Yeah, I've been a tech nerd for decades but all the "AI" stuff really does feel like "Sooooo we're taking a type of computation that's actually bad at most things and putting it in a whole bunch of stuff to make it work worse because... if we don't the whole economy's going to crash or something?"
This is a little bit different than actually literally I vector centrality but it's very similar and so we call this technique IGEN reviews and I've become convinced that this is more or less the right way to do performance reviews.
So, it's hard to tell how much of like the loss of the past few years was AI versus the end of like zero interest rate policy and like the post-COVID crash. And I think it's more the latter, but like again, LLMs are still getting better.
But it's also your instruction budget is like if you give the model too many instructions and especially too many conflicting instructions and that's in your initial prompt and also like if you have a conversation you start going down a path and then you change your mind and you start going down a different you actually I don't want to do any of that I want to do this. It's like a it's a lot of computation the model has to do to notice that it has to ignore that whole thing.
Ahamed, the banker and investment manager whose previous book Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World covered the crash of 1929, writes well.
So a a big challenge in object-oriented programming is dividing the responsibilities because you're moving the computation to where the data is. Saying, "Well, this object does this and that object does that is a really critical decision because you want to you want the computation near to the data so that there's less coupling between them." which is a lesson that I I think uh kind of got lost in the noise. That's the fundamental design move in ob in designing object-oriented programs and I I think I stand behind that.
If this were $200 I'd complain, but not for $25. For that, it's a neat little box that maybe more people could contribute to, to make it the most handy way to jack in from a crash cart.
I think in some ways like one of the worst scenarios is a drip scenario because of the political economy piece. Right? Because like you know, people essentially what you what you might see is like people not really being unemployed in mass, but kind of like moving into sectors that pay them less money, kind of basically getting uh what happened with phone operators in in in the mid-century of the of the between 1920 and 1940, phone operators were completely automated, right? But it took 20 years even though the technology existed.
Ideas like public key cryptography are I mean, they're just incredibly deep um very non-obvious ideas uh which in some sense lay hidden uh already sort of in in the 1930s.
People will sometimes talk about um you know, a theory of everything as a potential goal for for physics. And and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is this is not true at all if you think about computer science.
And so when you take these things in combination, I am absolutely certain that the world's GDP is going to accelerate in growth. I'm absolutely certain the percentage of that GDP that will be used for computation will be 100 times more than the past
It significantly lowered the bar to production. It is how we got the whole
society to run on software. If you make it harder for hobbyists maintainers, you
are going to crash society.
So my betting is that it's mostly it is just classical computing that's going on in the brain, which suggests that all the phenomena are modelable or mimicable by a classical computer.
There’s this assumption that computation is at the base of reality, and I see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It’s something that happened after many billion years of evolution. It doesn’t happen in every physical object.
When you take venture funding, you sign up for a rocket ship ride that will either take you to the moon or to crash-land painfully back on earth. Those are the only two choices. And both rides tend to require heavy extraction of value from the customer.
Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything – just delightful, wide-ranging stuff from the surely best science-communication double-act in the world. The perfect gift for the nerd in your life.
Paypal survived the dot com crash to become a massively successful company. They also led to the Paypal Mafia, the most famous group of people formerly of the same company that went on to do other successful things. I wanted to know the story of the company and this book covers the good, the bad and the ugly of their journey to success.
I’m a code nerd and a font nerd, so I don’t take this choice lightly, but this is my favorite dev font. I love its combination of legibility and subtle personality, and plus, the code ligatures are great.
I'm currently running macOS Mojave, backed up with both Time Machine and SuperDuper to an external drive and BackBlaze to the cloud. Overkill maybe, but after a major drive crash a few years ago, I'm not taking any chances.
Covers a few theory of computation highlights. The explanations are delightful and I've watched some of the videos more than once just to watch Bernhardt explain things.
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