echelon

I think that the fairy path of human language is going to adopt "creation" as assuming someone could have prompted it.

Nobody in the future is going to have these paragraphs-long diatribes about what does and does not constitute creation.

People are just going to say, "I made this."

And that's that. We'll judge based on the significance and novelty of the output.

Canon mountaintop photography : smartphone selfies :: Quality AI art and software : ChatGPT Miyazaki cartoons

Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".

Nobody will bicker about "created", either.

If someone in the future wants to spend a year making a stop-motion, claymation-animated feature, people will still think that's cool. But it won't stop the world when most people are using new tools.

This is sad.

I grew up watching his show on Tech TV and reading his columns in PC Magazine.

He used to butt heads with Leo Laporte and it was great:

https://youtu.be/C96YG7qzN80?t=142

Nolan made "The Odyssey". It was his vision.

Hitchcock made "Psycho".

Miyazaki made "Princess Mononoke".

While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces.

You can tell when that doesn't happen. You can tell when the producers exercise outsized control. Or when the studio controls the editing table. And it's not like that's ever kept a secret - people talk about this openly and loudly when it happens.

Musk built his empire, and even if he bought his way in, he still used his unique methodology to turn it into what it is today. "Founder Mode", if you will. Same thing with Steve Jobs.

All of this hand-wringing about who painted the shed in "The Evil Dead" doesn't matter. It's Sam Raimi's. Everyone else on set dances to the beat of his drum.

Software can (and will) be like that too.

Game design, company formation, product development, you name it.

You did not make the cheeseburger.

Yet,

Christopher Nolan made "The Odyssey"

Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma made "Ocarina of Time"

Mark Zuckerberg made "Meta"

I feel just as proud of everything I'm making with LLM, image, and video models as I do the code I wrote by hand for years and the photons I shot on film to make movies.

This is just a new higher level thing. I'm still the "director".

It's my design and my taste.

Author is right about this though,

"Didn't take long. Only about 50x longer than it would have taken Claude to do it."

I'm never writing code by hand again. I stopped in February.

Wouldn't that be crazy - a hobbyist market for H100s?

Maybe someone could start a business buying up and rehousing these.

You're joking, but perhaps LLMs will find a way to mathematically break the complexity of factorization.

Maybe they'll find a solution where P=NP.

That could really throw a wrench into the whole internet thing.

It seems they need an expert human driver for now.

Kimi is open weights and you can rent cloud compute cheaply. It's only going to get more affordable.

Once a proof of concept exists you can distill it down to something that might execute on CPU alone.

With open weights models you can build systems that rend big tech apart.

Last-gen tech has been tried for twenty years. It's not working and it has never gotten distribution.

You know what does work? Adblock. It reasons that we could build a new form of it.

I would pay for someone to build this because I'm busy building other things. I would literally commit money to anyone who suggests they would build this.

I only have so much energy to reply to all of this negativity. Half of it is being cut off at the legs by HN filters from the constant downvotes and flagging. Downvotes and flagging for attempting to be positive and excited about tech progress.

You're not going to do anything about big tech by sitting on the sidelines. I don't see anyone doing anything about it. Nobody's built websites that show people how to contact their legislators. Nobody's building alternative tech.

We have a chance to use this tech to cut off the big tech overlords. I don't see how you're all missing this. We can literally build new browsers now. It reasons that we can place filters at every level of the stack to catch the stuff we don't like and prevent it from reaching us.

For people who supposedly care so much about tech and privacy and digital freedoms, I just see complaints.

I propose a solution to neuter big tech and you label it as a filter bubble instead of a victory.

But you're probably right - I'd like to filter out every grumpy HN person with a negative outlook sentiment score and move on with my day. It'd save me time. I shouldn't be wasting any energy responding to this den of depression.

I'm earning $3m run rate from a business I launched in February and I've signed a few hundred thousand in monthly commitments for a new B2B SaaS I'm launching soon.

Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. If you don't have the vision for it, then fine. Someone else will take the opportunity.

Why is everyone here so myopic?

Why pay Kagi or whatever at all? How can you trust them or anyone, if this is your belief?

Why even pay your ISP? Just go back to candlelight and corn flakes and stay away from radio waves.

You'd better not own a smart phone if this is truly how you feel about the world, because it clashes with what you just said.

Come on.

Why make new music or new movies? The same things have been said by every previous generation. Just listen to your parents' music, right? Use the same technology, the same fashion, everything.

Why?

Because it's incremental improvement.

Because it's making a dent in the world.

Because creation feels better than consumption.

Because we're maybe 10-20 iterations away (250 years, tops?) from brain uploads and everlasting life harvesting the energy of distant stars. Or at least our descendants are. And that's pretty cool.

I want to continue to use the enterprise products paid for with billions of dollars of investment, because they still have tremendous value.

Similarly, I want to continue to use the platforms that have all the users, content, and network effects.

BUT - I'd like my own personal agent to sit between everything and strip out the nonsense before it hits my eyeballs.

Ad block used to be good enough, but we can clearly take this much further.

Ads are not the only toxic thing. The algorithm is. Attention seeking from any entity is. The whole internet is adversarial, not just one screen of one product.

An agent could sit between us and the web (or us and our apps) and strip out all the ads, strip out all the clickbait, filter out all the negativity, algo-spam, and low-value content. Calls to upgrade, cookie banners, MrBeast, whatever.

I want an agent that knows me and acts on my behalf as I browse the internet. It should see everything in my browser (or even everything on my screen) and whittles down the bullshit before it ever reaches me.

This kind of tool could focus the whole of the internet into perfect crystal clarity - into an internet whose only objective is to serve me. Certainly not an internet that can make me mad or that tries to convince me to buy things.

Something flexible like this goes beyond just search. It fixes everything on every corner of the internet.

If we treat this as a technology/browser/OS problem, then it can fix everything wholesale. I can continue to use the social media platforms and technology everyone else is using, but I won't be subjected to the bullshit. I don't have to switch to Kagi or BlueSky or whatever small alternative tries to go up against titans, loses the network effects, and winds up as smaller, less-functional offering.

A butler-like agent is a new pane of glass. An internet condom. A judge, jury, and executioner whose only goal is to make sure one stays focused and happy.

This is a product I would pay a thousand dollars a year for.

I've built two multi-million dollar businesses this year. I have no interest in building Windows. Right now I'm building some very cool business functions similar to companies with way more funding yet lackluster product offerings.

I have no doubt someone out there somewhere will follow up on exactly what you've suggested.

LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.

How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?

How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?

How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?

These all feel incredibly shallow now. A few dedicated people could build these systems and begin dismantling the margin and monopoly of every major piece of software we know and use.

If ChatGPT has ads, how hard would it be for a different startup to offer an LLM alternative?

Distribution and branding might be the only things that matter going forward. We may have just turned the tech industry into the 1960's cigarette industry.

LLMs are a Google killer. I don't think it'll be long before people start using their power to take away market share from big tech.

Big tech laying off so many senior engineers might have created the dry kindling to set this off.

(Because people always comment - this is not sarcasm. I'm being serious.)

The bubble can't pop soon enough.

I'm getting months of work done in weekends.

There is no bubble.

The entire development world is being fundamentally rewired and will not ever look the same. This is just one experiment at a new shape. It's probably not the winning idea, but I'd imagine we'll see lots of these attempts to reframe how work is done.

This looks to me to be more oriented around agents and training than it says on the tin. It puts all the artifacts for learning about how projects are built, orchestrated, and managed in one place. That's a great data loop. Hook in observability, monitoring and alerting, incident management and SRE and they'll be cooking.

I'm a Rust dev, but I've been worried Claude might not be able to emit Bevy (or Fyrox) sufficiently well.

I keep seeing Mr.Doob post amazing stuff in Threejs and the vibe coding scene blowing up with all kinds of generative work, and I feel really drawn to it.

Do you feel like Claude gets Bevy well enough? I know it kicks ass at Rust, but Bevy is relatively niche still.

Do you feel like Bevy is pretty performant?

Thank you.

We have wasted so much time and energy building up what has effectively become a marketing stunt.

Eliezer Yudkowsky was perhaps the best thing to happen to OpenAI's and Anthropic's fundraising flywheel.

We've had 50+ years of that. While you're undoubtedly correct, the bulk of the opportunity is in the massive disruptionary forces this creates.

Everything already exists. We only have incremental changes. The average moves over time.

The ball is moving towards open source and this will include fine tunes and LoRAs, and even more fertile growth after that. There's an abundant future market in that direction.

Several billion dollar businesses started as open source clones of existing things. Some found unique business lines, others simply did a better job.

You're moving too slow.

Over the last four days I've few shotted a 1:1 clone (and improvement) of Fal, OpenRouter, and Replicate in Rust. It's going to be open source.

I've lined up $300k of monthly commitments for it that land at launch. Might apply to YC with it.

Moving "organic" is too slow for the world today.

Which caused some problems with merchandising, but that's a different can of worms.

Can you expand on this? Are they not able to sell merch since they don't "own" their design?

How popular are they? Have they considered buying the model from the authors?

This looks straight out of Metroid Prime. Really cool design.

Google can do and has done a lot more harm than McDonalds or Coca-Cola.

They destroyed the open web (over and over - AMP, Manifest v2, etc. etc.), helped turned mobile computing into a rental / second-class citizen model, are ushering in identity tracking and attestation.

They pilfer the commons, unfairly monopolize, expand vertically and horizontally without bounds, make it impossible to compete, tax distribution every single way since they're the only set of rails, profit off of other people's copyrights and trademarks.

They even tried to hoard AI innovation, and it took employees leaving to set it free.

We just sacrificed our entire lucrative SaaS market to this, and perhaps even big tech itself. To the altar of AI.

And now it's all going to become commoditized.

Billion dollar software will be commodity. Salesforce. There are orgs already moving to their own internal tools.

It does not seem hard now to rebuilt Google Search, Google Chrome, Gmail, Gsuite, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare, Vimeo, Twilio, or even Stripe. The cost barrier has to have dropped 1000x, maybe 10000x.

We have millions of engineers with the talent to do this. Many of whom are unemployed and have savings and nothing better to do. They could easily carve these markets into pieces.

We shouldn't shut down open weights. It's too late. They'll win, and that's a good thing. Big tech was a thermodynamic bubble of high energy waiting on the dam to burst, and now it has. The genie won't go back into the bottle, and that's totally fine. It's progress.

Now we need to rebuild our factories and supply chains and energy and resource inputs. Because the back half of this revolution is going to be robotics and factory automation. If we don't have the connective tissue in place, we're really going to hurt.

We'll do well if we regrow manufacturing. If we don't, we might be in for a world of trouble.

You could say the same thing about Linux in the 90's and 00's. And yet here we are.

Remember the Halloween papers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

You have no evidence of this.

Also: you can literally make incredible software that would take half a year right now for $200/month. Or free if you run local open weights.

You can do branding, marketing, design. You can create comics and movies and video games.

You can make an AI tool right now and get customers today. You have no idea how wildly popular this segment is. How much people willingly engage with this stuff and want it.

Yet you choose to disengage and complain about a future that hasn't happened.

It's more likely that firms will need to hire more to stay competitive. Or that workers will fire their old jobs and break out on their own.

Something I used to think was impossible: competing with Google, Apple, Stripe. Not anymore. I think you can compete with anyone.

Those of us who liked the open web and P2P and hacking on projects all the time are seeing these models as a way to rebuild the internet in a shape that pleases us. To build anything and everything we want. Sans opportunity cost.

And that's the real value - you don't have to burn the candle of your life away to get what you want. You'll have so much more time now that you aren't AST wrangling.

Opportunity cost is vanishing (or at least the cost is multiple orders of magnitude smaller). And that's the most exciting thing that's happened in tech since the internet.

I'll probably be able to make my own phone operating system.

I'll probably be able to decompile N64 games, port them to Rust, combine them, extend them. In a weekend.

I'll probably be able to make my own music management platform while simultaneously working on a few robotics projects.

A find my phone button.

Automate everything.

And that's maybe a month of projects.

This discourse reminds me of the handful of Christians who thought we needed Corn Flakes and uncomfortable clothing to stay chaste and that electricity made us stray from God.

Chill. Your brain is the product of the past. Reread that: your brain is anachronistic and outmoded.

We get to live in the future now. Count yourself lucky. You're one of the few that got to witness the birth of flight culminating in landing on the moon, except in this case your floppy disk became your personal shopper and stay-at-home Michelin star chef and part time driver.

It's okay to feel a bit of discomfort. It's hard to believe this is actually happening in our lifetimes, but it is! And that's so cool.

So sit back and enjoy the future.

It's absolutely crazy that a game so popular - let alone any game - was originally written in Java.

Why did notch do that?

There were next to no libraries, ecosystem, or support for Java at the time. It was such a bizarre choice.

Not to mention the JVM, GC, and all the other oddities. It was super off the beaten path to have done this.

Might as well have been Ruby or Perl.

This is the Kimi and GLM effect.

Open Source is coming.