Pretty much all the machine learning recommendation engines that emerged in the Netflix era were doomed to collapse under their own weight over time for non-mainstream users because the some limited number of mainstream modes dominate as most statistically "optimal" across the total user pool. These algorithms are best in the early days, when they're still exploring the content space for good novel fits but eventually get trapped into deep, boring grooves that work really well for tons of non-discriminating users with similar tastes.

Separately, in real commercial terms, they're all fundamentally poisoned by business model objectives of highlighting cheap content or servicing partnership/advertising deals, etc. And that problem also becomes more and more prominent as the companies running them grow and become more influential and as they need to squeeze harder and harder for revenue growth.

It was basically just a long, winding, wildly expensive road back to broadcast radio programming.

It was a good run for a while, but we're long due for a new model.

Suddenly, they have a oracle that can endlessly tickle their curiosity (accurately or not) and follow them as deep into discussion as they can imagine, without ever growing tired or annoyed.

Unfortunately, in many ways, there's a lot of overlap between those people and those that had once made great community members online. They had the curiosity to have already dug deep into topics so as to become knowledgeable about them and discovered interest communities online as a place where they could invest themselves socially and feel less alone. Online communities were good for them and they were good for the online communities.

The story you relate here is not singular, and it's sad one to see, as it likely means these people are going to eventually find that they've lost the esteem and social credit they'd spent years earning and are now as alone online as they ever were before.

You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

Students and their often overinvolved and influential parents put a tremendous amount of pressure on instructors to provide high marks regardless of performance. This was always an issue but has become more and more uniquitous in recent decades.

Although some manage, it's extremely hard for indivudal instructors to stand up for earnest critical grading in the face of all this pressure. However, an institional policy like this lets them point to that policy as a sheild that deflects responsibility from individual teachers to a faceless, indiffent bureaucracy.

That's not to say that this is the best possible such countermaneuver, but that's the role it's trying to fulfill.

The grading system is already long broken -- far removed from your own meritocratuc ideal -- and this is a meager attempt to do something about it.

But I don't know if that takes away from the idea itself and what fruitful counterpoint it might play in modern discourse.

They're not talking about the economic value of humans or even the psychological value of humans as subjects with experiences and a right to liberty or care or something. The idea they're trying to recall and reinvigorate is a sense of human value that transcends that temporal, material noise altogether and that is truly universal. It's the human value that welcomed slaves, prostitutes, wretches, merchants and kings as peers in something grander than economy or state or lineage or tribe or creed.

Now, you can make a well-developed case that that's hogwash and that the human value that matters is the one that alleviates suffering or grants liberty or even the one that grants material reward for some virtue or bloodline or whatever, but that's not what these guys are talking about. They mean a human nature that is always there and always worthy, just as much when it's experiencing temporal poverty/suffering/abuse as when it's basking in temporal wealth/success/freedom.

The idea is that Christian or not, Catholic or not, it does good for everyone to think of human value that way and the critique -- for a long time now -- is that for all the flash and glimmer of technology and its material benefits, it sometimes makes it very very easy to forget.

Six months of fiddling and $X00 in subscription/token fees to make a DIY inventory management app that's going to need regular attention and revision, with ongoing service fees, to accommodate not-quite-right implementations and hidden technical debt.

That's a toy for wealthy hobbyists, not a revolution.

The industry needs to deliver on a lot more than that to justify the investments that have been made.

Users attest to higher productivity and point to material but intermediate factors like token use, generated lines of code, pr counts, etc, but there doesn't seem to be a convincing revolution in the quantity or quality of mature software being delivered.

Combine that puzzling impressions of outcomes with a sense, for many, that they don't feel like they have a personal problem that warrants a new tool, and you end up with a pretty earnest and defensible indifference.

To get hold out engineers using AI, the industry needs to be focused on demonstrating relatable workflow improvements and demonstrating practical improvements to finished work product. Instead, policies like token use incentives just rely on luring them into pulling the slot machine handle with the expectation that once they do, they'll join the cadre of other converts who justify their transition with subjective improvements and intermediate metrics.

That's the level that most competent software engineers should be working at.

Delegating understanding to LLM's is totally different thing. It's not plumbing at all. It's more like hiring a unlicensed, generalist but well-reputed handyman from Craigslist and then going out to a movie while they do the work. It could turn out fine, or not, and if it does work out, it could even save time and money if they're rate is low enough.

But it's not plumbing anymore, and you should be wary about billing plumber's rates for their work or taking on liability for it if you haven't even made sure that work meets your own standards of trade and quality.

You can argue that it's "one more level of abstraction" but it's a qualitatively different kind of abstraction. And in the economy of skilled labor, and the legal landscape of accountability and liability, that difference is enormously relevant.

To win a news cycle.

For the forseeable future, the AI market competition is not about which product can provide the most valuable utility to users. It's about which product can be holding the protective aura of social media and investment zeitgeist while competitors buckle under the strain from unfulfilled hype and over-leveraging.

Utility, engineering, efficiency... these are all menial details for the winners to reluctantly iron out in 2035.

Yielding to "not feasible at scale" is exactly how we ended up with a lot of today's most pressing and almost intractible problems, from social media's ills to person and society straight through to enshittification and non-repairability.

Why do you not buy it and why do you think OpenAI is doing the best they reasonably can? Do you have reasons, or is that just something your gut tells you?

They're a new, fast-moving company exploring a completely new technology domain. They're facing existential competition and a ticking clock to make good against unprecedented investment. They have a countless competing priorities and are still discovering the capabilities and consequences of their research, product, and business choices every day.

How do you get from there to "the best they reasonably can" and "nor within their power to fix"? Those feel like very conclusive answers for a field, and business, that's about as far on the frontier as anything we've seen in decades.

Writing code to coax computers into doing specific things in specific ways is a craft, trade, and art form older than pretty much anybody alive today.

Writing prose instructions to direct LLM's to generate that code also produces software, but it's essentially a different craft/trade/art altogether.

Whatever success the latter claims in commerce or mindshare, both of these arts will coexist for longer than anybody will be around.

It's completely natural to carve out spaces where people who appreciate the process or character of hand-crafted projects can discuss those projects without people talking about a whole different thing crowding out their conversations.

A lot of artists who would love to be able to direct their professional software in natural language have to reconcile that with how this technology came to be and what the aims are of the company now delivering it to them.

If someone were on vacation and came home to learn that their neighbor had allowed some friends stay in the empty house, we would often expect some kind of outrage regardless of whether there had been specific damage or wear to the home.

Culturally, people have deeply set ideas about what's theirs, and feel like they deserve some say over how their things are used and by whom. Even those that are very generous and want their things be widely shared usually want to have have some voice in making that come to be.

ZIRP ended, its remaining monopoly money has been burnt through, and the projected economy is looking bleak. We're now in the phase where everything that can be monetized is being monetized in every way that can be managed.

Free tiers evaporate. Fees appear everywhere. Ads appear everywhere, even where it was implied they wouldn't. The lemons must be squeezed.

And because everybody of relevance is in that mode, there's little competitive pressure to provide a specific rationale for a specific scheme. For the next few years, that's all the justification that there needs to be.

If that looks use-italics "really legitimate" to you, then you might be easily scammed. I'm not saying they're not legitimate, but nothing that you shared is a strong signal of legitimacy.

It would take a perhaps a few hundred dollars a month to maintain a business that looked exactly like this, and maybe a couple thousand to buy one that somebody else had aged ahead of time. You wouldn't have to have any actual operations. Just continuously filed corporate papers, a simple brochure website, and a couple virtual office accounts in places so dense that people don't know the virtual address sites by heart.

Old advice, but be careful believing what you encounter on the internet!

Imagine you saw a question like this posed at the beginning of an essay or work of fiction. 99% of the time, that essay would be a wild and delightful trip through paranoied interpretation. In fact, it would be really unusual and boring were it just to dismiss the idea this hot lead immediately after it was poised.

Well, LLM's are just improv partners in essay or story writing, not therapists or confidant, and you gave that improv partner an easy volley to ran with im writing a paranoia story.

If you really need to use an LLM to find insight and advice (you really should avoid that), never give it scintillating leading questions like what you posed here. Instead, use neutral open questions that suggest as little as possible, and introduce only the more boring ideas when they need to be leading at all. When you fail to do that, you're just inviting it to play out your own dark fantasies. And while that may feel validating and clarifying, it's going to be sending you deeper into your own imagination and farther away from solutions and reality.

Please use these things responsibly, if you have to use them at all.

The Claude the industry needs is one that responds to that prompt with questions about scope and intent, and challenges its only-suitable-for-tutorials design ideas rather than obediently delivering a "90% finished product".

10 years ago, this basically marks the difference between hiring some dude on Fiverr for $400 and an actual engineer or agency who might help you figure out what the heck you're trying to do and point you in some sane direction towards it.

I appreciate this article for sharing what kind of experience people can expect from Claude right now, but it mostly demonstrates that code assistants remain most useful in the hands of experts who are careful what to ask for, and largely misleading and slop-amplifying for people who don't.