Very good too, actually, assuming you enjoy the premise of CYOA in the corporate world. You can play it online for free if you want to give it a whirl.
Not sure, I would say it overstates things anyway (it's Twitter, so exaggeration for engagement is par for the course) ... but I would say it's gesturing at something roughly true and it'd be worth discussing the idea.
> Our elbows graze and his windbreaker says “vwip,” “vwop,” the walk feeling almost like a jog until finally he slows, we’re getting ready to jaywalk
The little onomatopoeia feels quite forced and out of place here -- totally the wrong note. FWIW, AI really likes writing that kind of thing, and I wonder to what degree that's influencing actual writers.
> Marshall McLuhan gets the credit for the medium is the message, but Claude Shannon had beaten him to a colder version of it years earlier: to a machine moving your words, the meaning doesn’t matter at all; only the medium does, and which of its signals can be told apart. Bravo and Delta survive a bad line; B and D don’t.
> I didn’t arrive there as a mathematician; I’m not one.
> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall, and it asked a question I couldn’t answer
Very strong LLM whiff. A line of thought that constantly, constantly turns back on itself, negating and doubting and qualifying in one way or another, is the biggest tell (the classic "It's not X, it's Y," is only the baldest example).
Noticing that whiff instantly turns me off from reading on.
> Technical debt, I assert without evidence1, grows exponentially, and therefpre it is very important to minimize it in your projects.
This actually seems like a really important idea absolutely deserving of its own blog post.
I'd have to think about the exact argument for why this feels so right, but the kernel would go something like this: whatever you build on those parts of the codebase where you have technical debt incurs new technical debt, because you're building on top of abstractions you'll remove later. The reason you have to remove the new abstractions, too, is that abstractions are like puzzle pieces: their structure determines which other abstractions they can connect with. So, as a rule (there are some exceptions), you can't take out one bad part, replace it with another, and leave everything around it untouched.
And, of course, it's easier to build on top of something creaky but currently serviceable than it would be to first rip that out and replace it, so that's what you do in most cases ... and the whole codebase gets more creaky and less serviceable; you increase the amount of abstractions you'd have to rip out and replace before building something new. The problem does, indeed, grow exponentially.
The argument is free to a good home -- I don't have the time for a full, meticulous elaboration, but I'd love to read one if someone is interested in making it.
Right, and that's also true of physical inventions that you might think are a straightforward application of scientific knowledge. The steam engine is a good example -- it was produced by tinkering, and we devised a theory of how it works much later.
Probably for the vast majority of human inventions, the thing exists long before the theory of the thing. I think that feels counterintuitive in part because examples to the contrary are very conspicuous -- e.g., the A-bomb. But inventions like that, where a theory is meticulously worked out then applied, probably only happen when you have to follow that path for whatever reason -- for the A-bomb, because of enormous capital expenditures. Yet there are countless inventions that came to be only because someone noticed an interesting effect and built something around it (off the top of my head, the microwave is another example), without creating a theory beforehand.
Very, very good essay. I'd like to add one thing to the argument. It used to be the case that your software itself could be a sound moat; that's no longer the case except toward the high end, where vibecoding fails due to complexity. Now, sound moats are e.g. your data, your regulatory advantages, your established customer base, etc., and software is increasingly just a fungible component -- increasingly like, say, accounting: a back-office task to tick off.
I love how in the slide with "It was the goose that created value", the goose has its wings raised. The goose is ... triumphant. Ascendant. Its arc is complete: after being valued at $0, the goose is recognized for the inexhaustible source of value it is. The goose is vindicated.
And finally, in the denouement, we see the goose in serene repose. "It is the Goose itself," we are told, in bold, confident lettering. This is what matters. Not the eggs.
I hope lasagnacat can come back, do a special on this, and hire John Barrymore for the narration, as a spiritual sequel to their Pipe Strip video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw).
The salient thing to me here is that their art kind of just crashed and burned (at least, I conclude so based on the post -- this is the first time I've heard of either of these people), and mental illness does not seem to have had any positive effect on it.
Sure, I think the article is basically correct, as things stand right now ... but the problem is that that wipes out software development as a career: software becomes just a tool that domain experts can spin up to make their jobs easier.
> Fifty-four tightly clustered, slanted oil wells — the last of the Salt Lake Oil Field — sit snuggly between Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and San Vicente Boulevard. In fact, the Beverly Center’s odd, curved footprint is designed to accommodate the drilling site, which is hidden by a wall along the street. The wells are almost completely invisible, dwarfed by the mammoth mall and the sprawling Cedars-Sinai Medical Center across the street — the hospital where I was born and where I later dropped my friend off to meet his wife for an ultrasound appointment.
This is all very right, but I'd like to add this: As your capacity to deal with abstraction (which is a function of intelligence and executive function and, to some extent, knowledge) grows, you become more and more constrained by the extent to which you can manipulate symbols. AI-based solutions for that are potentially really powerful, and that's the mechanism through which, as TFA says, "intelligent, educated people with working reward circuitry stand to gain more from AI."
And I'd also add that AI strongly disaggregates the returns to different levels of the capability to deal with abstraction -- higher levels get more, lower levels get less -- rather than uniformly boosting returns across the board (unfortunately). Of course, this has been the trend of information technology since at least the '80s, but now the slice at the top is really small and the returns very high.
Yeah, I think that's a good one, as would be e.g. Guards! Guards!
No idea why the recommendation in that link is Sourcery -- it's not bad, but it has that early Discworld flavor that's really just an extended riff on late '80s / early '90s fantasy and probably wouldn't land with a modern audience.