> halucinations, reasoning, grounding in reality, updating long-term memory
They do improve on literally all of these, at incredible speed and without much sign of slowing down.
Are you asking for a technical innovation that will just get from 0 to perfect AI? That is just not how reality usually works. I don't see why of all things AI should be the exception.
Well said. It's not that there would not be much to seriously think about and discuss – so much is changing, so quickly – but the stuff that a lot of these articles focus is a strange exercise in denial.
You know why it's called the web? Because all the websites and webpages linking to each other form the shape of a web. I don't know what shape the internet is going to be, but the web is shaped like a web. Also tomorrow.
I love the web, but it is also clear that much of the internet is now a hub and spoke model. Client/server, in other words. The difficulty was always matching clients with different servers, and the centralised services never had to solve it.
I'm on HN for years now and what I slowly came to realize is that people here (maybe more than somewhere else, maybe not) like to spend time and energy explaining how stuff is, like it's still some sort of school test that gives one points for all the correct answers. Thereby easily forgetting what has been and still is, what works, what one can do about stuff in a positive way, what choices people have (instead of constantly pretending there is no choice, or someone else already chose for us), etc.
Even pointing out that people have a choice - with some work, yes, but only a little work - elicits some counter response that basically comes down to: no, you don't have a choice. I don't like that, and it also signals creative laziness.
P.S. Zoom out a little. The open web is also client/server (although peer-to-peer would be nice), that's not the point. We all need some infra, some trust, and a clear rule of law for the internet and the web to work. We just don't need big tech's view of 'social media' (there's nothing social about that) or platforms that present themselves as being an alternative as long as we have the perfect alternative - called the open web - being around for thirty years, battle tested and actively maintained by millions.
P.P.S. This is in reply to you, but read it as a general opinion, it's not a personal attack on anything you said.
If it does not cost that much, that is obviously because the artist is too cheap. If you find that to be a preferable equilibrium, that's a choice I guess, but I find it fairly ironic in light of the purported motivation.
What has always held true so far: <new tool x> abstracts challenging parts of a task away. The only people you will outcompete are those, who now add little over <new tool x>.
But: If in the future people are just using <new tool x> to create a product that a lot of people can easily produce with <new tool x>, then, before long, that's not enough to stand out anymore. The floor has risen and the only way to stand out will always be to use <new tool x> in a way that other people don't.
I think this fails to recognize how many more important problems there are in the world, and that the writing of code was not meant to be one of them, but only came into existence to solve them.
Of course, that does not have to be true now. You can certainly do this for personal satisfaction.
But the argument in this article is a bit confused. The step that lies behind "coding" is not of lesser difficulty, on the contrary. Instead of worrying about coding, we can instead worry about the bigger picture, and all the beautiful thinking, contemplating and deadlock it entails.
Only now, we are one step closer to solving a real problem.
I noticed that while everyone on hn is quite clever, we are regularly not clever enough to assume that other people in similar settings are just as clever, and recognize when they probably spent a lot more time thinking about an issue we just skim the headline of.
> I noticed that while everyone on hn is quite clever
Are we though? I see a pockets of world-expert level knowledge, some reasonable shop talk, and quite a bit of really dumb nonsense that is contradicted by my professional experience. Or just pedestrian level wrong. I mostly shitpost.
I don't have an opinion about arxiv's hosting, but it does read to be one of those projects that includes cleaning up of long standing technical debt that they probably couldn't get funded if not for the flashy goal. The flashy goal will, regardless of it's own merits, also be credited for improvements that they should have made all along.
I’m not sure of the perspective of the OP but his comment hits home in that a common theme for the past ten years of my career has been “let’s move something to X, Y, and Z because that’s what Google says you should do.”
Note that Google doesn’t outright define an architecture for anyone, but people who worked at Google who come in as the hot hire bring that with them. Ditto for other large employers of the day. One of my mentors had to deal with this when Yahoo was the big deal.
In some cases, when abstractions are otherwise correct, this hasn’t been a big deal for the software projects and companies I’ve been involved with. It’s simply “there’s an off the shelf well supported industry standard we can use so we can focus on our customer/end goal/value add/etc.” Using an alternative docker runtime “that Google recommends” (aka is suggested by Kubernetes) is just a choice.
Where people get bit and then look at this with a squint, is when you work at several places where on the suggestion of the new big hire from Google/Amazon/Meta/etc, software that runs just fine on a couple server instances and has a low and stable KTLO budget ends up being broken down into microservices on Kubernetes and suddenly needs a team of three and doesn’t provide any additional value.
The worst I’ve experienced is a company that ended up listing the cost of maintaining their fork of Kubernetes and development environment as a material reason for a layoff.
Google’s marketing arm also has made deals to help move people to Google Cloud from AWS. Where I am working now this didn’t work to plan on either side it seems so we’re staying dual cloud, a situation no one is happy about. Before my time there was an executive on the finance side that believed Google was always the company to bet on and didn’t see Amazon as more than a book store. Also money. Different type of hubris, different type of pressure, same technical outcome as a CTO that runs on a “well Google says” game plan.
At the end of the day, Google is a big place and employs a lot of people. You’re going to have a lot of individuals who experience hucksters trying to parlay Google experience into an executive or high ranked IC role and they’re going to lean on what they know. That has nothing to do with Google itself, but their attempts to pry people away from AWS are about the same flavor from my personal experience.
I'm going to fling that response right back at you. "Enshittification" is not a generic term for "update I don't like", it describes a specific dynamic that happens when a company inserts itself as a middleman into a two-sided market. arXiv could get worse in other ways, but enshittification in particular can't happen to it, that's a category error.
I think you should offer better thoughts instead of mad-libbing in buzzwords where they don't apply. Enshittification is actually a useful concept, and I don't want it to go the way of "FUD", which had a similar trajectory in the later years of Slashdot where people just reduced it to a useless catch-all phrase whenever Microsoft said anything about anything.
I believe there's a real chance of it happening here as a result of this transition. I personally experienced results of several of similar transitions over the course of my career. What I haven't experienced are problems with Arxiv that would motivate such a change. There might be actual problems they are trying to solve - but I still believe things will probably get worse as a result.
I can not believe that we feel that this is what's most worth talking about here (by visibility). At this point I truly wonder if AI is what will make HN side with the luddites.
They do improve on literally all of these, at incredible speed and without much sign of slowing down.
Are you asking for a technical innovation that will just get from 0 to perfect AI? That is just not how reality usually works. I don't see why of all things AI should be the exception.