I don't really understand why they call it the end of the digital revolution.
Meaning software has eaten the world and there's nothing left to eat.
AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
161–170 of 288 posts
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
full disclosure I work at Whatnot but that sort of thing is a large part of the appeal of Whatnot to me, that people are showing off the stuff live on stream and you can ask questions about it
This whole concept of selling things in video format seems so alien to me. I didn't believe when someone told me they shop on TikTok now. It already takes me ages to browse through a gallery of items, I couldn't imagine going through items video by video.
I’ve been car shopping recently, and I’ve found myself deliberately seeking out videos, because I’ve found that it’s very hard to get a sense of what the thing is really going to look like from static photos. Unstaged photos make everything look uglier, staged photos require adjusting for the unknown staging.
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#163I'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.
We're racing to build hell.
We have been since we bound consumption to the internet. All of this was inevitable after that.
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#164I think it's clear to me that AI will be both things: 1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the contraction of all things horse-related when the internal combustion engine came around but- it will also be 2) new technologies and ideas enabled by a completely new set of capabilities The real question is if the economic boost from the latter outpaces the los…
> AI pessimism is hard to understand Well, it really isn’t. First, this entire post makes two assumptions: 1) that AI adds more value to the process than it removes and 2) that it’s sustainable. It’s not pessimism to want to validate these first. Are AI “gains” really transformative or simply random opportunities for automation which we can achieve by other means anyway? Can the world continue to afford “AI as a serv…
> Are AI “gains” really transformative
They're transformative in the sense that will shrink the optimal team size, but I don't expect the jobs to actually go away unless these things both get substantially better at engineering (they're good at generating code but that is like 20% of engineering at best) and we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context.
Really basic stuff gets a lot easier but the needle doesn't move much on the harder stuff. Without some sort of "memory" or continuous feedback system, these models don't learn from mistakes or successes which means humans have to be the cost function.
Maybe it's just because I'm burnt out or have a miner RSI at the moment, but it definitely saves me a bit of time as long as I don't generate a huge pile and actually read (almost) everything the models generate. The newer models are good at following instructions and pattern matching on needs if you can stub things out and/or write down specs to define what needs to happen. I'd say my hit rate is maybe 70%
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? How long you've been a developer? I've been almost exclusively doing "agent coding" for the last year + some months, been a professional developer for a decade or something. Tried just now to write some random JavaScript, C#, Java, Rust and Clojure "manually" and seems my muscle memory works just as well as two years ago. I'm wondering if this is something that hits new developers faster than more experienced…
> random JavaScript, C#, Java, Rust and Clojure "manually" Right, sounds very credible to me. What did you write, an addition function in each of those?
Lol, thanks (I guess?), but really isn't that hard. I don't think I know a single experienced developer who doesn't know at least 3-4 languages. I probably could add another couple of languages in there, but those are the ones I currently know best. Besides, once you've picked up a few language, most of them look and work more similarly to each other than different. From my lisp-flavored lenses, C# and Java are basically the same language for most intents and purposes.
I wrote a little toy-calculator in each, ended up being ~250 LOC in each of them, not exactly the biggest test but large enough to see if my muscle memory still works which I was happy to discover it still did.
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#166I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.
All skill degrade with disuse. For example, here in Canada we have observed a literacy and numeracy skills curve that peaks with post-secondary education and declines with retirement.[0] Use it or lose it, as it were. 0: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241210/dq241...
That is one factor, but it’s not the whole thing. The other key element is “cognitive offloading” where your brain stops doing stuff when it thinks it is redundant.
This is similar to the photo-taking impairment effect where people will remember an event more poorly if they took photos at the event. Their brain basically subconsciously decides it doesn’t need to remember the event because the camera will remember the event instead.
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#167Probably a bit unrelated but I wondering if there is any economic theory that actually predicted something for real rather than extrapolate trends from past data in hindsight - even if crossing different kinds of events.
Honest question, I'm not trying to mock economists or anything like that.
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that most people are pretty short-sighted about the utility cases right now (which is understandable given the negative feelings about a lot of what's currently going on). There are a lot of really useful things that were impossible before. But none of these use cases are "easy," and they all take years of engineering to implement. So, all we see right now are trashy, vibe-code style "startups" rather than th…
With this said, a lot of people are likely worried about being eaten by whales when it comes to doing things with AI. It's kind of like dealing with Amazon, or any other company that has both compute and the ability to sell the kind of product you make. Said AI providers can sell you the compute to make the product, or they can make the product themselves with discounted compute and eat all the profits you'd make.
This is always a worry, but typically, being first to market is the most important part. As long as you can scale quickly and maintain your edge, this doesn't seem like such a big deal.
However, my product is so far removed from anything these companies would make, on top of that I'm using open-source models (e.g., oss gpt 120b is really, really good). I don't use any of the main providers like AWS, etc., and the underlying AI systems are only about 5% of the product. I need it for the idea to work, but it is a tiny part of the full offering. I can't really imagine it would make any sense for Amazon, etc., to compete on something like this.
But yes, in the end, huge conglomerates with infinite money can destroy smaller entrepreneurs - but that's not really any different than it's been for decades pre-AI.
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#169AI is destroying the economic premise that has drawn so much investment into Silicon Valley. It's going from a capital light business model with network driven moats that allow market domination, to a capital heavy, high burn-rate model with the potential to not only offer ZERO moat protection but destroy the ones that already exist. Cloud infrastructure + vibe coding now make it possible to quickly replace existing…
The open weight LLMs seem a prime candidate for Innovator's Dilemma style disruption.
Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
This whole concept of selling things in video format seems so alien to me. I didn't believe when someone told me they shop on TikTok now. It already takes me ages to browse through a gallery of items, I couldn't imagine going through items video by video.
I’ve been car shopping recently, and I’ve found myself deliberately seeking out videos, because I’ve found that it’s very hard to get a sense of what the thing is really going to look like from static photos. Unstaged photos make everything look uglier, staged photos require adjusting for the unknown staging.
Oh, I definitely look up products I intend to buy on YouTube. But I don't go there (or any other video platform) to discover them.