Software should be fun. It should make you feel something, positive hopefully. Utilitarian software is the worst. The human experience is why life is worth living (even for something as teeny tiny as a terminal).
Now recently the U.S. economy has experienced a huge positive shock to its Intelligence, with more to come. The core prediction is that this increases marginal returns, employment, and real wages in the Polanyi knowledge sector.
The deeper lesson is that education has to be research-based and proven to work measurably, not just based on positive emotions or customer satisfaction.
The most positive use case if you said, you know, what's the number one thing we could use AI for? It's not giving kids chatbots that's going to work. It's giving them an individualized lesson plan based on their level to catch them up to grade level. And that would be the single best thing we could do to fix education in America.
The 'in between' is likely to be subsumed by agents producing just-in-time UI. When you need utilitarian content or data, it'll be generated just-in-time for you. Think of the agent as the new browser in this model.
I've said like the licensable engine thing kind of was our AI transition already unfortunately and uh I regret to inform you that the news is not probably that positive.
And I do think some of that is positive and energizing, but I also think you can certainly go too far with it, and I also think the current pace is not sustainable.
It would also help if your manager said, "Well done for getting that bit done." Right? That's that's also a motivation pull to think, "Yeah, actually I don't need to get the whole piece done to get the reward of somebody identified that as a positive thing to have done."
If you start from a low baseline of performance, you might get some positive boost. It's quite small, but you might get it. But if you are actually quite a high performer, then you risk getting worse. with this is called the inverse U-shaped curve.
it is both true that you know maybe creating super intelligence will be the most important thing yet to happen in the history of business or human society and also that it will pale in comparison to some new startup something that hopefully one of you will do.
The Rumpelstiltskin effect is not a claim that receiving a diagnosis is a net benefit or a net positive. It is a claim that the mere act of receiving a diagnosis can be beneficial.
While in mathematics AI agents are starting to have a major positive impact on research (e.g. by resolving the Jacobian conjecture), the situation is very different in hep-th.
And so you kind of end up in this this bad equilibrium where everybody kind of knows that it's a bad equilibrium, but like nobody wants to break out. And I I felt like, okay, well, if I just hopefully come out and say like, look guys, let's all recognize that we're in a bad equilibrium and let's move to this different equilibrium where we're we're plotting things with an X-axis
I think like people are really important and I think we'll be more important in the future and giving people more tools to be more productive is going to be like a critical part of any kind of positive future
when I think about why it might be good to have a lot of wealth in the future as a good classical utilitarian, to me, the value is or at least one way you could have a kind of almost unsatiating uh utility function in in having wealth in the future is to create new happy beings, right? They just add to the total welfare of the world.
But my my experience pairing with a two humans and a genie or multiple genies has been very positive. And the fact that they're kind of slow is really nice. So, every time the models come out and they're faster, I'm like, "Oh, there's less time to talk."
So, I see a a big trend is the re-soloing of programming. Where a big part of extreme programming is creating a safe social environment for basically antisocial people. Not just asocial, antisocial. And the when I think about the degree of interaction on an XP team, people aren't talking to each other hours a day and happy to be doing so because it's set up for that to be a positive experience.
And unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works, and that’s how you get the most points is by being max hyperbolic.
. Saying no gracefully and firmly is one of the most important skills for a product manager to develop. This is the classic guide for learning to do so.
the coffee bed would act on these molecules by filtering them out a bit like oxygen adsorbers keep oxygen in; it just provides a gigantic maze of free surface area for them to stick on, and hopefully the microscopic fluid velocity is gentle enough to not drag them along.
Although the cross-sectional relationship between national income and fertility is negative, the longitudinal relationship between national income and fertility is positive: economic booms create baby booms, economic busts create baby busts.
the shift from 50th to 99th percentile earnings has no negative effect on women’s fertility, and unearned income for women has a neutral-to-positive effect
The panel had a generally positive view of Braintrust, highlighting its clean UI and structured approach to evaluations. The tool’s emphasis on human-in-the-loop workflows was a significant strength.
The panel had a generally positive view of Phoenix, with one panelist calling it one of his “favorite open source eval tools.” The tool is positioned as a developer-first, notebook-centric platform.
If a clinical diagnosis can have a therapeutic effect, then, at least in some instances, diagnoses are medical interventions in themselves and ought to be treated and researched as such, with an eye to both positive effects and potential iatrogenic harms.
And the impact of solar array on desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves like soil moisture retention. Um there like if you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just deploy solar panels on it and that would pay for the process.
I almost feel the term doesn't matter, what I know is by 2030 there'll be such dramatic progress. We'll be dealing with the consequences of that progress, both the positive externalities and the negative externalities that come with it in a big way by 2030. So that I strongly feel.
In a vibe coding future, companies will hopefully invest more in understanding user needs, refining the interface, and polishing details that delight users, because those are harder for AI to get right without guidance.
Reading the book had not changed my fundamental belief that, in balance, we were on a good trajectory with AI research: good for science and good for society with expected positive impacts in many domains.
Their words now
I now believe that I was wrong and short-sighted to ignore that dual-use nature. I also think I was not paying enough attention to the possibility of losing control to superhuman AIs.
Hopefully I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable.
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