When things are stagnant, we gradually optimize our lives towards a low energy state and overfit to our exact circumstances. When a change in circumstances reveals past optimizations to be wasted work, it kick-starts the four stages of grief over the loss of that low energy state.

There was an excellent article on the front page recently about role confusion, which highlights just how just far models have to go on this: https://role-confusion.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48605117

Points: 39

# Comments: 26

Software development is search through the space of useful/interesting automations. Business is search for product market fit (at the intersection of expertise, capital, problem, etc.) Writing is search for lossless, efficient idea transfer.

AI software development is more search. If we search more, will we find a bunch of garbage? Hell yes. We'll find a TON of garbage. That's not new, though. The world has been writing way more books than you'll ever read, recording more music you'll ever hear, filming more television shows than you'll ever get to watch, etc. A lot of it is garbage, but the good stuff stands the test of time and rises to the top, and I'd rather live in a thriving, flourishing world full of all these things, because there's more cream-of-the-crop when there's more everything.

It's evolutionary fitness operating in the space of ideas. I agree that "maybe later" was indeed a useful mechanism, and maybe even a local optimum in the development methodology search space (which recently experienced a major earthquake!), but evolutionary pressure will bring it back into existence in some form sooner or later.

I guess the "natural" base to use to get the "right" number of increments is a pointless exercise, since it ultimately bottoms out in the question of "why is a regular year as long as it is?", but if we assume a base of 2, I'm currently in my 6th log year, and hope to die comfortably into my 7th. Actuarial odds are >80% in my favor.

Bug report, if you're the author: I can't delete periods.

Feature request: I wanna be able to move periods from one layer to another.

(Oh, and there's no shorthand, like `-c`. It's `--commit` or bust.)

The space of contrarian ideas is vast, and most of them are probably bad, but, nevertheless, the willingness to hold unconventional, internally consistent views should be celebrated, because it increases diversity of thought. Our collective hive mind grows stronger through heresy.

However, I like my heresy with a splash of axiomatic precision, which is sadly lacking in this article.

All those companies (and many other large tech companies) have discovered the same arbitrage that older media companies discovered decades ago, which is that we, on the average, are much more willing to pay with attention than with money, even where money would have been the better choice.

Advertising continues to be one of the most powerful business models ever invented, and I don't think that's changing any time soon.