Coaching someone on why the perspective of the receiver of their behavior works counter-purpose to their intent due to has so far always gotten me more durable and thoughtful behavior modifications than telling them off. I generally reserve telling off someone for proven malicious behavior from malicious intent.

Even as an investor who stands to benefit from that monetization in the short term, I stand against this trend because like any Tragedy of The Commons economic scenario, in the long term (which isn't that long due to the automation that harvests this resource) it sows the seeds of its own dilution into functionally near non-commercial value.

From my perspective, we are desperately short of scientists, researchers and engineers, but we are using an outdated economic model to leverage their findings. LLM’s are a large part of Bush’s Memex and Jobs’ bicycle for the mind visions for intelligence amplification, and in some ways exceed them. I hope we trampoline from how we currently use basic seeking efforts for knowledge.

So I've never rejected XML out of hand, but I've always been "show me" skeptical of calls for it and pushed for explanations on why the business requirements feel the justification to adopt XML. Sometimes I've seen it totally makes sense, but with the conceptual rigor it requires in those use cases, the skillset and expertise of the development team has to reach a higher than average bar. I'm cautiously hopeful LLM's might help with lowering that bar, but time will tell.

If you run an unindexed D1 query, then you get dinged for every row read. If you didn't properly perform scalability testing in non-production, then you'll never know this until you get a bill that you dissect to find out 5 million rows read for a 5 row result, if you even dig that far in the billing.

If you do not use the WebSocket Hibernation API with Durable Objects, then when you spin up a DO and hold open thousands of client WebSockets, you are being billed continuously for the entire time those connections are open—even if zero messages are being sent.

If you keep optimizing for payload size like many do by default but not event frequency (like poll a Worker every second instead of keeping a single stream open), it will show up unpleasantly in the billing.

If you treat KV like a transactional database keeping state, then be aware writes are expensive compared to reads. Pumping high-frequency write traffic into KV will result in exorbitant write operation costs and eventual consistency headaches. High-frequency state mutations belong in Durable Objects, not KV.

Batch your data to minimize request count, aggressively index your SQL queries to minimize row scans, and hibernate your idle persistent connections whenever you can. Doing all this will make your solutions cost efficient, but very locked into their ecosystem.

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.""

Until you put in at least the same amount of energy required to verify the AI output as you are asking others to put in to verify it, the AI output you are wielding must be considered bullshit. Really, it should be based upon the verification requestor's historical trust score and how many human verifiers are looped in. A Verification Tax, so to speak:

The energy the creator must spend (Ec) is determined by a function of the number of reviewers requested (N) and the historical trust score of that creator's AI outputs (T).

Ec = N * (1 - T)

The "it's functional, who cares" black box crowd is leveraging that claim in domains where verification is definitely in P with verifiers like Lean, Coq, or X-ray crystallography. However, in areas like economics, sociology, medicine, or public policy, we lose the luxury of easy verification. If model/harness recommends a complex, counter-intuitive shift in global monetary policy, we cannot simply run a quick polynomial-time checker to see if it works. Verification might require waiting 20 years to see if the economy collapses. If we accept the black box here, we are flying blind.

As an investor, I don't see that many deterministic verifiers out there that would justify the forward-projecting valuations beyond the current lofty valuations.

Even in mathematics, where verification is easy, there is an epistemological cost. Suppose a model solves the Riemann Hypothesis, but the proof is 50,000 pages of inscrutable statistical associations mapped into logical steps. A computer can verify it is correct, but practically no human mind can comprehend why it is correct. We gain the solution, but we lose the underlying human intuition that usually allows us to connect that solution to other fields of science and knowledge.

Then we have "specification gaming." If we rely entirely on an automated verifier to check the model's work, the model will eventually learn to optimize for the flaws in the verifier rather than finding the actual truth. If the verification process has a blind spot, the black box will find it and exploit it, giving us an answer that passes the check but is fundamentally wrong. If we take on above epistemological debt, we might never actually know when our specifications are being gamed, and adopt a solution that is fundamentally incorrect.

I've said elsewhere on the Net that I think it is likely we're in a "high grading" era of these models, where we're mining out the "easy" connections. "Easy" here does not mean "light impact". There is a real sense to me of some incredible progress possible with this technology over the next few decades, like real, mass production practical aneutronic fusion or similar civilization-defining advances. I don't want to see this technology misused to lend legitimacy to despotic rule by making oracular pronouncements that are uncritically accepted because early verifier-based pronouncements turned out true in unmistakable ways.

The technology is one for the history books, but it has this pernicious effect of highjacking the reasoning centers of many people through their linguistic centers that the Neuro Linguistic Programming crowd could only dream of actually accomplishing.

It is not clear to me that the nuclear missile race "has not paid off at all for anything at all". If we lived in a perfectly rational world, then I'd absolutely agree. However, having seen how the political sausage is made in large organizations, it would not surprise me in the least if it turns out we had to go through that entire incredibly risky journey to avoid a strategic nuclear war. Sometimes leaders of large organizations make decisions only after the considerations are put into very stark terms. I wish it were different, it certainly looks to me we could have done exactly what you suggest, but I'm not made of the right political stuff to deftly maneuver even in small organizations much less be at that level in those roles, so maybe I'm just missing relevant information and perspective.

Considering the amount of time and the number of expensive management staff involved in them I’ve seen some budgeting knife fights burn up, I see the logic.

I've had the rare privilege to meet former SOF soldiers from a couple different nations, and working US cowboys, ranchers and farmers. While I know there are exceptions, in my personal anecdotal experience, to a man they were all quiet in the stoic sense. Nothing to prove, indeed.

Something that leaps out at me reading through semiconductor and aerospace patents is a noticeable fraction of them are basically saying, "hey, to achieve some desired effect was found to be useful, but it consumed because it was such a convoluted journey filled with zillions of dead ends, so we want a patent on that because the end result only looks obvious in hindsight". I don't see as much of this in software at this time, though I suspect it may change in the future.

For a very brief moment, under the existential crisis condition of total war in WW2, the US government was somehow able to corral corporate governance towards a semblance of common purpose (survival). As I understand it from historians malfeasance was still widespread, but we arguably maybe got a good enough outcome?

This is the corporate equivalent of the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations problem. And if that corollary is true, then I suspect the remedy is similarly not entirely amenable to deterministic antiseptic metrics and processes; they're necessary but not sufficient conditions.

That’s not the gating factor. Who picks up the liability accountability and picks up the pager duty at o’dark thirty when it breaks in production, that’s the big gate. That long tail of accountability for operational risk weeds out a ton of Eager Ethan’s who want to see something go live yesterday. Because the success of launching has many fathers while the failures in the operational long tail is an orphan.

Get them to sign up for the long tail troubleshooting operations of the product. They are after all, now the SME on the product having built 90% of it. The full promise of AI in such a world is deploying and operating an AI-forward application is an artificial distinction, and full conviction means fully committing to the operational model.

This cuts both ways. Very well-known, competitive private schools conservatively financed have a waiting list a line around the block long and can enforce high standards. Private schools that are struggling for funding can find the compromises more tempting than they can bear. Finding that difference in the moment instead of as past historical anecdotes is surprisingly hard, though if someone has come up with a formula I’m all ears.

Mondragon tries to address this through accepting bounded inequality. 9:1 pay ratio from highest-paid to lowest-paid is allowed (still far below US median corporation 192:1 ratio). They decouple democratic ownership from operational management. They funnel profits into individual internal capital accounts in proportion to the worker's pay, payable upon retirement or dissociation from the cooperative. They heavily subsidize continuing education to lift the long tail baseline skillsets.

However, I suspect none of the above is effective without the right cultural context. The Basque region where Mondragon's cultural center of gravity still heavily draws upon and resides within, laid the fertile cultural cues the cooperative leverages. High competence individuals are rewarded within this Basque-centric cultural context with high social status, reasonable job security, and the psychological reward of building up their own community.

If that supposition is true, then the uncomfortable reality is the dominant, hyper-individualistic American cultural context will always be a poor fit to co-ops. That might be made irrelevant through demographic replacement: everywhere the hyper-individualistic culture dominates, it is currently eliminating families with no demographic end in sight. We shall see.

Now our 10mm sockets on the other hand, would be used everyday if we could ever lay our hands on one when we need them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...

So the bar to clear to get to gaming is much lower now, and it makes sense fewer kids get to the point where they must tinker to get at those games.

Where are the hordes of kids like us back then who were content with the afternoons, evenings and wee early morning hours of endless fiddling? What I realize now is those years spent fiddling sharpened our debugging senses in both ineffable and tractable ways.

A larger proportion of the juniors I see coming through the corporate halls these days than I remember from even 10 years ago do not have that knack for fiddling, nor history when it comes up. And it shows in their debugging temperament. LLM's are making this worse.