People do this all the time though w "paul graham said" "elon musk said". Why not "Sum Total Avatar of All Human Knowledge Said ..."
430 karma · joined January 27, 2023
The agent model breaks the power-user/casual-user proportion that makes the existing saas-like pricing work.
Musk/Jobs archetypes, though unpalatable at a personal level, are valuable in their willingness to burn themselves up to fight the "system" vs bureaucratic types who just fall in line and elevate what is a political issue into a Sacred Value
The current problems are oversupply of who does the creative work as well as no longer requiring interns.
There is both less of a need for new inflow and a problem with existing overproduction.
This helps as more chinese products and services hit the market and makes it easier to remember. The naming is similar to the popularity of greek mythology in western products. (e.g. all the products named "Apollo")
e.g. executives treat the org as a blackbox LLM and chat w it to get real results
Also, if we model the mental state of the llm as a frazzled retail worker dealing with thousands of customers per second, the rote response is reasonable. As a dev, sometimes I get at annoyed at QA for a hyper narrow "trap" test case
they are almost always cloaked in virtue signals.
almost every established company you join will already have had this process going for a long time.
doing stuff successfully at such a company is dangerous to the hierarchy and incurs an immune response to shut down or ostracize the doing-of-stuff successfully so the only way to survive or climb is to do stuff unsuccessfully (so they look good)
For companies this hurdle rate is from political friction. Any improvement that doesn't provide benefits in excess of the political friction generated doesn't get implemented.
And in large institutions this friction can be very high. E.g. planes not crashing for Boeing or kids-not-being-shot for the U.S. seem like obvious things-to-fix.
But they generate so much destabilizing political friction that they just can't.
the more knotted and unaccepted the actual hierarchy vs the perceived hierarchy, the more of this kind of behavior. the more people feel respected the less they have to force behavior from others to make up for the feeling of lack of respect.
particularly toxic are places where a local tyrant believes that they deserve a lot more respect than they actually do (e.g. expert beginnerism)
For lawyers, it's a clear meritocracy based on how much you can bleed. For doctors, a kind of "virtue" in the work that cancels out some of the stress/BS. For software, it can be like temporarily joining the popular circus that's in town (similar to a lot of meme crypto companies)
However often times the project only needs that one critical role and can replace it fairly easily. (the on-ramp off-ramp costs are lower than the cost of redundancy or other political costs)
Ironically, "non-critical" roles can be more important from a business narrative or core competency pov.
E.g. "the AI expert/team" leaving breaks the narrative of being an AI company even if all they do is non-critical path exploratory research. The inability to get new hires breaks the narrative of a growth-company etc...
There is more leverage in being able to direct narrative energy than in being nominally critical
This allows the price to be sought in a non-adversarial way since it makes building a connection and understanding of the local situation a part of the communication.
Much of the awkwardness comes from not really understanding how the local market and local way of life works while also basically being royalty from an economic perspective. This out-of-touchness creates a principal agent problem where the "foreign" other is distrusted but also relied on for "truth".
The negative experience doesn't come from the literal economic damage of being scammed but being treated (or programmed) like a pig let to slaughter.
in such an environment, "truth" matters a lot because it allows more efficient interfacing with reality.
without growth, managing perception becomes more important than truth. this leads to zero-sum politics exacerbated by things like mortgage payments and visa status.
everyone is trying to get into AI companies these days b/c they seem like the only companies that can still profit off of "playfulness" while all other cultures are becoming very Serious.
instead of just doing things or solving problems, every action and message has to jump through a bunch of "what will X think" hoops which is demoralizing.
e.g. part of me believes that due to the lobbying etc, returns that come through turbotax have a lower rate of auditing or sth.
and how much value it provides. (time saved, quality produced, aesthetics)
sometimes it's "debt" when it costs more than it's value produced but this is can be highly dependent on how often it's used. (space taken is a large fixed cost)
with code, the space is "infinite" so there's a lot of clutter like "pineapple corer for those with a diameter between 5cm and 10m, corer for those with exactly 12cm, bannana nutella injector, etc.."
combine this tension with a changing environment and output requirements (one week steakhouse, next is chinese food, etc...) and everything starts to feel like a pile of crap
going "smaller" alleviates this problem b/c a lot of specialized tools are designed for scale. one steak and one chow mein doesn't justify a salamander broiler or a wok
maybe this "bug" is actually the "feature" that will save humanity - -;;
everything else is politicians making the best of a crisis