That seems narrow minded. Theres both "learnings directly related to the thing studied" and "learnings downstream from the thing studied". If you imagine mathematics being a huge sudoku puzzle of unknowns you are trying to fill in, each previously empty square you are able to fill in (or gain a smaller bound on) has implications in all sorts of other areas.
It's important to remember that most mathematics is not science - large parts of it are mostly esthetic pursuits that bring joy to certain mathematicians, and sometimes happen to have unexpected benefits to science or engineering (like how number theory suddenly became important to cryptography in the 20th century).
Fermat's last theorem is a great example - it is in itself a completely irrelevant observation, not used (so far) in any larger theory. It was only pursued because (a) Fermat casually claimed to have easily proved it (almost certainly being mistaken about it), and (b) it sparked the curiosity of mathematicians because it looks so simple but turned out to be so hard.
So what does humanity gain by knowing that the theorem holds? Basically nothing. What does humanity gain from the process of proving it? As far as it is known for now, basically nothing (though it is somewhat likely that the complex theories created to prove it will find other applications). However, those that have worked on it, and the guy who did prove it, gained a huge amount of personal insight into mathematics, and surely grew as mathematicians, and will hopefully use those skills in working on other problems that may prove more directly useful. Plus, they had a great time doing it.
What this means is that, if the proof had been discovered entirely by AI, basically nothing would have been gained. LLMs don't learn by doing, so no personal experience growth would have come from this; and as I mentioned, both the result and the proof are, so far, quite irrelevant even for mathematics more broadly. So it would have been actively detrimental, or at best neutral, compared to letting human mathematicians work on this problem, in a way that is never the case in science or engineering, where any bit of knowledge is in itself useful to at least some extent.
Ehh I love Casey and have learned a ton by watching how he thinks about things in his handmade hero series, but he is fairly narrow minded in his views of dev. Not that theres anything wrong with that, for the kinds of dev he does his approach is very good. But its not generalizable.
How is this relevant? I didn't say he should make a book about his teachings about SWE, I said he could compile a comprehensive review of the foundational literature of compsci
I suppose it is a matter of what one works on, but that has been consistent in my career.
I have seen many be rewarded for choosing what I would deem intentional, gross negligence. But hey, those devs get work finished faster, and that's all that matters to the non-technical folks.
It’s not a coincidence that Casey and other high profile performance minded people are in game dev. Thats a field where performance is important (or at least a consideration). In web dev or regular enterprise app dev it’s simply not a consideration that needs to be made most of the time.
Yeah I had the same thoughts about what they chose to DIY vs hire out. Insulation is so simple, and trim can be done at your leisure. But thats also not likely to save much overall since the contractors also know how simple those are.
You're missing the important part: doing all of this WITH A ONE YEAR OLD CRAWLING AROUND AT HOME. You can get things done, it is just an order of magnitude longer that it would take without kid(s).
Author here. 100% this. I bought a fixer upper before my child was born. I gutted our house and did most of the work myself. I saved a lot of money. And I realized something… I don’t actually like home projects. Once my kid was born it exacerbated the issue. I didn’t have time. My wife is a full time caretaker, she was with my kid all week so nights and weekend is my time to lean in. Doing this myself would have strained our whole family. The time just isn’t there, I want to be a present dad, husband. And I want to do things I truly enjoy: making art, playing music, cycling. It’s not a fit for everyone where I’m at in life contracting out work I don’t want to do myself is preferable.
They are both on borrowed time. The only thing keeping them afloat business wise is that current hardware costs are prohibitive which keeps local models artificially constrained. The next era will be open weight / local model for the masses and SOTA for the big players.
If your prognosis is true I'm not sure it's fully positive. Inference without batching is just massive less efficient, even if local hardware can be more energy efficient per operation and can skip out on cooling.
Open weights, obviously beneficial. Local compute when not necessary, seems like it'd be significantly worse for the environment?
I think because more devs cant run things locally, we are not getting the "open source gains" that you would get by having the network effect of more eyes on the work. Theres still little nuggets of gold in there though (eg antirez's DS4 project). But once more people can get their hands on hardware, I think the flood gates will open. And once that happens, I dont necessarily think people will run locally. But that will enable fungible service providers which we already see, but at a much larger scale.
To a lesser degree, open weights also leads to an eventuality of these two companies not being able to sustain their capital investments. Not to mention their pricing models are unsustainable as they currently stand. So they are being eroded from the outside-in, while also trying to fight the internal pressure to continue to raise prices/margins.
EDIT: I actually think the harness is more of a future for these big players. And theres real value in providing a high quality harness. So maybe they move to SAAS for claude code in the future. Who knows
Im bullish on more people being able to build software than pre-AI but bearish on the general population being able to. The unfortunate truth of AI is that it requires you to think like a dev to be effective. And thats just not how a lot of people think or want to think. Thats fine. But that means AI wont be a huge unlock for the masses.
I think we might underestimate the evolution of these tools as AI gets both better and cheaper. The current form factors are like trying to setup a website in early 90s, cumbersome and not user friendly. Coding infra, AI coding UI, etc are not solved problems yet. If things progress, I think there will be a time when a whole app can be developed and deployed with a single prompt. In that kind of world, who can’t write code?
I mean what Im hearing is "once we have AGI it will be easy". Sure, agreed. But AGI is going to unlock a lot more than software dev including having people just one-shot Lovable replacements. I also just fundamentally disagree its going to happen without another several "attention is all you need" events all chained together.
I think you are doing the equivalent of looking at a hockey stick graph and extrapolating to infinity on where we are headed. We are already hitting the asymptote and the line is starting to go horizontal. Theres plenty of gains to be had by current state of AI, I'm not trying to be a wet blanket. I just dont think those gains are going to be had by "the masses using AI". Its going to be highly technical people doing highly technical things at scopes and speeds previously unimaginable.
I think you're failing to see the forest through all those trees. The value of software will plummet as barriers to entry fall and people become more capable of creating exactly what they need for their own specific purpose.
This is pretty common in rum drinks, especially tiki. Like you said, rye offers something unique separate from traditional “bourbon” and so the flavor profile of the end drink is different
Famously, stock is settled on a delay (and generally doesnt involve physical products that are not fungible). Im sure theres a lot to glean from how they handle concurrency but Im not sure they are solving the same problems.
settlement is a different process, what exchanges are doing is they match Buy and Sell orders.
you have an open Sell 1 APPL for $100.0. Millions of other HFT orders rush to scalp your single order. How do you think exchange matches your Sell to HFT's Buy orders? which Buy order gets fulfilled first?
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