Top-tier from Willison himself:
The learning isn’t in studying the finished product, it’s in watching how it gets there.
Mate, if that's true, my years of Gentoo experience watching compiler commands fly past in the terminal means I'm a senior operating system architect.
My rule for understanding somebody like Piper is that they will endorse whatever they think will keep Starbucks open, ubiquitous, and relatively inexpensive
A møøse ønce bit my spare 4th child, the disappøinting øne with a løw scøre øn Raven's Prøgressive Matrices...
Over the last few years, I have fully gotten on board with the idea that the haunting vestige of the idea of people as property is one of the core weaknesses of American society, and the "western civilization" enthusiasts that promote its supremacy.
Of course, there are a lot of other people who have been on board with that point of view for centuries.
But Star Trek says the smartest guys in the room don't have emotions
This is a thought I've been entertaining for some time, but this week's discussion about Ars Technica's article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.
A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly haven't cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network won't dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? It's gassed. The idea that "it might be ME up there one day!" persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining don't have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.
For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what I've seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systems... which, if it's not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.
Everybody's looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?
"My heavens, our self-regarding supremacist ideology can't possibly imply violence... can it???"
Dragon Ball A16Z: We have replaced interminable screaming powerup sequences and planet-destroying energy blasts with long panning shots of the characters using their abilities to light giant mountains of cash on fire. If you give us a series C at a valuation of $420 million, we may be able to determine why test audience surveys have thus far come back unfavorable
This causes me to reflect on contrasting currents in tech culture. I remember growing up with the Apple/Mac rumor culture around the time Steve Jobs came back, and how people had conditioned themselves to get hyped for any little tiny leak about upcoming products. A culture which obviously persists now, albeit in streamlined, advertiser-friendly blog spaces. By contrast, MacWeek magazine had a columnist calling himself Mac the Knife who claimed to have clandestine rendezvous with shady trenchcoat-clad characters in the back alleys of Cupertino... And somehow the new product reveals were almost always somewhat less whelming than the rumormill had built them up to be. Part of the Jobs idolatry that still dominates Silicon Valley is the clear strategy among empty-suit grifters like Altman that such hype is vital but Apple didn't do enough with it; that you should always be marketing what's around the corner rather than keeping it hidden away under lock, key, and NDA.
Contrast this with open-source culture, warts and all. What's in the repository is the basis of what comes next. You think superintelligence is imminent? OK, where's the code stubs that will serve as the foundation? Make a pull request for your mega-brain's medulla, let's review it. It's also a big reason why the current round of AI doesn't fit with open-source culture, no matter how many people are trying to force it. It is inherently an obfuscatory technology. Not just due to the sheer size of the data sets and weights involved, but also through the weird non-deterministic practice of configuring software through natural-language prompts. GIGO at scale, but you can keep the hype going by promising a lower percentage of garbage in the future.
User requests something that accommodates their actual use-case. Altman responds by dismissing it as "toys," in that same cultivated faux-casual lowercase smarm that constitutes the bulk of his public identity. This man is not fit to be an executive.
Jobs is Tech Jesus, but Antennagate is only recorded in one of the apocryphal books
Whatever the precise definition, it appears to be comorbid with stimulant dependency