could not agree more. this is the "everything has to be communicated via video format" they tell you not to worry about... as it were... all of the interactive and sequential that helps to build up a story, but where every detail is brought into focus exactly when it is relevant, but still forms part of a cohesive, intelligible whole (ie. a document! (who knew that documents were a great way to document things!)). i really have nothing to add to parent other than to second how fantastically presented the content on this page is. really beautiful work.
this is all 100% true and yet the 12 year-old boy inside me still smiles smugly at how fucking cool my dual reservoir water-cooled setup is, and how there was a brief moment in time a couple years ago where i had arguably one of the fastest (consumer) setups in the entire world... was any part of that labor or money "worth" it? no, absolutely not. was the $1k power bill i had to pay PG&E one month worth it? even less so. but do i have any regrets? absolutely not! :)
anyone even remotely on the fence about whether or not they should bother with all this stuff, just read OP or read this tl;dr: the answer is no, it is not.
as someone who has never voted, i am absolutely okay with this characterization. i often hold my tongue when it comes to complaining about political stuff because i dont really feel like i have the right to. i mean, of course i HAVE the right, but the hypocrisy isn’t. to be clear: this is not the same thing as being animated about general gov. malfeasance, which is something that everyone is in the right to complain about, as the operation of the government isn’t a politics-specific issue in a lot of cases.
wow i was really primed to hate this article and this take because i, for lack of better terminology, genuinely view Bret Victor as an idol of mine. but i guess that is the thing with idolatry… to be clear to anyone who doesn’t care to read the article (understandable): there’s nothing untoward or unseemly, just a research group that is clearly lost, and Bret as BFDL not being able to “save” it. i will say that the other researchers come off as being pretty soft and useless, but that obviously does reflect back on the group’s raison d’etre and thus, by extension, its leader. like, imagine being recruited to a research group by Bret fucking Victor and being like “nah, i don’t want to work on anything useful, and if i can’t do exactly what i want to do, i quit”. i say this all, despite appearances, with the utmost respect for all those principals, who i have stalked on github, X, etc. to an unreasonable degree out of a pure, assuredly naïve desire to get more bits from people who i consider to be doing the so-called “Lord’s Work”… the people they brought on absolutely are legit enough to have earned the right to not genuflect to anyone, but… where’s all the idealistic belief in building something better for tomorrow that they all portend to care about, from their own words? i don’t want to get political, and won’t, but… it feels like the most self-centered take on idealism since… aw shucks, yesterday… it’s my fault for putting these incredibly brilliant people on a pedestal, but i still find the whole thing incredibly disappointing, as someone who, well… idolizes them. and i would rather be disappointed than chastened and cynical— the world has PLENTY of that to go around, and i still believe in the power of the intellect to transcend this kind of bullshit, this case notwithstanding.
these things are actually fixable with prompting. is it easy? no. is it PEBKaC if you don’t do anything to change course as it builds a TLS library? yes, but paperclip maximized! xD
yeah maybe around the time of Archimedes it was closer to the top, but societies in which people are willing to die for abstract ideas tend to be one... where the value of life isn't quite as high as it is nowadays (ie no matter how much my inner nerd has a love and fascination for that time period, no way i'm pressing the button on any one-way time machines...).
I mean, Archimedes stands out because he searched for the truth and documented it. I'm sure most people on the planet at that time would have burned you for being a witch, or whatever fabled creature was in vogue at the time.
as I understand, Bell Labs mandate was to improve the network, which had tons of great threads to pull on: plastics for handsets, transistors for amplification, information theory for capacity on fixed copper.
Google and Meta are ads businesses with a lot less surface area for such a mandate to have similar impact and, frankly, exciting projects people want to do.
Meanwhile they still have tons of cash so, why not, throw money at solving Atari or other shiny programs.
Also, for cultural reasons, there’s been a huge shift to expensive monolithic “moonshot programs” whose expenses need on-demand progress to justify and are simply slower and way less innovative.
3 passionate designers hiding deep inside Apple can side hustle up the key gestures that make multi touch baked enough to see a path to an iPhone - long before iPhone was any sort endgame direction they were being managed to.
Innovation thrives on lots of small teams mostly failing in the search for something worth doubling down on.
Googles et al have a new approach - aim for the moon, budget and staff for the moon, then burn cash while no one ever really polished up the fundamental enabling pieces in hindsight they needed to succeed
but it’s private money? who gives a fuck about the $/job created? if anything, it’s a good thing that Anthropic can afford to do it because they can so efficiently use capital. at least, so far…
I think GP is criticising how ‘wasteful’ that is compared to better uses of the money in $/employee. It's really not creating that many jobs for the amount of cash we're talking about.
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