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I’m suprised nobody has mentioned that Claude is the realization of all this blockchain work - an internet computer you rent time from where the computation is measured in tokens :)
You just described time-sharing. Cryptocurrency mining is much different, in that you can commit computation resources and never get paid.
But time sharing was never as global and accessible. It was a group in a company or in a university sharing a specific machine.
The currency discussion is different too. Time sharing was just a local fee. Now people are talking about the tokens themselves can do for them.
Feels like a false equivalency. It's just my experience, but I've completely ignored crypto and the metaverse, and I don't get the sense I'm missing out on much. In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose…
This depends very much on your line of work. As a freelancer I do a bit of everything, and I’ve seen places where LLM breezes through and gets me what I want quickly, and times where using an LLM was a complete waste of time.
Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster.
Designing a new SLAM algorithm? Probably LLMs will spin around in circles helplessly. That being said, that was my experience several years ago… maybe state of the art has changed in the computer vision space.
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
This line, as one example:
> For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.
Like a lot of tech Flash had its moment in the sun and then faded away, but that “moment” lasted a decade, and plenty of people got their start because of or built successful businesses around it. Did they have to pivot as Flash waned? Sure, but change is part of life.
I’m sorry but I find the take expressed in this piece to be absolutely miserable and uninspiring.
But, hey, congratulations on the 20:20 hindsight, I suppose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know what not to invest in then? Bitcoin wasn't the only cryptocurrency fifteen years ago. It wasn't even the first digital currency. If you hop on every bandwagon, you'll go broke far more then you become wealthy. Just look at all the people who poured money into NFTs or digital real estate in the metaverse or Dogecoin or whatever. It's easy to say "well of course I would have invested in Google in 1999"…
I don't think you're understanding my point. Hopping on the bandwagon is explicitly not "maximizing your foothold while minimizing your downside," nor is it early-stage almost by definition. An early stage technology with an uncertain future cannot have a bandwagon. I think the logical thing to do is to invest a minor amount of time/money across a broad spectrum of new promising tech. If you had been aware of and bou…
If only Mt Gox didn't vaporize all of my bitcoin in the early 2010's :(
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an Acti…
A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid. I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!