Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
The "Dracula Effect," describes AI automating easy tasks to enable 100x productivity but draining engineers through nonstop high-cognitive work, limited to about three intense hours daily;
It's always energizing to do a podcast with Steve Yegge (@Steve_Yegge, engineer+author, formerly at Amazon+Google, creator of Gas Town). Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:43 Steve’s latest projects
02:27 Important blog posts
04:48 Shifts in what engineers need to know
10:46 Steve’s current AI stance
13:23 Steve’s book Vibe Coding
18:25 Layoffs and disruption in tech
31:13 Gas Town
40:10 New ways of working
51:08 The problem of too many people
54:45 Why AI results lag in business
59:57 Gamification and product stickiness
1:04:54 The ‘Bitter Lesson’ explained
1:07:14 The future of software development
1:23:06 Where languages stand
1:24:47 Adapting to change
1:27:32 Steve’s predictions
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Three interesting thoughts from Steve that we talked about in this conversation:
1. Reading ability is becoming a blocker for wider AI adoption.
Some struggle with walls of text that current AI tools produce, and Steve predicts that in the very near future, most people will program by talking to a visual avatar, not reading terminal output because he observes that five paragraphs is already a lot to read for many devs.
2. What software engineers need to know keeps changing.
In the 1990s, any decent software engineer knew Assembly, and today almost no decent developer knows it because Assembly has long been superseded by technical progress. What engineers “need” to know these days is different from the ‘90s and that process continues with AI, changing the parts of the craft that are essential for devs. We grumble about this but that won’t change anything by itself.
3. There’s a “Dracula Effect” where AI-augmented work drains engineers faster than traditional work.
This is because AI automates the easy tasks, meaning that engineers are stuck doing high-intensity thinking all day. Steve says you may only get three daily productive hours at max speed, but during that time, you could produce 100x more output than before.
@birdabo I disagree with it. I have used LLMs to parallel research on multiple directions to solve for an idea I have. I went back and analyzed each research thoroughly which clarifies my thinking about the approach. It actually promoted by critical thinking.
@karpathy@karpathy How would you as an educator teach engineers to develop a discipline to keep up? Should it be a mental model, tools strategy or “agency” as you had put it in an earlier tweet?
As we head into the new year, I want to share an article by @andywarfield called "A little bit uncomfortable". It touches on a topic we don't talk about nearly enough--vulnerability and the relationship between fear and growth. https://t.co/P1mFpJci1s
Only NVIDIA, AWS, Google have successfully deployed rack scale architecture
Trn3 is the 2nd after Nvidia with switched scale up topology, which is better for frontier mixture of experts models
AWS Trainium3 course corrects on software
Switch design choices are... interesting
@superman_space Not in the same deployment. Many have started with Bedrock Agents simply because of early availability and difficulty to start with AgentCore. But now with the ability to simply zip and deploy you AgentCore code I see more adoption on AgentCore.
AWS always has those services that seem overlapping in capabilities. Recently, Bedrock Agents and Bedrock AgentCore Runtime seem to have raise these questions. Here is chart that helps on the use case selection. Let me know if you want tech compare....
Appalled by @bergencountyzoo today. Train operator screamed at my 6yr old “ARE YOU DEAF?! Go back!” when he tried sitting with friends at a birthday party (1pm, Nov 2). Kids deserve patience, not aggression. Filed formal complaint. Parents beware. #CustomerService#Disappointed
@AirCanada I have multiple duplicate pending charges on my credit card when I was booking my flights. Your website kept giving error and I kept trying with multiple cars and now I have charges on all of them. What will happen to the duplicate charges?