Requests for comments from career security experts: is this any good?
I worked through the IoT boom and hypecycle, and I found an easy way to cut through the hype to describe what we were doing was "everything has an IP address."
This obviously meant more to some people than others, but even a relatively technologically naive leader could grasp at some level what this would look like.
Naive me joined other commoners to express aghast surprise at how stupid and clueless our leaders were (are!), completely clueless to the idea that perhaps we were (are!) being managed and that our rage burns off energy in a mostly harmless manner.
Recently, and in no small part thanks to everything being available for streaming, I started with the DS9 pilot and made my way through all seven seasons. It took me several years of steady chipping away (spikes in watching on long flights, and weeks or months of no watching), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are multiple sharks jumped. Alien sharks jumped. The same hammy and even adolescent takes on relationships. But through it all shines the enduring, consistent introspective existentialism.
I think watching DS9 in this way provides a richer experience while TNG can mostly be enjoyed by dropping in here or there, and you eventually pick up on the long arcs of the Borg, Q, etc...
"Engine" works well as the model. The car is the harness.
Pushing back further (etymologically): A horse is the model. The harness connects the horse to the coach/wagon, where the user sits. Multiple horses may be connected in parallel. Maybe oxen (different models) are connected for certain jobs, which require a harness appropriate for the workload.
I agree that harness, like agent, is a hype word and is often part of word soup. It's been at least a year now (an eternity in the AI wars) where the frontier model releases are just one factor we are using and weighing against competitors, and things I would put under the "harness" category matter as much or more.
Digital minimalism is less time on devices/platforms.
This article is more about digital curation, which has value in it's own right.
Let's ASSUME that the AI boom has, in fact, created an outsized demand for AI-literate SWE's who can understand and ship custom solutions from within client's organizations.Are you a glorified consultant? Why or why not?Does your position deployed, um, forward, give you unique visibility or access which results in you building something you could not have built as a [insert the opposite of...
Our healthcare system has co-evolved with insurance in a sort of partial free-market, partial heavily regulated environment. Arguably we get the worse parts of both: Kafka-esque beaurocratic mazes and shareholder value optimization for private firms.
There's a paradigm shift needed in how health insurance works: optimize for total cost of care.
Can the invisible hand do this when providers are offering mainly treatments with token preventative care visits thrown in?
Star Trek has always had a sort of hammy or "of course we're jumping sharks, that's kind of our thing, but when we do it's not really jumping a shark" tone to it. Especially the action sequences.
I've oft criticized novels and movies that are too thin a shell on philosophical givings forth, but in the case of Star Trek (mainly Enterprise and Deep Space Nine for me, but I think the original has the same appeal for many) it's like I can't get enough.
It's the thinking that appeals to me, and the inspection of the human experience in a manner that feels familiar to me.
I'll never forget this line, and what it means. I think of it often.
The technical ability of anthropic models continue to steadily improve, but I still find the creative and compositional choices to fall far short of anything I would ever use.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this: 1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch 2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses 3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases
OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.
Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.
One that stuck with me from the NPR series is "I believe in BBQ"
Give it a try!
I think there is another overlapping factor at play too: good writing is novel in some way. AI can produce so. much. volume. so even if some of the patterns it uses have been markers of "good" writing, those same patterns become almost unbearable when you have millions of people pumping out content using them.
One of the ways I can make a custom app/harness for a given task more of a competitive advantage is by striving for model agnosticism - the thing works and so has the valuable part outside of a model.
We've already seen older models being unavailable, and the newer (supposedly better) model doesn't do the work as well for some reason. Or a service is just down for minutes or hours.
A sort of related concept is that I may dislike, actively hate, or be completely indifferent to some of the authors and artists whose work I love. I love their work, but I may not love them. I may choose to spend time with people whose art I dislike. So it is with AI. I dislike the idea of AI, so I claim to dislike the art.
As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.
Imagine the holodecks in Star Trek, which for my argument I'll consider to be significantly more advanced AI, and significantly closer to crawling out of the uncanny valley... the people using them ultimately hit the same wall of "oh but this falls short of real human experience."
Does this (2019) article propose the opposite? That hit music usually contains a sort of pleasing surprise, and that over time our hits have to become more and more unpredictable musically?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pop-music-good-br...
That's now I'm reading it. But I'm a music consumer, not a music creator, so I may be missing some nuance or conflating related ideas.
Mainly, crocodiles may survive a mass extinction event caused by humans.
At some point, it was clear to everyone that punchcards were no longer the most efficient way to program. People who chose to keep using them could for whatever reason could be considered artisans.
I also thing we should avoid automatically attaching to "artisan" value. I know some artisan bakers whose bread is amazing and sells out virtually every day they bake (alas, they still don't make much money which is why most people don't eat artisan bread). So artisan products can be better than their modern counterparts, but it's a mistake to assert it automatically is higher value.
An artisan is (by definition) someone who creates manually, using traditional methods. Before there are automated or higher tech means of creating the same output, artisans don't exist, they are just craftspeople or tradespeople.
A factory worker, or factory owner, can care deeply about the quality of the product, and can be "in the loop" as you write about, but they are in the loop with the factory equipment vs. in the loop in manually crafting the product.
I don't think I'm refuting or in any real disagreement with you, in fact I may be here pushing artisan pedantry because I didn't see the literal use of the term coming through strongly enough.
If you long for books for your children, join the fight!
I also hope to see a rebound for books and reading for all ages.
Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.
– Thomas Edison, The New York Dramatic Mirror, 1913
What a quote! I love these takes because it instills a sense of skepticism for what our (wise?!) technologists are saying today. Especially the ones who are making the technology. No one knows how it will play out. Books remain.
Regarding your son: I am critical of adults' ability to orchestrate effective learning for children. Err on the side of honesty and directness, even in situations that are personally uncomfortable.
Most children are remarkably smarter and more capable of understanding than we (adults) give them credit for. Your son will likely have a better memory than you in the years when the acquired information disparity is highest (you having a lot, him having very little). Children learn early on how and when adults are being untruthful or partially truthful.
You cannot read too much to your son. You cannot talk too much with your son. You cannot listen too much to your son.
I'm out of my league on knowing if these ChatGPT projections are close, a little off, or way off, but we currently pay about $5k per month for Claude for our whole team. The projection for "run Deepseek on AWS to replace Claude" is coming in at $30k+ for GPU hours.