This is so true, I use frontier models at work and the variance in the day to day experience can be dramatic.
I use Deepseek for some home stuff, and it's as you describe - fast, consistent. Not brainiac level, but when you drive it well it just tends to execute reliably. I have seen it fail consistently on very hard stuff, but I'm certainly ok with having to special case occasionally. Especially if those occasions keep getting less and less numerous as the models improve.
Now I need to convince my company to allow us to use a Chinese model ... I don't think I'll have much luck.
Who cares what's productive? We're all just talking shit on the internet here.
Why do you think it's your responsibility to police who says what about some megacorp, on a random forum on the internets? If I want to criticize some corporation's PR output, I think I'll go right ahead and do that, thanks.
ai is the final act of postmodernity, the total transition to a fugue state of mind. that is, the replacement of the human mind with an artificial hallucination.
hypercapitalism, hypermodernity, and finally, hyperreality.
I've started avoiding many things created in 2023 or later - you can be pretty sure writing prior to that wasn't some AI slop someone threw together with a half-arsed prompt.
These days I have this vague paranoia that most of what I'm watching, listening to, interacting with is just the product of some meat proxy somewhere trying to put some more half baked crap in front of my eyeballs.
I wish I had a portal to human curated, absolutely non-AI, non-clickbait BS like the very old internet (which still wasn't perfect). I think that dream is effectively dead now. But old books/movies/music are still good. Now I sound like an old grandpa reminiscing about the old days.
You don't actually control most of the things in your world. Your neighbour, for instance, isn't a reflection of your preferences and interests.
Also - in your home, it's YOU that's rejigging things. A result of your intent, your actions. Not curated and delivered to you via some corporate monster with a variety of incentives that are directly at odds with yours.
You don't control everything on internet too. There are things like your neighbor and there are things moulded by your interests as perceived by the internet.
Intent is not a black and white thing. People sometimes read your intentions via your body language. Same goes with internet. You did express your intent in some way.
You said "The physical world around you is also sculpted by your actions" ... I mentioned many ways in which that's not true. And you now mention the internet is also not completely controlled by one's mind.
Yes, I remember those too. The costs of manual memory management were real and were not low.
But costs on the cloud are real too, especially now. I’ve been living in JVM land for a very long time, but now it’s especially clear how important lean services are. Especially now that the bar for writing lean code is so much lower: let the borrow checker figure it out, etc.
I just spent a couple days wringing out more performance/memory efficiency for our services. Nice gains to be sure, but it’s still so immensely wasteful compared to something well written running native. If it was my money, I’d be going native for sure.
> But costs on the cloud are real too, especially now. I’ve been living in JVM land for a very long time, but now it’s especially clear how important lean services are. Especially now that the bar for writing lean code is so much lower: let the borrow checker figure it out, etc.
I don't think even Cloudflare bothers with this waste of time. If they did, they would certainly not have built their global infrastructure on JavaScript running on V8. They'd have done what Google and old-time Facebook did and built their whole infrastructure on low-level system languages, and hiring the world's leading minds on the subject to milk the last drop of performance from their hardware.
Even Google stopped to look at the problem and came up with Go. Not V8.
> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.
All those things happened before the era of decent AI.
Also, it really does matter what you're building. Yet another CRUD app? Don't waste time on (super) lean languages - use Go or something else you like and move on.
Building a Kafka replacement? Making something that processes gobs of data quickly? Perhaps think about using something lean and efficient, as the economics have changed. "waste of time" (or memory) also applies to the cloud and your (or your company's) bill. And if you haven't noticed, you're being ripped off on the cloud, running something 10-50x less efficient has real bottom line impact.
Woosh.
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