LLMs are an alternative to search engines, which endangers google's whole ad business.

"AI mode" search is a sort of bridge. It gets Gemini a lot of customers that otherwise would not have used an LLM at all.

They may get stuck trying to keep the llm pattern similar enough to the search engine that the adwords business working more or less the same way.

This could be self limiting.

Irl, (a) different people's ways of working with ai are a million little islands and (b) bottlenecks vary enormously by coder and codebase/task.

Also... I think our era has an intrinsic bias that change=progress, productivity, etc.

Take the "networked computing revolution" of 1990-2000. These computers did land on every desk and every pocket. They are administration powerhouses. Excellent for all manner of administration tasks.

But... what this netted out to is "change." We send a lot more emails than we did letters. We communicate a ton. Secretaries went extinct. But "administration" grew.

A university faculty typically has more admins. Companies hire more accountants, HR, project managers, etc.

Maybe administration was never really a bottleneck.

Code has a lot of this. Everyone has a road map, wishlist, etc. It appears as though "code capacity" is the bottleneck. But maybe most of those companies can't really generate much more value from more software.

Anecdotally, it seems that many mid-tier shops are migrating/ modernizing their stack, and suchlike.

I haven't heard of many belting out features, and increasing prices or sales.

Most bottlenecks are upstream of another bottleneck. Few are a "dam."

To some extent, we tell as many lies as we can get away with. Some answers are more convenient then others.

"Why" this is taking so long, like "why did this fail?" are prone to broadly agreed lies. Sometimes this is for obvious blame liability reasons. Often, this is because the lie conflicts with some "meta."

One such fallacy is the idea that software=value. Code= money, because it cost money to write. Features=revenue. Etc.

Irl.. startups produce features very quickly because they actually need features. They start with zero features.

But... LinkedIn, visa or even Facebook.... What they are short on is opportunities to develop code with value. Ie... Something that will increase revenue.

FB aren't resource constrained. They're demand constrained. If there were a "write code, make revenue" opportunity available... they'd have taken it already.

This totally conflicts with the experience of working somewhere. That's because you have wishlists, road maps and deadlines.... and it always appears that demand for code is sky high.

Precise motives are hard to work out as a general rule. Ultimately, it often comes down to a decision that decision makers like or don't like for a confluence of reasons.

More conventional forms also, to some degrees and in some times and places.

Many of the ancient people's of Mesopotamia leave little or no trace of their languages. Hebrew, an iron age language, leaves only scraps dating to the iron age. One of 2-3 complete sentences from the whole kingdom of Judah is an inscription commemorating the completion of a waterworks project for Jerusalem. They wrote it on papyrus and it does not survive.

Neighboring iron age cultures are known from single artefacts.

The Easter Island script was seemingly written on banana leaf.

There is no deep archeological record of knotted strings.

Speculation from a sense of evidence is trick. Personally, I think writing and proto writing existed and was invented and lost many, many times. Thousands maybe.

Also, while impressive... A scaled up in advanced literary culture is not necessarily necessary, or even useful.

Egypt for example, are those Monumental temples and pyramids, mortuary hieroglyphs and what not necessary? Useful?

It's hard to distinguish between the outputs of the civilization, and its objective needs. There may have been many ways of doing complex, large, dense civilization.

Elamite, Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages of that region were written on clay... which lends very well to mass production and extremely well to preservation. They also had large populations and urban centres.

These are all very big multipliers of evidencence. A clay tablet has >1000X more survivability than papyrus, velum or even painted pottery.

Meanwhile... there isn't much writing in central and south America either... even when/where population density and urbanism is high.

Khipu, knitted strings, are the most common known writing system. There's evidence for the existence of other writing systems... but not much of it. Hence, undeciphered one-offs.

You also need to consider that writing has different uses. Most development of literacy examples start with some pretty limited use cases.

Writing isn't like fire, instantly useful to everyone everywhere.

Everything else can develop gradually. But... gradually doesn't necessarily mean generations. It can be one person expirementing, working on the project and until completion.

Think of it as a "master work" or a PhD. Big, but not beyond the right person's ability to complete over a decade.

Think Newton, Galileo or Tolkien. They didn't just "have an idea" that fully worked. But... they worked on their ideas for years, got a lot done themselves, and had fruitful projects.

People are people. What is possible in one century is possible in another, unless prerequisites are not present.

In the case of language... the centuries of development mostly contribute the ambition itself.

The inventor may not be doing some great project. They might be just inventing something small to help keep track of sales... or they're just inventing a gambling game that uses symbols.

Logograms and ideagrams were ideas that he tried out. An MVP before pivoting to a better one. That's how invention works, through expiremention.

To me the example represents the fact that it doesn't take a millenia. If the right person is on the job... it can be a one person job.

But... IDK if this (or other clearly advanced writing systems) demonstrate "refinement of millennia."

I think we have a "history is accelerating" bias. Changes in the deep past happened slowly, and the pace of change increases over time. That may be true from a very broad POV... but I don't think it's true on shorter timescales.

There are no hard limitations on going from a newly invented writing system to a professional scribal culture in a single generation. I don't think watershed "revolutions" are something new. Egyptian writing, and Early bronze age egyptian culture more broadly gets very advanced, very quickly. We don't really know what elements have deep histories... but it's hard to explain ancient egypt without allowing for some impressive leaps. Hence aliens.

Also... "common ancestor" can be a lot of things. It could be like the gradual species-like philogenetics of cyrillic, latin, hebrew, arabic and all other alphabets' development from proto-sinaitic and canaanite/punic. The same script gradually evolving in different scriptural islands.

Otoh... "ancestry" can be pure inspiration. The idea of writing, its uses and the certainty that widespread literacy is possible can be the "dna."

The confusing part is that culture does, often, evolve very gradually like species and clades over time. These sometimes leave evidence of the whole process. Sudden explosions can't be deduced from the absence of evidence.

The super-old artefacts themselves are only a hint... but I think more recent artefacts demonstrate that invention of a writing system is relatively common. We tend to think of invention of core concepts as the magical event, with expansion and proliferation as derivative or even inevitable. But... I think this may be backwards.

In general... I think purely intellectual feats that can be completed by one person happen over and over. Otoh, we intuitively underestimate the role of context. Availability of trade goods like paper and ink. The application of writing to uses like tax collection, trade contracts, religion, scholarship or whatnot. Those all require many people. Whole societies, economic and political structures.

IMO, this is the uniqueness of the early bronze age... for writing and other things.

A lot of the writing dirth of the european dark age relates to the scarcity of papyrus. Writing medium seems like a trivial issue. You can write on skins, or bark or shingles. But... that doesn't scale and doesn't lend to the development of writing as a big deal. The invention of cheap paper-making was as important as moveable type for the "Gutenberg Revolution" to take place.

Rongorongo is an undeciphered script from Easter Island. From the handful of surviving examples, this is clearly a highly developed script... developed independently on a small island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Corpus

The Cherokee Syllabary is a fascinating example. It was invented by Sequoyah. One guy. He had access to paper, ink and examples of english writing. He (seemingly) didn't have any information on how english writing worked. He borrowed letters from english... but he used them to represent syllables with no relation to latin. EG: the letter "D" represents the sound "A."

The ingredients for the invention of a full, advanced, newspaper-ready language were (1) one motivated genius (2) paper and ink (3) an example of how far the idea of writing could take you.

There was no proto-writing stage. It wasn't limited to personal seals, charms, prayers, accounting or short documents. I think the key here is example, a demonstration of potential. Sequoyah had seen books, letters and longform text. So, he went straight to newspapers, constitutional documents and suchlike. He taught his young daughter to read and the timeline from initial conception to widespread, advanced literacy was just 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

Writing and proto-writing may have been invented tens of thousands of times. Neanderthal proto-writing would be a paradigm-shifting find... but it wouldn't shock me that much.

The breakthrough inventions that tend to unlock a flood and punctuate our understanding of history... I think these are often more trivial than we expect. What matters is the ethereal and hard to describe "context." The addition of one or more trivial ingredients like a writing medium. Abstract "meta" like "writing should be used to write whole books." The sociability of the inventor.

The growing appreciation of Elamite sophistication adds to the shockingly large corpus of large, advanced civilizations that have existed in history. There are so many of them... and we don't even know what most were called.

For example. Take a modern country with a modern economy. Flatten it. Destroy all the factories. Bankrupt all the companies. You can get back to a fully modern economy again quite quickly. WWII demonstrates it.

Taking an unindustrialized country through the development process... that's very tricky. It can't really be rushed.

For a long time, economic development was seen as mostly capital and technology. You need time to develop all the capital needed. Roads, factories, etc. But... development efforts underperformed. Then the idea of "human capital" got popular as a way of explaining the deficit. Education, mostly. Development efforts still underperformed.

I think the "living community" thing is the answer to this. It' ecology. You can't make a rainforest by just dumping all the necessary organisms into the right climate. It's the endlessly complicated relationships between all those organisms that make the rainforest.

This is one of the things that worries me about the pace of modern change. When writing and literacy resurged in classical antiquity... we totally lost all the ways of (for example) doing scholarship orally. Socrates (through Plato) wrote about some of the downsides to this.

...and we did completely lose oral scholarship. We have no idea how to do it. Once the living culture died... it stayed dead. All the knowledge contained within it went away.

There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.

There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."

That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.

Wasted potential is a mournful thing.

Our mental models of developments like the industrial revolution, literacy, printing or suchlike tend to be a lot more straightforward than how things play out in practice.

When a bottleneck is eliminated... you tend to shortly find the next bottleneck.

Meanwhile, there is an underlying assumption everyone seems to make that "more software, more value" is the basic reality. But... I'm skeptical.

To do lists, wishlists, buglists and road maps may be full of stuff but...

Visa or Salesforce have already exploited all their immediate "more software, more money" opportunities.

The ones in a position to easily leverage AI are upstarts. They're starting with nothing. No code. No features. No software. With Ai, presumably, they can produce more software and make value.

Also... I think overextended market rationalism leads people to see everything as an industrial revolution...which irl is much more of an exception.

The networked personal computing revokution put a pc one every desk. It digitized everything. Do we have way better administration for less cost? Not really. Most administrations have grown.

Did law fundamentally change dues to dugital efficiency? No. Not really.

If you work on a terrible enterprise codebase... it's very possible that software quality/quantity isn't actually that important to your organization.

I wonder if this bone grease was an edible product or something else. Oils have many uses.

This thread and article have made me realize that a lot of different incentives exist to talk up the apocalypse.

It even neutralizes the Eliezers and their apocalypse mongering.

There was a when little panic about the fear of bigoted computers at that point.

But... it got a lot of earned advertising and they also sort of did a "pre-burn." They saturating the space with "bigoted Ai concern" for a while, and now I don't ever see it come up.

There's a "get ahead of the inevitable" thing going on. Also, obviously, prospectus hype.

Besides all that, these are geeks and they're excited. This is what an excited geek looks like.

IDK if this is true.

The boulevard of dreams is full of failed/misguided ad-based business plans. Contempt for the business model is sometimes the reason. An implicit assumption that all you need for success is traffic and a willingness to dirty yourself.

There are only a handful of success stories. Most involved a pretty deliberate and tenacious attempt. Success typically involves some very specific and strategic positioning. Data. intent. scale.

No one but Google had google's scale for search ads. 5-10% of the market just isn't enough. You do need tracking but the model works OK even without much targeting. Intent is built in, and that makes up for targeting. But the scale required for viability is very high.

Facebook ads didn't work until (a) they had pushed the envelope on targeting (to make up for lacking intent) and (b) scale was massive. Bing, reddit, etc.... They never had good ad businesses.

This is how I'm thinking about it: in a scenario with increased opportunity and risk... You've gotta know where you stand.

First question is how much is more software actually worth to you."

This is one with a lot of self deception. Software development is expensive. The companies have to do lists and wishlist and road maps. They have an A/B testing system and a productivity mindset.

But... If Linkedin, Salesforce or any whatnot really did have ways of producing software to make money... they would have done it already. Remaining opportunities follow a diminishing marginal value curve/cliff.

Imo, software development isn't necessarily a bottleneck. So... opportunity is limited and risk is the bigger deal.

The opportunity is at the upstart trying to bootstrap feature parity with Salesforce.

If you have no customers yet... you can unfettter the vibe and see if it works.

Imo companies need to revisit google's early days. Let a thousand flowers bloom. 20% time. If you unleash capable people and give them tokens .. That's a good way of searching for opportunities.

The thousand flowers died at Google because they had reached a point where opportunities are not everywhere. The best ideas had been discovered and also... the markets big enough to move Google's dial are few. There aren't many $100bn markets.

There's no way to do vibe coding safely, at scale, currently.