gliall_err

Metalworking, lathes, precision tooling, are all way more valuable skills and tools today than they ever were before the industrial revolution.

I suspect that over time a good grasp of fundamentals and great tooling will only get more valuable in software as well as automation expands, in whichever form.

Automation expands the demand for skills. It can never diminish it. Required variety indicates that complexity doesn't go away with automation, and at some level someone will have to understand and make decisions about complex issues. You can't automate all the way down. Or, put another way, everything is already automated all the way down. The expansion of automation as we perceive it is merely the growth of complexity over new dimensions.

Or put a third way: automation means two different things: constraint and liberty. The confusion arising from not discerning which one is in force makes it seems like one can grow unbounded. Liberty requires constraint and vice versa.

I'm bad at getting some API to not be unreliable? What are you even talking about? When your team fails an SLA do you just tell them "well it's working now so git gud"?

We are assigning semantics to systems that deal only in syntactics. The entire problem with the current "AI" hype is squarely based on how we interpret output from systems based on statistical modelling of natural language.

That software is built on top of human language and these systems can be used for uncanny automation is a huge societal problem at the moment because we are all assigning meaning to patterns that inherently have none. It's all just bits flicking back and forth. We can make them match human language and use such systems to store and process data for us. We can use these bits to turn equipment on and off and run physical systems in factories and so laboratories. And now we can use GPU farms to dazzle us with output streams that might look a lot like autonomous agents capable of understanding human language and automating computer tasks.

The failure modes, the so-called "hallucinations", the amount of model whispering going on in managing "harnesses", "instructions" and so on... It's all just a lot of confusion and pareidolia.

We should never have hooked up hospitals and water supply systems to the internet but now here we are: people can type text such as "find vulnerabilities and get access blah blah" into a box and it goes into a looping interaction with statistical models of language and out come streams of commands that some python parses and runs like a script kiddie into some virtual machine running kali linux and that may disrupt vital infrastructure...

None of that was inevitable, or necessary. None of that means anything. There is no genie in the GPU farm. We concocted this entire shadow theater and are collectively gasping as the marionette slices the throat of some guy in the front row. Who had the brilliant idea of tying the sharpened sword to the marionette and sit people within range?

Why did we plug everything into the academic network built on trust? Why did we build GPU farms and interactive loops getting them to produce commands that we then parse and run blindly in internet connected vms?

The entire thing has cost hundreds of billions of dollars so far and counting. And why? Because the mountains of shitty saas code has become too boring to work on? We have made software so garish that we cannot bear to work on it without these contraptions helping us fling code at wall at industrial levels? Substitute corporate-speak and -bureaucracy for software to extend to the rest of the economy.

This entire state of things is comical.

Talent is not some fungible measure. I know incredibly smart people who can fail at incredibly basic life skills.

"They wouldn't be that dumb" is a meaningless argument. People you don't know can be as smart as anyone on the planet and still make very dumb choices.

Not "collapsing the climate"

Collapsing human-optimum climate, a temporary state Earth entered about 15 thousand years ago and made modern civilization possible.

The truly sad thing about it all is not the damage to some abstract "environment". The fact remains that we had an Eden-like planet for a few thousand years and completely and utterly wrecked it to maximize the "wealth" of a few generations of elites.

I was trying to figure out what time of day, by UTC, would most people be asleep. Searching I could only pre-slopped answers in hundreds of random blogs.

So I decided to get my own custom slop. Opened Gemini and it said "video generation is free for a few days, try it out!". I uploaded a copy of Neuromancer and asked it to generate a scene.

MF had Cage inserting a power plug in his ear.

Ah and the time zone curiosity question? It went about it for a a minute or so and said "can't help you with that one, anything else?"

I think we've seen the best these LLMs can do and the race to the bottom has started. It's all cost cutting now, and I am very curious to see what will be of OpenAI and Anthropic. Probably will end up absorbed by MS, Amazon and Nvidia.

You're missing the forest for the trees.

Horse population today is in line with the long term average. There was a freak bump from 1850-1920.

Think about this question: is it harder today or 200 years ago for the average person to learn and ride horses?

Same goes for craftsmanship: is it harder today or 200 years ago to find some highly skilled craftsman to do something a random people or organization might fancy getting done?

And software. We may be in the freak bump of software engineers. Seven digits seems like a good guess. Maybe we will revert to a long term average proportion of people with affinity for math and logic. But you bet your horse (heh) that in 200 years it will be far easier for the average person to find some highly skilled software craftsman to do some niche work than it has ever been. Average quality of corporate slop generated by flesh or silicon drones notwithstanding.

Society and the economy will go on growing more complex. Whatever anyone can picture or design in their heads about the reality of things can never approach the real world complexity and variety. And by whatever metric you may choose, the complexity and variety of skills and capabilities in human civilization will go on growing.

And how much of today's craftsmanship would be impossible one, two or three centuries ago?

There has never been as much craftsmanship as today. The idea that industry destroyed craftsmanship is a caricature. Modern industry was built on top of deep craftsmanship traditions and only enriched them.

The fact that some things that we knew how to do centuries ago we no longer know how to do is by no means evidence to the contrary.

This is a sophomoric oversimplification.

The US and Europe might have lost a lot of craftsmanship knowledge at a social level. Yet, what is left is so far ahead of what has ever existed in countries in South America for example. And China has gained a lot. Witness that youtuber trying to make grill brushes in the US. These differences have an impact in terms of opportunities and competition.

It's easy to sit at home, watch documentaries and picture history progressing along logical lines and imagine that the "industrial revolution" was this massive shift from craftsmanship to automation. Look closer and you'll see that what happened in the UK in the 1700s was in fact enabled by a long and deep tradition of craftsmanship that only got enriched by the rise of new power sources. Craftsmanship today is vastly more advanced than it ever was before industry.

And there is a lot to lose in the decline of craftsmanship, and it is by no means some sort of historical inevitability.

When you really start digging deep into history you realize most arguments of logical trends therein are mostly just misconceptions.