The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
> If a creator doesn’t specify whether or not they used AI, but our systems detect significant photorealistic AI use, we will now automatically apply a label.
It doesn't seem clear if this sweep will pick up AI-generated maths, physics and CS videos on YouTube, which use AI-generated scripts, AI-generated voices and graphical animations which are presumably produced from AI-generated code for input to Manim or the like. Or all the AI-generated documentaries about military vehicles which apparently use a similar mix of AI-generated scripts and voiceovers combined with old video footage and photos pulled from archives at the AI's direction. These have been absolutely flooding their categories on YouTube for a while now.
Odd that it doesn’t mention Metal Gear Solid, which was casting doubt on the morality of the player character’s actions and painting boss fights as tragic affairs back in 1998, even though it does mention MGS love letter Spec Ops: The Line (and even though MGS is a media darling and probably significantly overdiscussed in general).
I think the article is intentionally focused, if it were to mention every game that is related we'd be here for a while.
That said, this is a common thing in articles about e.g. video games - "I wish they mentioned X". I too wish that but at the same time, one needs limits.
MGS (and MGS2) are prominent enough, and directly relevant enough, and predate Shadow of the Colossus enough, that not mentioning them is a conspicuous omission, and not just something it would have been nice to add. In fact not mentioning them makes the article somewhat misleading, especially when at the same time it chooses to highlight Spec Ops: The Line.
You really can't mention MSGS without giving due mention to DOOM, which owes its existence to the popularity of Zork. And you can't mention that without D&D, but you have to preface every mention of D&D with historical war board-gaming and... chess and Go.
I am afraid that you have missed my point. DOOM is famous for many things, but encouraging a really-makes-ya-think response to the death of its NPCs is not one of them. If it were then it probably would cry out for a mention in an article about games which made you feel bad to kill bosses, yes.
I think that is one of the things I've always loved about the Metal Gear Solid games. Killing NPCs is something you can definitely decide to do, but there is almost always a consequence for it. The games' mechanics reward less violence. But is still a choice for the player to make on which path, and set of consequences, they want to have.
> A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids.
Hmm. What’s the general belief about Toby Ord’s “Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially?” https://www.tobyord.com/writing/hourly-costs-for-ai-agents among those who are well-equipped to judge? Is it seen as wrong or disproven or unlikely? Because if not—if indeed recent LLM capability advances have likely relied on increases in inference cost per run which can’t be much further sustained—then it seems remiss not to mention that if you point to those advances to claim that the exponential trend remains on track.
> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable.
Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)
Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them.
How do you explain to a junior this pile of messy code isn’t crap but is actually years of integrated knowledge ? That the most common principles discussed in computer science (OOP, SOLID, DRY etc.) are actually just little guides that aren’t to be taken to the extremes ?
A decade ago, I was sitting in on a meeting about a rewrite and, before I could say anything, someone in the first year of her career asked why anyone thought a rewrite would be any cleaner once all the edge cases were handled. Afterwards, I asked her where she learned this. She said "I don't know, it just seems kind of obvious." She went on to be a great engineer and is now a great manager.
I work on internal facing software and every rewrite I've seen in 20 years suffers from the same symptoms. The code/system is a mess because it has been exposed to reality for a decade. Reality is messy. That's why they pay us money, believe it or not.
Greenfield guy comes in, promises the world, and starts from some first principles white papered architecture. It's really lovely until they onboard the first user. Then they slowly commit all the "sins" (features that drive revenue) of the first system.
The firm is stuck supporting N systems indefinitely because the perfect new system takes so long to cover even 30% of the original system use cases, that management takes a flier on.. bear with me.. a second rewrite. Now they have 3 systems.
I've seen more 3rd systems than I've seen actual decommissioning of original systems into a single clean new system.
The answer is chipping away, modularizing, and replacing piecemeal Ship of Theseus style. But that does not drive big hires and big promotions.
My team lead has worked on the same software for 30 years. He has the ability to hear me discuss a bug I noticed, and then pinpoint not only the likely culprit, but the exact function that's causing it.
I do the same thing in a project I’ve worked on for 25 years. I’ve had mediocre at best results with AI. It’s useful to discuss concepts with, but the code never handles the nuances of the edge cases.
Yep this is like comparing master craftsmanship with a production line. You're gonna get good attention to detail and a masterpiece from one, and a limited thing that will break after few years from the other. But for majority of use cases the second one is enough. And pointing out the master craftsmanship is "better" is besides the point.
And with one you need to train a guy for 25 years and with the other you need plan mode for a few minutes and then it runs 24/7.
Do we? We have many buildings built and very little master masons or whatever nowadays. The amount of craftsmen needed to build a 10 story building is very limited. That's what we should aim for software, much less experts needed for the same outcome so more people can benefit from software.
I want the people building the buildings I live, work and shop in to know what they’re doing so those buildings don’t fall down or let in the wind and rain or require too much maintenance.
And the equivalent for software. It’s usable, intuitive, responsive, stats up and running, and doesn’t leak my private data.
No house I ever lived in was ever made by experts. The apartment building I grew up in was all built by minimum wage guys that may or not even speak the language of the building overseer and had zero specific training or certifications. Some architect somewhere did the plans for a standard building, which the developer purchased and just used.
Then the only "experts" (not even close, just a guy with a form and some technical training) are the building inspectors who come at the end to verify if some stuff is done up to code.
Other than the original architect who draw the plans that got used for many buildings and the electrical engineer that cleared the electrical, no experts were involved. This is basically how the whole city and most of the country was built.
There's no expert mason or painter or whatever involved. Just a dude that can hold a paint roller. That's the same as going from a craftsman programmer to some dude with claude. Individual quality goes down, but more importantly price goes down way more and so many more people get access to much better quality than having nothing.
there is a large incentive for computer programmers to build themselves up in importance. higher wages, better love lives, more status. but most software is pretty mundane and straight forward, or at least should be. fancy architectures rarely pay off and the best solutions are sometimes the most obvious. although i could be suffering from that phenomenon that people in maths have where they struggle to understand then once they grasp it they feel dumb like "ofc i should have known that!"
Yeah... in my experience people who code like that 'successfully' make modifications that fix an immediate problem while kicking another bug or two further down the road in a never-ending sunk-cost-fallacy of job security...
I have really tried as an "old" person in the field to try and pass on the stuff I've learned, but "craft" and such really has absolutely no home in modern dev culture. The people who care about history, the craft, etc. are increasingly rare.
The origin of 'dark DNA' begins to make more sense through this sort of lens, except the system somehow maintained a level of compensation to fix all its flaws.
My "presumably" is whether the book recognises the extent to which NeXT was founded basically as an attempt to complete/reboot Apple's "Big Mac" project. The usual story you get is "something something '3M', and post-Apple Jobs decided it would be nice to do a workstation aimed at the educational market". In fact it's pretty clear that Jobs was persuaded to start NeXT after Rich Page (p. 195 in Isaacson), and IIRC also other people on the Big Mac team, begged him to provide a lifeboat for Big Mac.
(I am not an expert on anything.) One happy circumstance here is that while the RAM cartel is chasing Big AI's money today, in the medium term its self-interest probably makes it a supporter of local AI. A new, compelling reason to have 128GiB, 256GiB or more of VRAM on all your devices? You can be sure that the dollar signs are glowing in their eyes already. The less efficient use of VRAM by personal devies (any given device's VRAM will be mostly idle much of the time) tends to make it more attractive, all else being equal (though of course it isn't) compared to the centralised systems run by engineers and accountants striving all day to maximise ROI; and in any case, since the short-run supply constraints on RAM go away in the longer term, the RAM manufacturers will be able to supply both. My guess is that you can probably also also explain Apple's AI strategy (sit tight and wait for Moore's Law to make local AI more viable) and maybe even nVidia's (lay the groundwork for a gradual switch from selling shovels to the army to selling shovels at Home Depot over time, at least as a Plan B) in similar terms.
Just because we'll have to pay for the hardware, doesn't mean we'll have meaningful control. Look at what happened with phones - weak and limited slaves to the mothership, secured against pesky users with powerful encryption, yet costing more than a vastly superior laptop; quasi-mandatory platforms for highly addictive experiences, centered around the flow of information.
And now with LLMs we can create even more fabulously addictive experiences, even more finely tuned information flows, even more treacherous servants. I very much doubt that we'll be allowed full control of it all. Every effort will be spent to centralize power, and every effort will be spent to extract as much cash as possible from us for the privilege.
Phones are such a travesty because they're so incredibly overpowered. I think there's a lot of people out there where their iPhone has more compute than their laptop or desktop, but it can't do 1/10th the amount of stuff. What a waste!
They're actually underpowered because they can't sustain that full compute over time like a desktop can, or even a laptop to some extent. That's a key limitation for AI.
That policy itself seems wrong though. It seems to imply that anything someone claims about themselves on a personal blog doesn't need verification.
People often have a vested interest to lie about themselves, and often people may not remember historical details about their lives as accurately as they believe they do.
That said, "no really, I am still alive" seems like something that should be trusted as a source.
But remember: once again, don't simply get angry at Google the institution. Get angry at Page and Brin personally. They have the power to prevent this, a power they were careful to preserve when they gave Google its IPO. They are fully responsible for Google's choices here. But, partly because they aren't constantly jumping up and down drawing attention to themselves on social media, they've tended to escape the same personal scrutiny given to eg. Elon Musk. That needs to end.
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