Yawn, another article which hand picks success stories. What about the failures? Where's the graph of flying cars? Humanoid house servant robots? 3D TVs? Crypto decentralized banking for everyone? Etc.
Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is shoveling shit in his mouth then smiling brown teeth at the audience. 10 years from now there's a real possibility of "AI" being remembered as that "stuff that almost got to a single 9 reliability but stopped there".
> the real "value" being delivered by the commercial software providers is often the setup, support, and hand-holding provided to customers who pay the crazy amounts
That is also possible and even usual with open source. The difference is you can choose the provider for each of those things, they can be different, you are not locked in.
> It feels like we have sometimes accreted an amalgam of these pithy takes based on very small, one off, studies (never replicated) that let us comfortably assemble an affirmation of our broader takes.
The patterns are there and are hard to deny. The reasoning and explanations of these types of books? Don't take them for granted, do your own research if anything is of particular interest, think for yourself, etc. The books can be of value without being 100% correct.
> “It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.”
If we go by the above then Sagrada Familia is far from perfect. I guess it depends on taste but I found it extremely kitschy. The lighted signs inside make me think more of a bar than a church. And I found the actual Barcelona Cathedral beautiful. There's also a pretty heavy discussion if the present thing is what Gaudi intended.
This one is sufficient for me. And I think classifying it as genocide is a big mistake if your goal is protecting the civilians in Gaza. An easily proven wrong accusation overshadows the fact Israel could have taken things more slowly an carefully. Which I think (with little experience or knowledge) they could since the power difference is huge between the sides.
> Wiki Education Foundation Executive Director Frank Schulenburg: "there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable impact on Wikimedia projects"
I think this is the best criticism as it avoids going into politics and addresses the practical issue.
> Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it?
No, and it showed. Witcher 3 was a success because of previous games. 3 was a dissapointment for a lot of people, they took the Ubisoft formula of repetitive content and diluted the experience until I got bored after about 100 hours.
W3 was a huge financial success but the writing was on the wall and only people who did not pay attention where surprised at Cyperpunk disaster. They tried to force a good game out with W3 and even more so with Cyberbunk. The results where clearly different than W2 which I personally think was their peak - a human curated story pace that left you dreaming for more.
Compare this with GTA games. Rockstar knows you can't rush things nor can you force industry revolutions in AI over night. Slow and steady wins the race. To which company do you think will the investor money go next?
Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is shoveling shit in his mouth then smiling brown teeth at the audience. 10 years from now there's a real possibility of "AI" being remembered as that "stuff that almost got to a single 9 reliability but stopped there".