I had a thought about AI - suppose they are successful at making software engineers obsolete - not totally but enough that the field becomes another moderately paying shitty job only done by people who couldn't figure out what they wanted to do or who are very passionate about some obscure thing for some reason - like geology for example, instead of a meal ticket to the upper middle class and a well-paying career. Th…
Yes you are right. This is Marx 101 and has been understood for 170 years. It's called the increasing organic composition of capital and drives the declining rate of profit that in turn drives imperialism, the declassing of the western industrial proletariat, and the march to world war.
We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.
Microwaves are pretty terrible, and proof that wide consumer adoption does not really indicate quality or suggest that consumers adopt technology which _should_ exist.
The generations of microwave after the first few were fantastic. They did what they were supposed to and lasted decades. Once that reputation was solidified, manufacturers began cutting corners, leaving us with the junk of today.
The same thing happened with web search and social media. Now, those selfsame companies are trying to get us to adopt AI. Even if it somehow manages to fulfill its promise, it will only be for a time. Cost-cutting will degrade the service.
Many people use AI as the source for knowledge. Even though it is often wrong or misleading, it's advice is better on average than their own judgement or the judgement of people they know. When an AI is "smarter" than 95%? of the population, even if it does not reach superintelligence, will be a very big deal.
Or the AI is patient enough to be the rubber duck, whereas asking the person you know knows the answer will result in them shutting you down after the first follow-up question.
The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:
I'm about as cynical as they come, but it has to be said that something like 99.9999% of all fundamental technologies are completely public at this point. Humans in the ancient past were unlikely to be that dramatically different in terms of present humans in terms of intellectual ability, but were held back by a lack of knowledge. For instance, we still use steel - and for 99% of humanity's existence nobody knew how…
>Like I mean who in their right mind would have left the basic oasis of Africa to go freeze their ass off and struggle just to live in the inhospitable areas up north?
I don't know that this is the correct characterization of how out-of-Africa migrations progressed. Youth (and people with the influence to shield themselves from danger) are expeditious, families and societies head where living looks to be easier and away from where living looks to be hard, whatever the pressure may be.
The printing press and communications technology. Prior to that everything was run by the king who was chosen by God himself.
The printing press may have started by moving things away from the existing power base, but it very quickly got used by the existing power base, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregation_of_the_Vatican_Pr... And printing presses themselves ended up being licensed by the state, e.g. this in England: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
Not to come down on either side, but I am begging commenters to refrain from using a Eurocentric lens when discussing a technology that wasn't even invented in Europe.
“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…
Yeah, I'll gladly AI-gen code, but I still write docs by hand. Have yet to see one good AI generated doc, they're all garbage.
Incidentally, I just spent some time yesterday with Gemini and Grok writing a first draft of docs for a complex codebase. The end result is far more useful and complete than anything I could have possibly produced without AI in the same amount of time, and I didn't even have to learn Mermaid syntax to fill the docs with helpful visual aids.
Of course it's a collaborative process — you can't just tell it to document the code with no other information and expect it to one-shot exactly what you wanted — but I find that documentation is actually a major strength of LLMs.
The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:
I'm about as cynical as they come, but it has to be said that something like 99.9999% of all fundamental technologies are completely public at this point. Humans in the ancient past were unlikely to be that dramatically different in terms of present humans in terms of intellectual ability, but were held back by a lack of knowledge. For instance, we still use steel - and for 99% of humanity's existence nobody knew how…
>A human who spent a year dedicating himself to consuming freely accessible information, who was then warped back into the past, could send humanity forward by tens of thousands of years - all by himself.
Only recently in my life have I developed an appreciation for fiction, because it contains deep insights into human behavior. I often fantasize about traveling back to the past, and explaining to folks that we've been to the moon, explored the planets, etc. It's a fun thought exercize, but I think the "reality" of such an experience would be more like this:
“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…
As trite as it is, it really is a skill issue still due to us not having properly figured out the UI. Claude Code and others are a step in the right direction but you still have to learn all of the secret motions and ceremony. Features like plan mode, compact, CLAUDE.md files, switching models, using images, including specific files, skills and MCPs are all attempts to improve the interface but nothing is completely figured out yet. You still need to do a lot of context engineering and know what resources, examples, docs and scope to use and how to orchestrate the aforementioned features to get good results. You also need to bring a lot of your own knowledge and tools like being fastidious with version control and being able to write extremely well defined specifications and tasks. In short, you need to be an expert in both software engineering as well as LLM driven development and even then it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot by making a small mistake.
The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:
I'm about as cynical as they come, but it has to be said that something like 99.9999% of all fundamental technologies are completely public at this point. Humans in the ancient past were unlikely to be that dramatically different in terms of present humans in terms of intellectual ability, but were held back by a lack of knowledge. For instance, we still use steel - and for 99% of humanity's existence nobody knew how…
I quite like the inhospitable areas up north but they required the invention of a kind of tech in the form of warm clothing and housing. At the current rate of progress we'll have well insulated houses in England quite soon. Re:
>this weird society where ... we spend inordinate amounts of time ... shit posting
human life is a strange business that has come about as a fleeting side effect of eons of DNA reproduction. I think things could maybe be improved there.
I'm about as cynical as they come, but it has to be said that something like 99.9999% of all fundamental technologies are completely public at this point. Humans in the ancient past were unlikely to be that dramatically different in terms of present humans in terms of intellectual ability, but were held back by a lack of knowledge. For instance, we still use steel - and for 99% of humanity's existence nobody knew how…
>Like I mean who in their right mind would have left the basic oasis of Africa to go freeze their ass off and struggle just to live in the inhospitable areas up north? I don't know that this is the correct characterization of how out-of-Africa migrations progressed. Youth (and people with the influence to shield themselves from danger) are expeditious, families and societies head where living looks to be easier and a…
I read a description of this somewhere. Just moving a few km per generation, while being able to maintain direct links to your previous home, would push humans to the extents of the globe over tens of thousands of years.