unless you’re ok with what you get out of today’s models on dedicated consumer GPUs

This is all I use, mostly for quickly putting together personal software and doing linux stuff, it doesn’t feel limiting and is already really powerful. A lot of the stuff those models struggle with can be overcome by giving better context and more specific instructions, and that can be automated, so they should become more useful as harness software advances, independently of advancements in the models themselves. Maybe I have a limited perspective because I just haven’t tried the frontier models, but developing a dependence on services run by malevolent companies that obviously intend to use that dependence as leverage is deeply unappealing, and I’m not sure what they could offer to make that seem worth it on top of what I can already do with my own computer.

Well yeah, although I would argue that the narrative of Idiocracy supports this idea

The premise in the intro sequence about genetics and intelligence is bogus, but anti-intellectualism is a huge problem and this movie called how bad it was going to get. Bad things happen when people don’t value science or rational thinking, even if that’s not the only source of problems.

The nice thing about rotary phones was, they didn’t have to be plugged into an electrical outlet, so they worked during a power outage

So to give someone a steam gift card now you have to send it directly to their steam account?

Hoping none of my current hardware dies on me before then

Author of the blogpost seems to be fully engaged with that, but their worry is that they no longer have a professional edge over the competition because LLMs let less experienced people do all the stuff they spent years developing expertise in:

Of course, I’m still employable because someone has to review the code and steer the robot. But I’m just another off-the-shelf engineer now. I have no domain expertise that another Sr. engineer steering an LLM cannot match. All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.

We were taught that generalists and specialists will always have their roles. But now the market is shaping everyone into becoming a generalist. That’s not a bad thing per se, until you look under the economics of supply and demand: if everyone is a generalist, the price of a generalist falls if there’s no demand to match. And we all know the demand is drying up.

Opened the comments knowing this one would be here to upvote

When you deputize an AI agent to shop for you, you basically tell the computer program (or “agent”) what you want. Like: find the best running shoes under $150 for someone with wide feet, or the cheapest flight to Venice. The agent then searches multiple retailers, evaluates options based on your preferences, and completes the sale.

This sounds like it could actually be useful, since there’s normally a tradeoff between perfectly optimizing getting the most of what you want at the best price and how much time you have to spend shopping around.

An AI assistant cannot be both a consumer agent and a platform sales channel.

Just needs to be actually independent, ideally locally run, maybe mostly not even AI since you don’t exactly need a LLM to scrape websites and compare prices. Where AI would be useful is times when things are ambiguous, like I often want to buy the cheapest available item, but if you sort by price there are pages of accessory items that just have the same keywords in the title but aren’t the thing I’m actually looking to buy, and it wouldn’t be trivial to automate finding the first one that actually matches using conventional methods.

Just gotta dodge spoilers for two more weeks…

Going forward they should do it think it through,

mutes audio for the rest of the sentence

This is reality if you’re using an mp3 player instead of a phone

That’s true but you can mess up pretty bad if you don’t know what you’re doing and aren’t carefully following a recipe. One time I wanted a stir fry to be more filling, so I added flour, which apparently gives it a uniquely unpleasant slimy texture and is basically inedible. Never did that again but that kind of stuff can happen more often before you have much experience cooking. Even if you are following a recipe sometimes they can be ambiguous or give wrong measurements (especially for the amount of salt to use).

It doesn’t look like it is literally shutting down, just ceasing development:

“With that update, we also intend to release the game out of early access and make it free for any players who want to check it out in the future. We are also investigating offering refunds to players who have purchased the game.”

Unfortunately not all good games are popular

First I’ve heard of it. Is it any good?

Are the specific suggestions made in the article “horrible UI design”? IMO it is good UI design to have a basic goal of people being able to use it without consulting with external resources, and not requiring them to know much more than is strictly necessary for the given task. The real fundamental problem is the marketshare of proprietary operating systems, not using them needs to be accessible, not a badge of computer literacy. The author is absolutely right that you should be able to format a disk and set up a network drive by just clicking through and selecting basic options about what you are trying to do.

All he’s really saying is that it is important for things to be easy for people to figure out how to do, and for that you need to be aware of what mental models they already have and design interfaces with the goal that the largest number of users can succeed in using the software. A better analogy might be that if you’re trying to run a political campaign, you should probably be speaking the language the majority of voters speak, and caring whether they understand you.

The examples the article gives seem like good ones. The starting point is a video of people new to linux trying to use software and failing to figure it out, acknowledging that as a problem to be solved. The proposed solutions are basically to have wizard guis that can walk users through the most common tasks for disk management and network drives. Usability matters and none of that should be very controversial.

What makes it seem that way? Doesn’t read like AI to me, not a lot of vague fluff, consists of salient points and claims backed by links to relevant sources.