Is it the case that the numbers always appear more optimistic, and then are revised to be more pessimistic values? Or is it just that the original numbers are off and are revised? Does that make sense?

Where my angst comes, is worrying that no one will ever get that experience anymore. They might have had some eventual success, who knows what monstrosity a much less guided LLM would have done, but experential learning may be mostly a thing of the past. And it creates a real tension between the person with experience and the person without.

The amount of times humanity has said this and time itself was not enough of an ingredient to achieve some anticipated outcome are legion. But we filter those out and go back to making more predictions based on the current linear derivative we’re observing.

Thanks for your paper btw. I did 20 years of Smalltalk. I came to view Smalltalk programming more like biological culture manipulation (you had a dish of live objects that you morphed into the result you wanted), whereas the conventional file->syntax->executable employed by most development systems is more akin to the industrial factory pipeline of assembling products from raw goods.

During those younger years, money mattered. Tools were sold on the premise that they reduced or mitigated the various costs inherint with employing programmers. And then... around the late 90s, that just kind of dropped from the discussion. As quantitave easing made money available to speculate with and hitting it big with the software that was "eating the world", things like web programming burgeoned with very little thought about "does this make it cheaper".

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Same for AI.

Where I struggle and find my ego self defensively screaming “But…!” is in work relationships. Product managers, where their wrongness makes my downstream life more miserable. Basically any relationship where I have a (self perceived) need for the outcome to be a certain way to protect/enhance my well being. Asymmetric relationships.

A: Copying Garbage Collector (semi space). Chapter 4!

Great book. I was always fascinated by bakers treadmill. Always wanted a real world case where I could implement one with Fibonacci sized mills.

Isn't that kind of Elon's thing?

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