Well of course. But well thought out and well written communication (which admittedly is rare) is an opportunity to actually think through what you’re telling people. How does point A relate to point B? As you read through what you’ve written do you realize there should be a point A.1 to bridge a gap?
It’s like math homework, you always had to show your working not just give the answer. AI gives us an answer without the journey of arriving at one, which removes the purpose of doing it in the first place.
Okay, I'll bite: the comparison to smart contracts is a less-than-helpful lens because the people who deploy them are perversely incentivized to optimize out things like boundary checks and other error handling to minimize how much they cost to publish.
AI generated code might well come with its own constraints and baggage, but the whole "every byte is lost profit" thing is a fundamental and IMO damning aspect of crypto code.
> the comparison to smart contracts is a less-than-helpful lens
Oh no that’s not what I meant. Sorry too much snark.
I was trying to say that on-demand-AI-figures-out-whatever will be so eminently hackable/brickable that companies will need to pay out ransoms on the weekly. These days those ransoms are usually crypto.
Still, I would push back that if you are publishing code that hackable, you already had different and bigger problems even outside of the context of LLM code.
I've been at this a very long time and I am regularly humbled by dumb oversights that Cursor picks up on and fixes before it goes out the door.
> The Soviet Venera program was really fascinating
Reading my uncle’s old tech magazines and sci-fi from the 70’s was fascinating. Eastern European sci fi was all about colonizing Venus and the Venera landers. The way kids in USA are obsessed with Mars, kids in my part of Europe used to be obsessed with Venus before the influx of Western media.
Getting to grow up on the cusp of that vibe shift was cool.
Življenje in tehnika[1] – popular science magazine in Slovenia that's been running since 1950. Grandparents used to have my uncle's collection from I guess his high school years. Spanned from the mid 70's and into the 80's.
I used to read random issues when I'd go visit. My favorite were the 70's stories about "We are imminently going to have AI cars. Experiments are underway and trucks can now autonomously drive long distances on the highway! Humanoid robots are coming soon look at this super dextrous hand!!".
On the sci-fi side one notable example is The Land of Crimson Clouds (Страна багровых туч, 1959) by the Strugatsky brothers. Unfortunately, there’s no official English translation that I can find.
> How much ongoing effort should be put into handling the possibility that this particular requirement might change?
How likely is it that the world freezes and stops changing around your software? This includes business processes, dependencies, end-user expectations, regulations, etc.
In general that’s the difference between a product and a project. Even Coca Cola keeps tweaking its recipe based on ingredient availability, changes in manufacturing, price optimizations, logistics developments, etc.
Hell, COBOL and FORTRAN still get regular updates every few years! Because the software that runs on them continues to stay under active maintenance and has evolving needs.
As a general rule, one should presume that they now less about running a business than the people that actually do that. There are exceptions but as with all rules, exceptions don't invalidate the rule.
"they should stop" is a fine rant to express your personal taste preferences, but objectively speaking, I would bet on Coca-Cola having good reasons when tweaking the recipes. If that happens, it's probably more necessary than a layman realizes.
Yes and no. We’ll never know. There are small changes all the time. You and I wouldn’t even notice the difference.
But if you compared today’s flavor to the flavor of 100 years ago side-by-side, I bet it’s pretty noticeable. Today they use corn syrup instead of sugar, for example. Many of the flavoring ingredients from back then aren’t even legal for human consumption anymore either.
Exact ingredients also differ between markets so we’re not even all talking about the same coca cola.
A part time bar owner I worked with claimed Mexican Coca Cola was the best due the sugar being made out of either corn or sugar cane, I don't remember which one, compared the US one.
It would have been interesting to do a blind test if that.
> Investors always encourage it because it reduces their risk... One of you can be fired and they still have the backup. But when it is all on you there is no passing the buck.
The reason is reduces their risk isn’t firing 1 cofounder, it’s that “When you want to go fast, go alone, when you go far, go together”. Building a business is tough. Most early stage startups fail because the founders simply burn out and give up. Having a buddy you can lean on helps. It also makes it easier to realize when you’re digging down the wrong hole and need to change strategy.
Isn’t that pursuing happiness? Your saying if you’re not happy than change your goals to something with happiness as a by product. Or, pursue happiness.
Pursuing happiness means you use happiness as a leading indicator (I think). You do things that you predict will make you happy. This is commonly preyed upon by advertising, sales, managers, bosses, etc.
I’m suggesting you use happiness as a trailing indicator instead.
Pursue other goals and happiness comes on its own. If you perceive yourself to be unhappy over a long period, that is a symptom and you should look for underlying causes then go fix those. You pursue fixing the causes, not the happiness.
See also: once a metric becomes the goal, it stops being useful.
To use a silly analogy: No amount of painkillers will fix a broken leg.
Or to share an example – I once got into gratitude journaling and mindfulness stuff. It kinda helped. You know what really helped? Quitting my job and getting a job I enjoyed. No mindfulness or gratitude journaling needed. Feeling like I need a gratitude journal was the symptom that something’s gotta change.
> Researchers have now found that people who pursue happiness often feel like they do not have enough time in the day, and this paradoxically makes them feel unhappy.
That's a little bit of a weird take in that just such a knowledge differential was the whole pivot of the movie Trading Places, even with the two extremely wealthy (and presumably powerful) Mortemer brothers
reply