there are out there. Your only data that the timer exists is the ping, consequently you cannot tell if a small population is at high speed or a large population is at a moderate speed. In both cases the data you receive are the fastest of the population.

In other words we haven't yet seen what the 10 year project made using these tools is like (or even if it exists/will exist), because they haven't been around for 10 years.

Re: Some things just take time

#128

Post by timacles »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #13

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

What society and America is about to realize is that it really doesn’t matter how productive you are at software and technological innovations when systemic things outside of the economic system are eroding.

It doesn’t matter how fast we can make our widgets and chatbots when what you need is to have a self sufficient workforce. We have outsourced everything material and valuable for society. Now we are left with industries of gambling, ad machines and pharmaceuticals with a government that is functionally bankrupt and politicians that have completely sold out

Re: Some things just take time

#129

Post by timacles »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #89
Philpax wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies for the obligatory question, but what did you try to do, and with which AI did you try to do it with?

Well following advice from folk on here earlier, I thought I'd start small and try to get it to write some code in Go that would listen on a network socket, wait for a packet with a bunch of messages (in a known format) come in, and split those messages out from the packet. I ended up having to type hundreds of lines of description to get thousands of lines of code that doesn't actually work, when the one I wrote mys…

Hate to pull the skill issue card here, but that is a trivial problem that can be one shotted with almost any model with

Re: Some things just take time

#130

Post by fluidcruft »

daveguy wrote: post #76
ghurtado wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to understand the definition of a common term such as "status symbol" though. Understanding words does not require being impressed by anything, nor caring about the opinion of kids.

If most people are thinking "whoopdedoo... you clearly have more money than sense" when they see your status symbol, is it still a status symbol?

Status symbols signal different status in different contexts. Some contexts (mostly lower middle class and below) are impressed by Rolex watches because they are expensive and the struggle for money forms a collective experience.

The old rich doesn't give a shit about Rolex watches beyond noticing the newb rich using them to tell on themselves.

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