I made the analogy a few days ago about how all modern manufacturing and machining processes were essentially bootstrapped from two fairly flat stones. Its going to be interesting to see how the acceleration in improvement of the tools for "making things" changes in the LLM age.
Agreed, I think we're entering the 4th era of the internet (as I see it).
The first era was pre-consumer (arpanet etc).
The second era had internet installed in several homes across the country, but it still wasn't clear what the internet was going to become, and it was still considered an oddity. This was roughly 1990-the mid aughts.
The third era saw the internet become socially viable - myspace, facebook, twitter, instagram all took over peoples lives. This roughly coincided with the release of smart phones, as well as the increased computing power of browsers, spurred mostly by V8.
For the last few years there's been this implicit expectation that we're entering into a new era, but it wasn't clear what that era would be. For a minute, people thought it was crypto/metaverse, but that was always kind of a silly idea.
It's now clear that AI is going to be the catalyst, and I think it's ushering in something equivalent to the industrial revolution, but starting from where we are now. It's just impossible to fathom where we're going to go from here.
Well, technically, three flat stones. Two flat-appearing stones can match (like two stacked Pringles chips) and still not be flat and thus not match a third true flat reference. Thus:
"When two plates are not flat but still match, one will not match the third. By continually lapping or scraping the high points of their contact until all three show perfect bearing when intercompared, three flat planes are created" [1]
[1] Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy by Wayne R. Moore c. 1970
I think the gnu emacs code base is proof of this statement. I'm fairly certain they fed the source into disassociated press and kept doing it until it compiled.
I made the analogy a few days ago about how all modern manufacturing and machining processes were essentially bootstrapped from two fairly flat stones. Its going to be interesting to see how the acceleration in improvement of the tools for "making things" changes in the LLM age.