> I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering.
Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least any that can be fulfilled by a human-in-the-loop / one-dev-to-many-users model? The end goal of LLMs feels like, in effect, the Last Framework, and the end of (money in) meta-engineering by devs for devs.
Amen. Now with all the agents and bots, I often pause and wonder — how much code is there left to write that we need AI as our saving grace? How many unsolved problems, underserved customers, unanswered questions actually justify the volume? Where did we all go wrong?
I think we have reached peak functionality in software, therefore the only place left to go was make the underlying code more complex, messy, and impossible for humans to read. /s
Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much.
Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.
Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.
"Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much."
Meaning what they are in fact doing has the same effect as if they stopped producing/exporting oil exactly to the extent that it gets replaced by EVs over there? I could only see that happening if they undersell everyone in the world so they create no new consumers. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle. I imagine the truth be known though? When Norway enters the market, how much other producers' sales go down?
This would be true but you're not accounting for OPEC and other groups (e.g. historically the Texas Railroad Commission in the United States, not sure how relevant they still are) to balance production and price per barrel to what they think is agreeable.
Oil hasn't been supply constrained since the 50's, it's price is largely based on what producing countries agree on, as well as geopolitics.
Additionally, governments levy a decent amount of taxes on certain end products such as gasoline. They might very well, as they have in the past, decide to simply up their tax revenue as prices of crude and derivatives go down.
Because long-term calorie restriction is 100x harder than popping a pill and downing a protein-and-fiber shake, and you can't outrun a burger but you can outlift a calorie deficit, so lumping them all together under "improve diet and exercise somehow" is a nonsensical rhetorical flourish / troll move?
“i can ask it to give a text description of a linear logical math process that has been described in text countless times”
If you think “the tacit knowledge and conscious/subconscious reasoning mix that caused X to write like X” can be meaningfully captured by some 1-page “style guide” like llmtropes, I’m not sure what to tell you. Such a style description would be informed by a soup of reviewers that most certainly cannot write like X even with their stronger and more nuanced observations than what the LLM picked up.
The poll linked in the article shows even trump voters have <30% approval for the pentagon’s actions here, so if the citizenship tells the military how to do things…
Anti-crawler tarpits and related concepts have existed for decades already; LLM training data is only the latest and most popular of web-scraping goals.
Claude is happy and able to provide a laundry list of ways to mitigate the impact of tarpits on your crawler, and politeness / respecting robots.txt is only one of them.
They're all usage based plans. You probably wouldn't hit 10k/head for most users, but thousands is not unheard of. But it's kind of anticipating that's what they would want to charge.
There is no ceiling to how much waste you can create.
Much like stacks and stacks of badly written web frameworks made things like collapsing comments on new reddit 200 ms of JavaScript execution ( https://bvisness.me/high-level/burnitwithfire.png ) I can easily imagine people layer stuff together till token burn is beyond insane.
I mean just look at the Gastown repository. Its like literally hundreds of thousands of lines of go and md files.
The thing is, all these “better than a medieval king” tech niceties still don’t cover the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy for all, and “poverty” is the state of suffering those gaps for lack of money.
Even in very cheap local housing you usually still have heating, a fridge and more then enough food (to much more often then to little even for the poorest people).
"More reach" seems a valid enough goal/desire in and of itself (even if you deride it as a shallow form of communication, shallow attention is what provides the opportunity for deeper connections); this sets the goal-activity of creative pursuits apart from "lounging alone at the beach" (which is itself a flawed representation of retirement, but that's another story).
The reason OP gave for trying to achieve more reach was this:
> it's been pointed out to me in harsh ways I could be easily growing if I tried a little harder, so I've invested more resources into the channel, equipment, actually trying growth, etc.
…which made me think of the tourist in the story.
Is it really more reach that they desire, transforming their content into whatever sates the algorithm, chasing metrics, investing time and money? Or is their current level of reach perhaps already enough as it is, a work of love and dedication, without someone—something—else deciding what’s best?
And the only thing that stopped in Xinjiang is the news coverage and press access.
I find it deeply ironic that for some, the vibes have shifted towards "hey maybe the CCP isn't all that bad" just because...what, the solar buildouts make them look more competent and long-sighted compared to your local upstart authoritarian party? Such is the nature of vibes, I suppose.
Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least any that can be fulfilled by a human-in-the-loop / one-dev-to-many-users model? The end goal of LLMs feels like, in effect, the Last Framework, and the end of (money in) meta-engineering by devs for devs.
reply