Nothing gets worse in computers. Name me one thing. And if the current output quality of LLM stays the same but speed goes up 1000, quality of the generated code can be higher.
Software has gotten considerably worse with time. Windows and MacOS are basically in senescence from my point of view. Haven't added a feature I've wanted in years, but manages to make my experience worse year to year anyways.
CPU vulnerability mitigations make my computer slower than when I bought it.
Computers and laptops are increasingly not repairable. So much ewaste is forced on us for profit.
The internet is a corporate controlled prison now. Political actors create fake online accounts to astroturf, manipulate, and influence us.
The increasing cost of memory and GPU make computers no longer affordable.
Hot keys. Used to be, you could drive a program from the keyboard with hotkeys and macros. No mouse. The function keys did functions. You could drive the interface blindfolded, once you learned it. Speed is another one. Why does VSCode take so long to open? and use so much memory and CPU? it's got a lot of features for a text editor, but it's worse than vim/emacs in a lot of ways.
Boot time.
Understandability. A Z80 processor was a lot more understandable than today's modern CPUs. That's worse.
Complexity. It's great that I can run python on a microcontroller and all, but boring old c was a lot easier to reason about.
Wtf is a typescript. CSS is the fucking worst. Native GUI libraries are so much better but we decided those aren't cool anymore.
Touchscreens. I want physical buttons that my muscle memory can take over and get ingrained in and on. Like an old stick shift car that you have mechanical empathy with. Smartphones are convenient as all hell, but I can't drive mine after a decade like you can a car you know and feel, that has physical levers and knobs and buttons.
Jabber/Pidgin/XMPP. There was a brief moment around 2010? when you didn't have to care what platform someone else was using, you could just text with them on one app. Now I've got a dozen different apps I need to use to talk to all of my friends. Beeper gets it, but they're hamstrung. This is a thing that got worse with computers!
Computers are stupid fast these days! why does it take so long to do everything on my laptop? my mac's spotlight index is broken, so it takes it roughly 4 seconds to query the SQLite database or whatever just so I can open preview.app. I can open a terminal and open it myself in that time!
And yes, these are personal problems, but I have these problems. How did the software get into such a state that it's possible for me to have this problem?
Bbs. Downloaded first shareware version of doom. Was it 4mb or something? I remember I had like 5kb/s and paid 5 cents a minute. My parents weren't happy those days. Now they are :)
BBS were a little off-tangent if you were actually using the internet itself, which I was (or least, I was pretty shortly after a few months on JANET (UK) and Bitnet (US & Israel).
The end of traditional news sites is coming. At least for the newspaper websites. Future mcp like systems will generate on the fly newstites in your desired style and content. Journalists will have some kind of paid per view model provided by these gpt like platforms which of course take a too big of a chunk. I can't imagine a WSJ is able to survive.
For an experiment i created multiple agents that reviewed pull requests from other people in various teams. I never saw so many frustrated reactions and angry people. Some refused to do any further reviews. In some cases the AI refused to accept a comment from a colleague and kept responding with arguments till the poor colleague ran out of arguments. AI even responded with fu tongue smiles. Interesting too see nevertheless. Failed experiment? Maybe. But the train cannot be stopped I think.
> I never saw so many frustrated reactions and angry people.
> But the train cannot be stopped I think.
An angry enough mob can derail any train.
This seems like yet another bit of SV culture where someone goes "hey, if I press 'defect' in the prisoner's dilemma I get more money, I should tell everyone to use this cool life hack", without realizing the consequenses.
I think the prisoner’s dilemma analogy is apt, but I also concur with OP that this train will not be stopped. Hopefully I’ll live long enough to see the upside.
The train is already derailing. The thing that no AI evangelists ever acknowledge is that the field has not solved its original questions. Minsky's work on neural networks is still relevant more then half a century later. What this looks like from the ground is that exponential growth of computing power fuels only linear growth of AI. That makes resources and costs spiral out incredibly fast. You can see that in the costs: every AI player out there has a 200 plus dollar tier and still loses money. That linear growth is why every couple decades theres a hype cycle as society checks back in to see how its going and is impressed by the gains, but that sustain just cant last because it can't keep up with the expected growth in capabilities.
Growth at a level it can't sustain and can't be backed by actual jumps in capabilities has a name: A bubble. What's coming is dot-com crash 2.0
AI has been around for 60+ years. SAIL, the Stanford AI Laboratory is one of the most important centers of early hacker culture. Knuth spent his time there. Both Cisco and Sun were founded by SAIL alumni.
Unless you're wanting to rewind the clock to the Berlin airlift we aren't going back to a world before AI. But I do think this absurd bubble is going to pop. Generative AI is crap. It's code is crap. It's images are crap. I say this as someone who has been self-employed for 2 years now in AI. The fact that its so hard to get usable results from generative AI that I can just get over the line into six figures of yearly income because I can massage it into doing something just passable enough to work for people is probably its biggest indictment.
Did you ensure everyone knew they were interacting with an LLM? IE it's name made it clear?
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This text reads sociopathic on it's own regardless.
Even if everything was done above board so no one was abused the way it looks like they were, this is not how I would have written about the same process and results.
Hey more angry people for your fascinating experiment, on this whole unexpected bonus dimension! Humans man, so unfathomable but anyway interesting.
I suppose it's possible maybe you only write sociopathic. You actually do recognize that you did something to other people, or at least that they suffered something through no fault of their own, and it somehow just isn't reflected at all when you write about it.
You might want to clear that up if we're all reading this wrong.
Actually we all knew and agreed on this. Just not every aspect of it was known beforehand. Like agents being in a review loop. I consider myself the opposite of sociopathic btw
To be honest I think there should be an option to completely hide all code that Claude generates and uses. Summaries, strategies, plans, logs, decisions and questions is all I need. I am convinced that in a few years nobody cares about the programming language itself.
Whereas I agree that working with machines would help dramatically in achieving science, there would be in your world no one truly understanding you. You would be alone. Can't imagine how you could prefer that.
That is a very uncharitable take. Faith is often a source of meaning or purpose independent of intelligence. I would recommend "A Confession by Tolstoy" for a different perspective
Not only in cold weather. Good luck trailing something big for a long distance even in the summer. In my model X the range is reduced to hardly 150 miles. Really inconvenient.
This is like the argument that LED traffic lights are bad because they don't get hot enough to melt snow on them.
It's something that doesn't matter most of the time and when it does matter you use something else. LED traffic lights started getting built with heaters in them.
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