rhubarbtree

Whilst I think there’s some truth to this, America’s elite would have brought us to this point anyway. Trump is a symptom of unfettered neoliberalism exporting jobs and destroying communities rather than a cause. Bin Laden drew America into forever wars and solidified their enemies in some dimensions. But America’s great downfall has been the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by its elite. They smashed the social compact and destroyed its institutions in the pursuit of profit.

I think Bin Laden will get a chapter in the book on the fall of America, but Reagan will be on the front cover.

Yep, a lot of people saw this coming. It was so obvious - new powers are always abused in the end. Same for the UK. Perhaps the politicians knew that and didn’t care. Not sure how deep their cynicism / malice goes. More power to us, they said.

Can confirm Apple is best but Roku is amazingly good number 2. In some ways its UX beats Apple.

I’m no fan of AOC but yes I think this is what she means. PG should be more generous and steel man the argument.

This aren’t great example are they?

Amazon is famous for being a terrible company to work for, on the logistics side.

Airbnb has caused all sorts of social problems.

Uber results in people working for peanuts and has circumvented labour laws.

I think there are some startups that have created large scale value without doing something malevolent, but not those ones.

Things like Linear. Good tool for software dev, no one harmed.

If it’s vibe coded, it’ll use one of the OSS libraries for importing word, so the answer is no it isn’t compatible and the website is misleading slop.

I think we’ve already seen that export controls help your competitor in the long term. First europe would turn to Chinese models, then if china was daft enough to stop that (why would they? It would bring the end of American hegemony) then europe will just develop their own.

The difference between America and europe isn’t technical ability. It’s access to funding and ambition. Export controls would fix that. In fact, I think the trump administration is already driving a boom in London.

Most of the time, which is why SaaS has been very popular.

Yep, you’re correct. I got to that bit and thought that can’t be right. It’s obviously wrong. If you rotate a semantic vector, you change the semantics of it. You don’t want that.

Makes me wonder if the whole thing is just slop.

Is the rest of the article correct?

Anyone suggest an alternative article?

I want someone to resolve the contradiction you have highlighted. Why don’t we now have an AI built web browser that is much better faster than chrome?

To that mind, why hasn’t chrome itself become 1000x better?

There is a disconnect between the narrative and reality.

And most social media, and blogs.

Newspapers are adopting it too, so soon we may see slop dominate even high brow publications.

Feels like a huge shift in human intellectual capabilities. Honestly quite worrying, I don’t think it’s a Luddite position to say that removing writing is removing thinking.

I see this as the slow death of OpenSource.

It’s controversial to say, and I may be downvoted, but I’ll share this as a pov: OSS is essentially giving away our work for free. Did that ever really make sense? If it does, why don’t graphic designers give their work away for free? Why don’t authors do that? UX designers?

It’s a very peculiar thing to us nerds.

And the strangest thing is, we may have unwittingly built the data source required to make our skills redundant, as models are trained on the work we gave away for free.

I think this is an interesting narrative.

Western debt is one of those problems you look at and say “this looks extremely alarming, why is no one panicking?” And then you assume that the elite know better and it must be manageable.

And then one day the consequences finally hit and you’re left reading the news “oh, so it turned out I was right and it was just common sense. Huh.”

US economy is screwed. UK economy is screwed. Neoliberalism killed it.

The reason everyone in politics is so elated by AI is the hope that a huge boost in productivity shrinks the debt as a portion of GDP. Talk about a wing and a prayer.

Yeah, I think it’ll go up for this reason. I will not be buying any shares, the company is insanely overvalued and hides terrible businesses. Elon is better the farm on AI in space, and if that doesn’t work things will not end well. Problem is, it reads as a post-hoc rationalisation not a long term plan.

I paid for a while, but they kept showing me crap in the feed rather than posts I wanted to see. Stupid videos etc. So I cancelled.

I think more you’re just at the absolute margins of engineering to get to escape velocity. Those constraints haven’t changed, so until some major material or fuel advance happens things will continue to go wrong.

Probably the mistake is to keep relying on rockets and propellants. Need to think more revolutionary. But hard for a startup to do that, usually needs gov backing.

Is there any reason to doubt that the Chinese will get (back) there first?

Yes, the temptation is that you bring all revenue forward at any cost so you can pump value at an IPO etc

Same. So happy when I found that option.

Claude Design. It produced something that looked good for a second, then you pay attention and realise it’s a disaster. Broke most UX rules out of the gate.

PMF is such a bullshit term. There’s no precise definition. It’s bs.

The fact is that investment is at a scale so large that current trajectories are nowhere near going to provide ROI.

The model companies are trying to milk every drop of ARR they can before IPOing. That is entirely the current narrative. You can hurt ARR before it churns if your goals are short term.

Anthropic being profitable is laughable. Sure, by some accounting measure that no one seriously uses. But looking at revenue and what they’re raising you can see the true story.

The truth is we need a revolutionary step up in capability to justify capex spend. It’s possible that might come - Opus 4.5 brought one - but failing that we’ll see the bubble pop once the IPO pumping is done.

Interestingly, this is how a lot of rich people make their money. They do something bad and then get the state to bail them out. For example, bankers trading recklessly, taking the bonuses and then leaving govt to sort out the mess, effectively back-paying their bonuses.

Another example is privatisation in the UK: scrap all investment, load the company with debt, leave the consumer and govt to sort out the mess.

So the rich do it too, just on a much grander scale.

200 is my preferred limit, and I think you can find that in a few highly regarded books on coding.

Colleague (non-designer) generated UI with Claude. It was awful and broke basic design rules. So yes you may be right.

IPO is coming is what is going on

Let me double down on my downvote.

The analogy proposed here is correct rewritten as:

If one person uses an AI trained across copyrighted data, then that’s ok.

But if everyone uses that AI, it’s not ok.

Which is a bit of an irrelevant point.

I attended what was a top CS uni at the time. Many of the definitive textbooks were written by our lecturers when it came to specialised classes - which isn’t very surprising really! I would say most of them were just genuinely recommended the top textbook in the field. Just happened to be theirs!

But it’s not the same though. If I look at a webpage, it’s still there for other people to enjoy. That’s not the same as a flower being picked.

Reasoning by analogy doesn’t work if your analogy isn’t well matched.

Erdos, or the model?

Catastrophising for sure, and unhelpful in that it obscures some of the more real issues young people face: unaffordable housing, student debt, employment market shifts, mental health problems caused by social media.