sandover

the ur-text behind this piece is: people just not understanding exponential capability growth. including the author of the piece!

if you could look clearly at the progress from 2020 to 2023, as someone like Gwern did, and from 2023 to 2024 with the invention of reasoning modes, then it was not that hard to understand what would happen in late 2025. Opus 4.5 was not a surprise to anyone who was actually paying attention.

But people (including the author) still mistake the current state as a stable state and future gains as incremental. he says

“I am not asserting that all code will eventually be AI-generated to spec, bypassing human understanding”

I AM asserting that, and it’s incredibly easy to do so.

The question of “when” is separate.

Untold R&D billions went into this; we have no idea what the breakeven would be.

If we were to treat Apple and Meta equivalently, we would have spent a decade tallying Apple’s R&D investments as “losses”.

A lot of folks here are making some version of the observation that an immutable public unforgeable database is, in practice, equivalent to ANY database which is sponsored by the state. That feels persuasive to me.

Does this imply that the blockchain ledger might have greater utility in areas where there is weak or no state control? Basically, the criminal underworld and black markets. What's been written about this?

Magnopus | Downtown Los Angeles, CA | Full-time | Onsite | https://magnopus.com

Magnopus has deep expertise in AR, VR, mixed reality, and virtual production. We’re passionate about creating experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.

We're looking for more than one front-end web developer to join our new product team, working out of the brand new Magnopus HQ in downtown LA (open July-ish). https://apply.workable.com/magnopus-2/j/183A32ACD7/

- You have multiple years of experience shipping production-quality React applications that interface with back-end services -- link us to your portfolio

- You’re strong on the fundamentals of Javascript (preferably also Typescript), React (and React Hooks), CSS

- You are familiar with modern frameworks and can demonstrate your ability to choose wisely among them

- B.S. degree in Computer Science preferred but not required

- 5+ years full time work experience

Magnopus | Downtown Los Angeles, CA | Full-time | Onsite | https://magnopus.com

Magnopus is an experience company with deep expertise in AR, VR, mixed reality, and virtual production. We’re passionate about creating experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.

Come help us build a new spatial product & platform touching on numerous tech stacks and all major platforms.

- Full stack web developer: https://apply.workable.com/magnopus-2/j/183A32ACD7/

- Spatial UI Developer: https://apply.workable.com/magnopus-2/j/2F5DB975A6/

The crew at Magnopus are smart, they are good communicators, and they are gracious. So ideally you're like that, too. These are growth roles in a growing company in a growing team; you will not only ensure we get good results up front, but you will also have an opportunity to set best practices that will serve us for years to come.

(Other positions are also open, including Security Engineer.)

Magnopus | Downtown Los Angeles, CA | Full-time | Onsite | https://magnopus.com

Magnopus is an experience company with deep expertise in AR, VR, mixed reality, and virtual production. The company was founded by a team of Oscar-winning artists, designers, and engineers from games, films, and other unusual places. We’re passionate about creating rich experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.

We are building a new product and platform encompassing front end, back end, and middleware -- and covering desktop, web, mobile, VR, and AR.

- Full stack web developer: https://apply.workable.com/magnopus-2/j/183A32ACD7/

- SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test): https://apply.workable.com/magnopus-2/j/DFCEF294C0/

- Spatial UI Developer: https://apply.workable.com/magnopus-2/j/2F5DB975A6/

The crew at Magnopus are smart, they are good communicators, and they are gracious. So ideally you're like that, too. These are all growth roles in a growing company in a growing team; you will not only ensure we get good results up front, but you will also have an opportunity to set best practices that will serve us for years to come.

(Other positions are also open, including Security Engineer.)

Magnopus | Downtown Los Angeles, CA | Full-time | Onsite | https://magnopus.com

Magnopus is an experience company with deep expertise in AR, VR, mixed reality, and virtual production. The company was founded by a team of Oscar-winning artists, designers, and engineers from games, films, and other unusual places. We’re passionate about creating rich experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.

We are building a new platform encompassing front end, back end, and middleware -- and covering desktop, mobile, VR, and AR. To ensure robustness and quality in everything we build, we need a skilled Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) to design, create, and own automated testing and test infrastructure.

https://apply.workable.com/magnopus-2/j/DFCEF294C0/

The crew at Magnopus are smart, they are good communicators, and they are gracious. So ideally you're like that, too. This is a growth role in a growing company in a growing team; you will not only ensure we get good results up front, but you will also have an opportunity to set best practices that will serve us for years to come.

(Other positions are also open, including Security Engineer.)

Oblong Industries | Multiple Positions | Full-Time | Los Angeles, Boston, or REMOTE | https://www.oblong.com/company/careers

Oblong is a hardware and software company that has always worked at the forefront of human-computer interaction. We are looking for talented folks to help us radically evolve our next-generation meeting tool, Mezzanine.

Currently open positions:

- full-stack engineer (React, Redux, node...)

- back-end engineer (Go, GCP...)

- C++ engineer

- Security engineer

- Director of Engineering

- and more

We have a small, agile engineering team where you can move fast and make an outsized impact.

Oblong is a humane place to work. For example, the company pays 100% of health insurance costs.

email brandon at oblong

Oblong Industries | Multiple Positions | Full-Time | Los Angeles, Boston, or REMOTE |

https://www.oblong.com/company/careers

Oblong is a hardware and software company that has always worked at the forefront of human-computer interaction. We are looking for talented folks to help us evolve our next-generation meeting room product, Mezzanine.

Currently open positions: full-stack engineer (React; Redux; Electron a plus) or back-end engineer (Go, etc.) We have a small, agile engineering team where you can move fast and make an outsized impact.

Oblong is a humane place to work. For example, the company pays 100% of health insurance costs.

email brandon at oblong

Oblong Industries | Multiple Positions | Full-Time | Los Angeles or Boston or REMOTE | https://www.oblong.com/company/careers

Oblong is a hardware and software company that has always worked at the forefront of human-computer interaction. We build meeting room products and large-scale immersive systems.

We are hiring in LA for positions in full-stack web (React, Redux, Electron a plus) as well as back-end (Go, etc.) We have a small, agile engineering team where you can make an outsized impact.

More positions will open up; we are also interested in graphics experience and experience with video or videoconferencing. Know Chromium? Graphics drivers? C++? Talk to us.

Oblong is a humane place to work. For example, the company pays 100% of health insurance costs.

email brandon at oblong

Please do a google image search for "medieval scriptorium". Then try a google image search for "victorian office engraving" or "victorian counting house engraving". Or check out this list of "Antique Office Illustrations 1770-1879" (https://www.officemuseum.com/photo_gallery_1860s-1880s.htm). What you'll see is different instances of the open office plan, over a timespan of a THOUSAND YEARS. It's a space plan which seems to emerge around collective knowledge work.

These types of workplaces are not a newly-hatched resource squeeze by our ruthless capitalist overlords. They are a physical work pattern which has been reinvented and retooled many times, and isn't going away. In most of history, "office"==="big room".

I don't think it's wild Silicon Valley chatter to say that public transportation along fixed routes WILL decline as a result of new technology, and this is a great thing.

Fixed-route 19th-20th century public transportation networks are inefficient because most of the vehicles are pretty empty most of the time. This makes these systems expensive on a passenger-per-seat-mile basis. Not to mention the colossal waste of people's time spent trying to accommodate their journeys to those fixed routes (and schedules).

Example: LA's Metro system is subsidized to the tune of about 50 cents per passenger seat/mile, or was as of 2009 (http://www.newgeography.com/content/002361-los-angeles-metro...)

In 10-15 years, transport companies like Lyft/Uber/Didi will be able to offer municipalities a much better deal than that. An electric car or van without a driver in it, with an operating lifetime of a million miles, will cost on the order of 20-40 cents a mile to run. Get 3-8 paying customers into the vehicle, and there is absolutely no need for a 50 cent per passenger seat mile subsidy.

It's machine learning. It's not AI. Please, all, let's try hard to use words that mean what they mean.

Agree! In my experience successful remote work is associated with 2 things:

1. extremely well defined problem domains

2. incrementalism

For lots of engineers, those 2 points describe their job. Lots of (incremental) value is created that way.

But I'd argue that the larger gains accrue to those companies -- or those cities -- where work is being done in non-well-defined problem domains. And not incrementally, but by big leaps, experiments, and messy failures.

In fact, you could go farther and argue that in a competitive landscape, companies will quickly match each other in their performance in well-defined problem spaces, and the only way to actually compete at the margins is in problem areas that are, by definition, newer and not well defined.

wearing a helmet somehow reduces the odds of exercise

Helmet paranoia DOES reduce the odds of exercise. On a group level, at the level of public health, that's PRECISELY what it does. I encourage you to read about it, that's why they call it the helmet paradox. This piece is a nice summary.

http://www.howiechong.com/journal/2014/2/bike-helmets

Bike helmets protect our heads, but they also do the following:

1. increase your chances of getting in an accident

2. discourage cycling

Here's what to do:

1. If you want to be healthy, ride a bike instead of driving.

2. If you want to be even healthier, consider maybe putting on a helmet, but be mindful it doesn't increase your risk-taking behavior.

I choose option 2, but option 1 is also great.

You are mistaken about what the rules are in most states. To take one example, in California, you own the lane and cars cannot pass unless they can give you three feet of clearance.

http://ktla.com/2013/09/23/gov-brown-signs-law-requiring-car...

I wear a helmet too!

But it doesn't change the truth of the sentence: "The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it."

For this reason, I wear a helmet. But the health benefits of cycling vastly swamp the risk of death, so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference.

The person who is truly taking a risk is the person who doesn't ride a bike because of the perception that it's dangerous, and continues to be sedentary and drive a car to work. This person is literally reducing their life expectancy by years. (See links I posted elsewhere in the thread.)

You need to be able to think about conditional probability.

Look at it in terms of effect on life expectancty.

The risk of death from 1 hour of cycling reduces life expectancy by about 24 minutes. Wearing a helmet probably changes this by a couple of minutes.

- http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...

- https://nwurban.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/cyclings-impact-on-...

1 additional hour of sitting and watching TV in the evening, in an already sedentary life, probably has a similar effect on life expectancy.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/get-up-get-out-dont...

The exercise you get from that same session of cycling for 1 hour INCREASES life expectancy from 3-9 hours.

- http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/03/minutes-exercise-longer...

- WHO study, http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/exercise-l...

It sounds like you're not informed.

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/16/5720762/stop-forcing-people-to...

There's also the "Copenhagen left". Which is, pull over to the _right_ into the crosswalk of the intersection where you want to go left. Wait for the light to change. (Google it for a picture.)

Don't ride in the door zone. Don't let cars make you ride in the door zone. Take the car lane instead.

I've gone 15,000 miles safely in dense urban environments because I am heads-up about the 2 main threats: intersections, and the door zone.

I've been cycling to work in downtown LA for nearly 8 years, 4 miles each way. I'm faster than a car over that commute. The weather is fantastic, and I am physically in great shape. Mental benefits are huge.

I've gone about 15,000 miles in dense urban environments without any accidents of any kind. There are a number of keys to this:

- Think like a driver -- it helps to be a good driver first

- Think, period. Don't listen to music, pay attention.

- Don't ride in the door zone. Don't let drivers make you ride in the door zone. If you need the lane, take the lane. It's your right.

- Use flashing lights on front and back, at all times of day. Nobody else except emergency vehicles is allowed to have flashing lights. There's a good reason: they are unmissable and very distracting.

- Wear brightly colored shirts and a bright colored helmet.

- If you don't wear a helmet, don't worry about it, it doesn't mitigate that much risk. The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it.

Question in my mind as a user of LAX: WHERE is the private terminal and does it get me out of the nightmare of LAX evening traffic? That would be a strong point in your favor. And also, does rideshare pick up there smoothly? Will you be working with Uber/Lyft to make sure that they are fully aware of the location? What about rental car services, are any accessible from the private terminal?

People who don't have electric cars still seem to have a mindset about refueling that's based on gasoline vehicles.

I have driven electric cars for 4+ years. I have charged in public ONCE -- and that was mostly for entertainment value. I didn't bother with a fast charger at home, either, I just plug it into a regular outlet.

Whenever the car is home, it's plugged in. It trickle charges overnight. So typically, it's almost always at 100% or close enough when my wife or I leave the house. Anyone with a parking spot _at home_ with access to a power outlet can do the same. Public charging stations just don't matter in this usage pattern. Home charging capabilities matter way, way more.

Now, this is for a city car -- and we've had electric cars with limited range (100 miles). But you quickly find that it's very rare to have a reason to drive more than 100 miles in a city in a day.

In cases of a super-long commute, or a driving-heavy job, things are different, but in those circumstances, gas cars or longer range electrics would win out anyway.

But the 80/20 case for most people who live in cities is the city car pattern, and for that pattern, electrics with home charging work fine.

(All the above only applies for the next 5-10 years while cars can't drive themselves. After that, none of this matters, and apparently most auto execs still don't see that either.)

Take a quick look at a graph of population growth from 1870-2015. It has an incredibly steep curve. Now think about how that graph will look from 2015-2100. Likely, it will be drastically flatter.

Wouldn't this have a huge effect on real estate -- indeed, isn't that population graph the primary driver of what happens in the real estate market?

I'm not sure the last century provides a meaningful guide here.

This is misleading. These (quite recent) changes in governmental policy have come about as a result of things that Tesla managed to achieve, firstly, on its own, and secondly, through its effects on the behavior of other automakers. No major automaker was meaningfully working on EVs before Tesla; now they all are.

Indeed, to a rare degree, the shift we're seeing in a major sector of the world economy is the result of the unilateral actions of just one person: Elon Musk.

I think this kind of shell has the best features of something like PowerShell -- the ability to work with real data structures -- but combined with Clojure's opinionated minimalism about those data structures, the result seems more useful.

One other thing that Clojure has, however, which may be a problem here, is a strong emphasis on precise namespacing. That seems a like a serious problem for day to day use of this kind of shell. Pedantically namespacing all the interesting library functions I want to use would get old fast.

I'd imagine that some wealthy people must find this stuff extremely intriguing

Some definitely do. Example:

https://www.maps.org/news/bulletin/articles/420-bulletin-spr...

I'm ready for my Amazon house kit!