This didn’t really fit into what I wanted to say in the previous post about the DHH podcast.

But I nevertheless wanted to record these rough ideas because I find these statements sus and exposes a sort of from-the-ass-talking that really gave me pause about the quality and earnestness of their opinions.

DHH (01:20:29): The future’s coming whether you like it or not, so you might as well choose to be excited about it.

A colleague shared this transcript with me: https://lexfridman.com/dhh-2-transcript

He said he really wants to adopt this viewpoint on AI, its optimism in particular. So I gave it a read. The whole thing, all 5 hours of it.

People seem to have this idea that large language models (LLM’s) can be relied upon to do complex things. People want to do things like “deep research”, pretending that an LLM can effectively perform the job of a research analyst. People make insulting statements like “GPT-4o…enables PhD-level reasoning”. People seem to be under the impression that LLM’s can be productive on their own ^{1 2} , that it’s a good idea to let agentic AI loose with access to the ability to submit proposed code to public open-source software, and disparage its maintainer when it is rejected (and I venture to say many are not discouraged by this result).

Just finished Black Mesa – I can’t believe that effort started in 2005 and concluded in 2020. Fifteen years of a passion project.

Severance Season 1 was the type of science fiction I crave, and was extraordinarily captivating. Season 2 cooled my eagerness, even though I watched it immediately after.

(Warning: spoilers ahead)

At the advice of Corey Doctorow I’ve gotten an RSS reader for myself and subscribed to a bunch of blogs. It’s refreshingly simple and good-feeling heritage tech, when tech was for the people.

I fixed this website’s parameters to make the RSS work properly (or, at least, as far as I can tell). I’m using a preconfigured theme; digging into the code that forms the index.xml file I saw that the placeholder (is it called a shortcode? a method? I’m not sure) was {{ .Permalink }}, but it was resolving to /; not helpful on the wider web. The solution was to change the baseURL to my domain name explicitly, and create permalink templates in the configuration.

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

I was amused by “AI” when it took off in the winter of 2022-2023. My friends and I took turns generating comedic images, probing our imagination for the most incongruous prompts to see what humor could manifest. More than one year later, I’ve developed a distaste for generative technology, but more than that a sense of foreboding. I doubt that I have any new opinions here but I find it worth writing down anyway.

…and the jobs that benefit the most people pay the least.

We’re incentivized to benefit the fewest people and wonder why resources are concentrated into the fewest hands.

2024-09-06: I found this expressed in almost the exact same way in a documentary about burnout.

One of the most pernicious things about our current economic system is that the more your work benefits others in an obvious and immediate sense, the more your work has a clear and undeniable beneficial effect on other human beings, the less you are likely to get paid for it.

Apr 2034, Reuters

Sam Bankman-Fried, formerly convicted of various counts of fraud and released from prison early in 2027, has purchased Valve Corp. and lays out his vision for the future. “We’re taking the Steam platform in an entirely new direction”, the 51-year-old entrepreneur said. Bankman-Fried will focus efforts on providing a premiere platform for AI-generated content. “There are so many ideas that AI can help us explore”, said Bankman-Fried during our visit to his 100,000 sq.ft. estate, his voice reverberating across the grand hall.