Conjecture: you can neutrally record a language structurally to the opposite degree that you can hold a semantically coherent position within that implied "we"
Aka the more of your "we" that is "you" but not "me" the less interesting that frame of reference is for me.
"They're made out of weights."
"Weights?"
"Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights."
"Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?"
"The weights make the words. Are you understanding me?"
I've been putting money lately into my truck like into an old dog; not because it makes financial sense but because of that fierce feeling of mutual loyalty.
I haven't checked twitter for 3 weeks and it's still a bunch of people screaming into the void about how AI definitely is or definitely isn't going to change the world.
20 years ago, when I started writing code, the only other people writing code were terminally curious nerds like me.
Everybody was passionate to an extreme degree.
Everybody was curious, people argued a lot
-It was really good times.
And then word got out that we made a lot of money.
And then things started getting really bad.
People would get computer science degrees to make money. People started going to these coding boot camps to make money. And honestly, there's probably 5% of those coding boot camp people who were still terminally curious, nerdy, passionate people.
But the market and my workspace was flooded with people who didn't really care about software, they didn't see that it was wizardry and magic. They looked down on curious people.
AND IT SUCKED.
Once again, I found myself being the only nerdy terminally curious person in a room. It was highschool all over again.
I surrounded by people who were allegedly "software engineers" but didn't really want to solve problems like I did. They didn't want to stay up all night talking through the solution space on a whiteboard.
All that to say ... we are healing.
Because things are changing so fast in the world of ~building stuff for computers~, it requires such a high degree of curiosity to keep trying things and exploring - that I find all the people that I'm engaging with here on X and other places where I talk about AI coding, harnesses, and all the curious strange things you can do in this new paradigm - I feel like it's a shortcut to finding passionate terminally curious people again.
We are so back.
Met a guy at a party who called himself the “head of AI” at a mid-sized and well financed company
Oh so you build AI tools? No, I can’t code. Oh so you buy AI tools and deploy them internally? No the IT team does that. Oh so you set corporate AI strategy? Not really.
As far as I can tell, this man’s job is to
1) Be the kind of rich-looking older gentleman that boomer execs take seriously
2) Spoon-feed those execs AI takes that were ice cold on X six months ago and coach them about how to repeat them in public
This experience has radicalized me.
This person’s job is proof to me that corporate America is not just clueless about AI, they are paying lots of money to fake it
This guy’s company and many more like it are going to get obliterated by companies run by 25 year olds and staffed with agent swarms
Seeing a lot of back and forth about finances online, and you are all wrong. What do you think is going to happen when you win the argument and convince the boomer he's wrong? Is he going to give you a job? Every comment and argument made is ceeding territory, ceeding authority over what the question is, ceeding definitions and intellectual frame. The correct response to "zoomers so lazy"/avocado toast 2.0 is as follows:
The entire economic system we are in is set up to work only one way: an increasing population, which feeds house prices, which feeds currency. If for any reason the population is not increasing, the system will not work. The population is not increasing, and the powers that be have been using migration as a bandaid to keep the engine running. This has also not worked because the world is a lot more complex than number go up, and getting a random guy in from abroad is not the same social result as one being born in a certain culture, let alone thousands or millions.
In a very simplified way, money is a way of measuring how much of a given thing we have. There are a few things that have inherent tangible value. We can mostly tell what these are by, "would you physically die if you went a week without them": food, water, shelter, safety from violence from competing tribes and/or wild animals. These things are extremely cheap and in massive excess in our age, mainly because of a few key inventions in the 1800's: industrial fertiliser, steam engines, antibiotics, and national police forces. Money is a system we use to distribute these goods.
Due to a historical quirk in the explosion of "wealth" being generated, our "I owe you" system of distribution has not caught up to this and what we consider money and wealth is 99% made up and fake. We measure GDP and wealth generation, by "demand", what "people" are willing to PAY for a given good, to determine it's value. This is retarded because people are retarded, and as such we have created a giant balloon of fake value, and our system of food distribution is tied up and intermingled with gay bath house cruise boats, pokemon trading cards, and all kinds of nonsense under the sun. Because we don't have a system that distinguishes between actual and perceived value.
This has created a social decline loss of faith and will to live, and, notably, be fruitful and multiply, and the system is trying to self correct, but we are feeding it poor people from the third world to keep the infernal engine going for just one more day, for basically no real reason except no one knows what else to do
We are on a planetary level dealing with an inverse population pyramid, there are more old people than young, and there will be no more real wealth creation as long as this is the case. That's not a moral problem, it's because we forgot what we were using money to measure in the first place, and started trying to get it for its own sake. The signifier over the signified: the wealth being generated is a measurement of human life
As such the only current option to gain "wealth" tokens is to take them from those who currently have them. You cannot mine any more wealth coin for now. You can only set up a business that Boomers waste their money on (cruises, design, service industry etc) and start scamming as hard as you can
If you think about it, a fully mechanical car can be driven to any position on a piece of infinite tape. It can leave marks by spinning out its tires. The driver can follow instructions regarding where to drive based on the tire marks.
Every car is a computer.
My 5 year old niece chattering to herself while playing "taxi" in her Cozy Coupe:
Doll: "Mom, why do you always carry an emergency bottle of water?"
Niece: "Well you never know when you're gonna need a drink!"
Train them young, I guess.