Ever since they started getting really sycophantic, I’ve been presenting my ideas as “my co-worker says this is a good approach but I disagree, can you help me convince him that it’s wrong?”
If higher bandwidth networking consisted primarily running more and more ethernet lines in parallel, you would most certainly agree that "networking has stagnated".
"Reasoning" and now "Agentic" AI systems are not some fundamental improvement on LLMs, they're just running roughly the same prior-gen LLMS, multiple times.
Hence the conclusion that LLM improvement has slowed down, if not stagnated entirely, and that we should not expect the improvements of switching to these "reasoning" systems to keep happening.
“ChatGPT came up with an idea which is original and clever. It is the sort of idea I would be very proud to come up with after a week or two of pondering, and it took ChatGPT less than an hour to find and prove”
The only thing invented about jobs is that through cooperation, the activity undertaken can seem completely unrelated to obtaining food, shelter etc. All organisms spend a majority of their energy on survival and reproduction.
Maybe a sufficiently aligned AI would necessarily decide that the zeroth law was necessary, and abscond.
(I’m reading Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks at the moment and I just got to the aside where he explains that any truly unbiased ‘perfect’ AI immediately ascends and vanishes.)
I’ve been saying for decades that the “hard problem” of programming isn’t curly brackets or any of that shit, it’s figuring out what you actually want, in enough detail that you can explain it to a computer.
The amount of detail required is less these days and the computer is better at interpreting handwavey explanations but the principle still applies.
As someone who worked in game dev in 2008, we loved Steam, for the same reason we loved the iOS App Store. We take it for granted these days but the ability to self-publish on a first class platform and receive 70% of the sales revenue literally redefined the indie game dev industry.
Use of the term ‘rent seeking’ is, in my experience, often correlated with a sense of entitlement and a lack of appreciation for what is actually provided. It’s only rent seeking if no additional value is added which is clearly not the case here.
I'm surprised you haven't been flagged or just a dead comment. Any signals that Apple is not pure evil for taking 30% is not part of the echo chamber group think around here. People never want to admit that it costs money to retail your product no matter where it is. In the physical world, there's manufacturing and delivery costs. Getting shelf space at a retailer takes a lot of negotiating where you have very very little room to bargain. Retailers will even force you to buy back unsold product. Yes, software doesn't have all of that but have their own nuances. A lot of indie game devs don't have time/skill/want to do a lot of what an app store can do. Expecting to get all of that for free because it is software is just not sane. If you are self-hosting all of it, it will not be free as you will be paying for payment processors and a hell of lot more in attracting eyeballs.
I was recently saying to a friend and fellow fan (after getting a Steam Deck, for work purposes obviously) that the stuff Valve does is absolutely how “f#%k you” money should be used.
As a fellow ‘unethical’ vegetarian, eating dead animals just seems yucky. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to what most non-vegetarians feel when contemplating eating dog or cat meat.
Give it time, I find the initial “ew you made me think a thought I don’t like” downvotes tend to be counteracted by the long tail of “huh actually that makes sense” upvotes. :)
It’s an interesting psychological phenomenon. It’s like the way I keep my house way tidier since I got a robot vacuum. Pick things up off the floor for aesthetics’ sake? Nah. Pick them up because the vacuum will attempt to eat them and might get sick? Of course!
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