gallerdude

Sometimes I wonder if in 100 years, it's going to be surprising to people that computers had a use before AI...

Yeah, in fact, most interfaces - video editing, Airbnb, 3D modeling - are some sort of visual interface. I understand code isn’t resembling a physical object.

But books and paintings were our best approximation of reality, then technology allowed us to make movies and photos. I feel like code being lines of text isn’t the best abstraction. But finding a better one won’t be easy.

For someone who loves Ted Chiang, what adjacent writers would people recommend? I tried Borges, and I like him, he just seems less accessible and intentionally opaque at points.

I would imagine he’d been thinking about it for a while, and maybe with all the buzz about him at the same time of the release, he was asked to decide.

Interesting that they didn't mention a bump in capabilities - I wrote a LLM benchmark a few weeks ago, and before GPT-4 could solve Wordle about ~48% of the time.

Currently with GPT-4o, it's easily clearing 60% - while blazing fast, and half the cost. Amazing.

What big changes has Microsoft made? The whole Java/Bedrock split seems like a mess, and the updates have been enjoyable, but certainly nothing to write home about.

The only vaguely interesting thing I can point to is Minecraft Dungeons, which was fun for a month for my friend group, and then it wasn't.

FYI, the URL is broken. Highlighting this, despite it not aiding my job prospects, demonstrates the integrity I'd bring to Tildei :)

I don’t think spending is their primary constraint; they’re probably looking for talent, no matter the cost.

This looks amazing. Over the last year, I’ve gone from a casual Disney/Ghibli fan, to a really deep lover of hand-drawn animation. The expressiveness and attention to detail are astounding.

I also really like really smooth and intuitive interfaces, the iPad in particular is extremely natural (albeit at the things it’s designed to do well.)

Inside I’m kind of nerding out at the combination of my two loves, I have zero artistic talent, but I will buy this immediately. Maybe I can learn to have ~some artistic talent.

There is also an adjacent problem, where management cares very little about features which improve things for the users. And no matter how many great engineers they have, they don’t get used on things that people would care about.

So far

Everyone talks about the machine that makes the chips, but I’ve never heard mentioned the machine that makes the machine that makes the chips.

(I guess it’s probably just a bunch of regular machines, but it feels like there’s got to be some special sauce in there somewhere)

The entire movie, in my estimation, is understanding the feelings of paranoia post-9/11. The point was that while ideally, we would like to be like Lucious and have principles, the fear of terrorism justified mass-surveillance. (Honestly, it’s amazing the movie was released pre-Snowden)

I hate that this became an insult. Therapy can be a really useful thing for a lot of people. I don’t know why some people need to punch down at people who are already hurt.

Animals viciously murdering each other for food is also natural, that doesn’t mean it’s preferable.

I would imagine if death were cured, a very small percentage of people would actually want to live forever. I imagine most people would want to live between 1x and say, 5x an average lifespan.

1. Maybe, but I’m sure there’s more that I want to do in life than what I listed out in about 10 minutes

2. My point isn’t that they should experience those things, it’s that there’s so much to experience.

3. What’s the point of anything?

4. When I think of the relationships in my life that went too long or too short, the ones that went on for too long I don’t feel too bad about. The ones that went too short are a completely different class - I feel far more regret and sadness.

Yeah, there are downsides to everything, the question is whether pros > cons.

Imagine tomorrow, some mystical cosmic event made it impossible for people to die of natural causes. Would you institute a law that once someone made it to 100 years old, they should be executed? This would prevent most of the downsides curing death would spring.

I think the answer to this is obviously no, that would be completely foolish, if not immoral. But when we start with the status quo of death existing, puzzlingly, most people think death is a good thing.

I'm young, and most older people I know have peace with the idea of death, so I could be totally wrong. Yet, I never understand the idea that curing death would be a bad thing.

There is so much in the world to experience - what does it feel like to:

* master tennis?

* hitchhike through snowy Hokkaido?

* craft an oak desk with just your hands?

* fall so deeply in love you feel whole?

* direct a movie with just your dreams?

* completely understand the ins and outs of a field of study?

* make friends with someone you've read for decades?

I would love to experience all of these things and more, but it would take huge amounts of dedication, risk, and luck to get close to a full list. By curing death, this gets way more achievable and accessible to everyone.

One of my favorite book quotes:

> “Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.” - Aldous Huxley

There are a lot of great lines in this, but the one that’s always stuck with me is simply “bullshit is the junk food of experience.”

It’s a perfect metaphor in so many ways, there’s some fundamental truth glowing behind it like a lightbulb.

I think the fundamental message is very relevant to software development: question everything. It’s really easy to get so caught up in the layers of abstraction, that we forget that we’re making software for people.

A chef who painstakingly concerned himself with where he sourced his ingredients may or may not be a good chef. But the chef who concerned herself deeply with the taste of the meal would probably be a good one.

Yet, when we talk about software development, 90% of what we talk about is stack, and 10% is what we built. I’m not super successful or anything, but I imagine the founders who focus on the 10% are the better ones.

IIRC, macOS was the first platform it was released on.

Why don’t you ask him?

This is good to know. It could also be that people with large phones underestimate how much they'd be able to adjust to smaller phones.

There's a breakthrough that I've been waiting for that I haven't heard anything about: when will an AI agent (probably a language model) discover something scientific that humans had not at the time it was trained. What if there was a math proof, physics interaction, ... that emerged from the model's approximation of our world?

Right now, the state of the art AlphaZero models can destroy humans at Go. But what if the machine learning models could teach us things about how Go works that humans have not yet discovered.

For me, the people who want smaller phones are the textbook example of a vocal minority. I've read so many Hacker News and r/apple threads about how people love and miss phones you can use with one hand. And then every few years a phone manufacturer will try it, and it won't sell at all.

I almost think people with small phones just underestimate how much they'd be able to adjust to a larger phone.

The odds we're about to live in a biopunk world just increased.

Adjacent topic: how does someone with strong computer science algorithm start designing pcb’s? Like if I wanted to, say, create a computer which randomly added together integers and displayed them on an LCD, where would I even start to learn how to do that?

I think that saying social media can't make the future better is like saying the internet itself can't make the future better. It seems obvious to me that both can improve humanity.

This is extremely interesting. We’ve had some amazing AI models come out in the past few days. We’re getting closer and closer to AI becoming a facet of everyday life.

Maybe I’m naive, but I see this as a coincidence. If it was an hour later, then maybe there would be something.