How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.
> How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software.
I've read about companies where all software developers have to RDP to the company's servers to develop software, either to save on costs (sharing a few powerful servers with plenty of RAM and CPU between several developers) or to protect against leaks (since the code and assets never leave the company's Citrix servers).
>You need uncontrolled compute for developing software
Oh you sweet summer child :(
You think our best and brightest aren't already working on that problem?
In fact they've fucking aced it, as has been widely celebrated on this website for years at this point.
All that remains is getting the rest of the world to buy in, hahahaha.
But I laugh unfairly and bitterly; getting people to buy in is in fact easiest.
Just put 'em in the pincer of attention/surveillance economy (make desire mandatory again!).
And then offer their ravaged intellectual and emotional lives the barest semblance of meaning, of progress, of the self-evident truth of reason.
And magic happens.
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To digress. What you said is not unlike "you need uncontrolled thought for (writing books/recording music/shooting movies/etc)".
That's a sweet sentiment, innit?
Except it's being disproved daily by several global slop-publishing industries that exist since before personal computing.
Making a blockbuster movie, recording a pop hit, or publishing the kind of book you can buy at an airport, all employ millions of people; including many who seem to do nothing particularly comprehensible besides knowing people who know people... It reminds me of the Chinese Brain experiment a great deal.
Incidentally, those industries taught you most of what you know about "how to human"; their products were also a staple in the lives of your parents; and your grandparents... if you're the average bougieprole, anyway.
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Anyway, what do you think the purpose of LLMs even is?
What's the supposed endgame of this entire coordinated push to stop instructing the computer (with all the "superhuman" exactitude this requires); and instead begin to "build" software by asking nicely?
Btw, no matter how hard we ignore some things, what's happening does not pertain only to software; also affected are prose, sound, video, basically all electronic media... permit yourself your one unfounded generalization for the day, and tell me - do you begin to get where this is going?
Not "compute" (the industrial resource) but computing (the individual activity) is politically sensitive: programming is a hands-on course in epistemics; and epistemics, in turn, teaches fearless disobedience.
There's a lot of money riding on fearless disobedience remaining a niche hobby. And if there's more money riding on anything else in the world right now, I'd like an accredited source to tell me what the hell that would be.
Think for two fucking seconds and once you're done screaming come join the resistance.
I wonder what material they used for the platter. I once took apart a 1.8" drive, and got a big surprise when the platter suddenly shattered. I was expecting aluminum, not glass/ceramic substrate.
One of my most delightful discoveries of the early 2000s was that iPod Minis used Microdrives that were pin-compatible with CompactFlash cards. I had a little cottage industry in the back of my office upgrading my coworkers’ old iPods to use bigger, solid state disks. I still have my 256GB iPod Mini. Aside from battery life, it still runs fine, and it is by far my favorite music player form factor.
> ... "and it is by far my favorite music player form factor."
I really liked the old original iPod Nano myself. Had one for years that I was triple-booting RockBox (for extended media formats support and fancier interface), iPodLinux (for playing Doom and other toys), and the original iPod OS (just in case). Still haven't yet owned another device in that size / form factor that can do as much as that little thing did. Apple really did make some sweet devices back in the day... :)
It is a common tactic among abusive parents to convince their child without them, they'd be unable to survive in the wider world. Any mistakes will become irrefutable proof thereof, and any attempts to break this control and do things on their own will be treated as ingratitude, often prompting the abuser to instantly abandon all parental duties to "teach a lesson".
I don't disagree, but in this context I don't think those are the same parents that are yeeting their kids off to board at university as soon as they are of age.
As one of those kids, you could’ve just stopped at “I don’t think”, because you’re not thinking critically if you think we don’t exist.
I wasn’t allowed to have a personal device or unsupervised internet access until I graduated.
My parents forced me to go to a school with a summer work program. I was yeeted to university by my wing clipping abusers THREE DAYS AFTER GRADUATION.
Rural, miles from the nearest town of 1200 so I didn’t have access to the resources needed to change any aspect of this.
I was deeply hampered by this, and despite being one of the salutatorians of my graduating class (we had ties due to AP), I crashed out of that university after a semester.
Uh huh. And some kids haven't got their head straight after puberty at 16, and still need (or would have needed) the training wheels. Blaming it on their parents would seem unfair.
Society works on averages. Most people being ready little adults at 16 doesn't mean everyone is.
Edit: yeah, look at the downvotes. How are you all doing with that self-regulation?
I think you're responding to an argument I didn't make. And I feel necessary to point it out because it looks like other people may be reading it like that, too.
(a) Quote from TFA is about using internet. GP talks about "didn’t have any freedom or autonomy" which I don't take quite as literally as you do, because they also mention "I saw this a lot in college". So it would have been quite regular level of (over)controlling, instead of locking them in and not letting them leave the house except for school.
(b) I am not advocating anything as a solution. I am pointing out that the simple cause and effect presented by GP might be more complicated.
See my other comment [1]. There's dozen of failed products. That one AppGyver product is from 15 years ago. Since then, he hasn't created any other product. The motorcycle however is real. The battery may also be. The issue with Solid State Batteries is that it's almost impossible to scale them.
The guy changes the industry he's in as often to match what's currently popular.
Failed startup isn’t a scam, to be a scam it needs to be presented in a way that is designed to collect money but that money be used for something else.
Otherwise YC would have been scam center, very few of YC companies don’t fail.
Paying for software developers is really weird. State governments for example struggle to pay for a FTE that makes $140k. But they can pay me over $200/hour for consulting services for multiple years. The technical FTE employees that they have generally aren't qualified to evaluate their consulting needs so you get multi-million dollar contracts with very little actual oversight. I was really impressed with the folks I was working with at this particular state government and looked into what it would look like if I joined them full time as a FTE technology leader. I would have to take almost a 50% pay cut. The top senior IT position that oversees all of the state resources makes 70% of what I do. It's crazy. Unless you're working in medicine or sports, government pay sucks.
I've seen similar but less extreme examples play out in the private sector. 16 year senior architect making less than freshly hired software dev that was just an intern within the same company. Software developer pay is largely based on what you're demanding. In a lot of companies, there is a wide range of pay for folks doing literally the same job. They will hire a dev at $180k because that dev wouldn't go lower and turn around and push back to get another dev at $120k for the same level of unproven experience.
I assumed the commonly cited 2x markup, so that would be a $100k salary, which is less than various websites say is the average US software dev salary. You could probably find cheaper elsewhere in the world, but even if you cut the salary in half that's still "bug must be doable in a week", which isn't going to cover many of the bugs people will care about.
This is not a new problem. Anyone remember what booting Windows was like back in 2000? All the programs loading bunch of libraries from spinning rust, just to get their tiny, useless icon to the tray. Some would show banners as they started in the background, to remind they exist. It would take minutes from GUI first paint to all icons in the tray and system responsive again.
Btw, night mode on that site is brilliant. Also necessary, the yellow burns my eyes.
How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.
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