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autonomousErwin

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I had 2 MacBook Pros. One 2024 and one 2019. The 2024 one would connect fine to the internet, the 2019 one would not.

After pasting in the airportd logs of both (into ChatGPT and Gemini) it found it was down to band switching (2.4GHz and 5GHz) through some really old error code.

This fixed a problem that had plagued me for >12 months. Really magical feeling it got in on first try.

I think there's some goldilocks speed limit for using these tools relative to your skillset. When you're building, you forget that you're also learning - which is why I actually favour some AI code editors that aren't as powerful because it gets me to stop and think.

I think this is the wrong way to think about it. In this case the "intelligent people who are wasted on finance and ads" are drawn to high-status, low-risk, well-paid jobs, with interesting problems to solve.

If you want to solve meaningful problems you need a different kind of intelligence; you need to be open to risk, have a lot of naivety, not status orientated, and a rare ability to see the forest among the trees (i.e. an interesting problem isn't necessarily a important one).

I'm becoming more convinced that this kind of rhetoric is usually peddled by individuals who haven't actually built anything notable (granted, that's most of us).

If all you're doing is using AI to build products, by definition, you're gravitating to the mean.

The AI doesn't care about a delightful product, it cares about satisfying its objective function and the deeper you go the more the two will diverge simply because building a good product is really complex and there are many many paths in the decision maze.

This reminds me of the Belgium 2003 election that was impossibly skewered by a supernova light years away sending charged particles which manage to get through our atmosphere (allegedly) and flipping a bit. Not the only case it's happened.

I wonder if not just checking the site every day (or minute ) would solve for this.

It's not necessarily the structure of the source data (the DOM, the HTML etc.) but rather the translator that needs to be contractually consistent. The translator in this case is the service for the endpoints.

Human 1 year ago

I thought this too, but I imagine it's a bit of pathetic fallacy for the reader's benefit else it would be (ironically) quite a boring read for us from the machine's perspective.

How do you know it's incompatible with the actual universe instead of our current understanding of the universe?

Take us for example, we're communicating instantly (for practical purposes) using thinking machines - how would that not seem like magic to someone thousands of years ago?

My point is, we don't know what the tribe have behind the bush. It's the equivalent of the Mayans wondering what's over that hill and then finding the Spanish with gunpowder, horses, and steel armour.

Isn't that the point of the dark forest theory? It's not the fact that there is a dangerous tribe behind a bush it's more that you don't know if they're dangerous or not so you have to err on the side of caution - because you don't know if they're doing the same.

It's the whole chain of suspicion theory that it's safer to shoot first and then ask questions later because the speed you can communicate is the same speed you can mount an attack.

I think I know what you mean, in an ideal world - we wouldn't have bugs. You'd build a feature and it would work forever but that's rarely the case.

I think of it as "offensive" and "defensive" building, ideally you want to be on the offensive (i.e. building stuff that wasn't there yesterday) but you have to balance it with good defence (i.e. adding a certain type of anti-fragility to your system by fixing bugs due to your features being exposed to the real world).

Saying this, I've never met a good engineer who wasn't very good at troubleshooting so perhaps it's more of a consequence of building than a skillset.

This is a great read and exactly where I think the global economy is going - instead of large companies you'll have millions of medium sized businesses run by small teams still making a bit of a dent in their own niche universe.

I do disagree with the work-life balance part, I struggle to see how you can build something (and maintain it at such a high level) without intense focus and commitment.

I have a feeling people are overthinking the whole "we need to have a moat" and really the best moat you can have until you're a multi-million/billion dollar business is your craftsmanship (as silly as it sounds).

Good UI/UX is still the edge as technology becomes more of a commodity.