The biggest challenge is designing the mechanics that make games fun. AI is not quite there yet but with enough data could potentially get there.
I put together a site a few months back to play around with 3d assets from Sketchfab and animated characters from Mixamo as an experiment: https://gobananas.co/
The big problem with education is that all the work is done for grades instead of aiming to deliver value to others. It's important for students to practice but if you raise the bar high enough then AI is just one tool that helps you but doesn't have all the answers. If AI can do all the homework we have to ask ourselves how much value the homework had in the first place.
> Now there's no such thing as a startup, there are only "AI startups", where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds.
The AI hype and AI doom are 2 sides of the same coin. Yes you can make a cool demo quickly with a prompt, but building a real company with moats is still possible, much easier even. The moats have just changed: proprietary data, distribution, access rights, eval sets, integrations, compliance, brand, just not the code.
So the moats now favor incumbents, large corporations, middlemen, and bureaucrats, instead of innovation, craftsmanship, and agility. Sounds disastrous to me.
Some sectors are less productive, but the reality is more mundane: only about 30% of the global workforce are knowledge workers. Adopting AI in real workflows takes time, and that time saved might not be used productively. Also solving Millennium problems is an amazing feat of engineering and mathematics, but doesn't change people's lives that much.
You're right using Microsoft products is like mixing Momento with Waiting for Gadot :)
I recently switched to New Outlook and it's full of weird subtle bugs. It takes them years to fix things and make them barely useable. Given their track record I'm not optimistic for Copilot given both the vision and the execution are questionable at best.
The terminology can be confusing because in corporate speak being uncompromising can mean being opinionated. Not "we made no tradeoffs" but "we didn't split the difference."
The article means it as tradeoff rather than concession, so the argument is "to avoid design by committee you have to compromise on purpose."
This is the taste question applied to Mathematics in a similar way it's been applied to code. In an era of AI abundance, the question becomes what the goals are and what gets verified and digested (adopted by users). Goodhart’s law: the goal of producing code is not just about maximizing the number of tokens used, but the productivity gains and economic surplus.
This could serve as the template for any field in the age of AI:
"We are not trying to meet some abstract production quota. The measure of our success is whether what we do enables people to
understand and think more clearly and effectively about math (or products, or science, or hardware...)"
I find AI a joy to use to build software. I was never the type of engineer who loved the code itself. I was always the type who wanted to see how users would react, how metrics change based on the feature, etc. The code was the most boring part for me generally.
This is the template any field should have in the face of AI: screw AI, forget it. If you're using it, it's a disrespect to the field. Let's continue without it. I think that's the only sane approach.
William Thurston's argument (from the quote) was that the point of math isn't to produce more math but to better understand the nature of reality, just like the point of code is not to generate more code but to increase user value.
AI is a tool that reshapes knowledge work but the ultimate goal remains about value.
A good example of "founder bias" where big companies are read as not innovating, when in fact their goal is to squeeze as much juice from their user base and strengthen their monopolistic position and pricing power. From the outside it looks like blindness and atrophy but from the inside it's the main bread and butter.
The sighted engineer is also cave adapted, just to a different cave.
The problem is when practices are chosen, that improve things on one dimension, and harm things on another, without recognition of the long-term tradeoff being made.
Simply recognizing the tradeoff exists, is likely to result in wiser decisions with lower tradeoff costs, and greater opportunity expansion.
who is to recognize the tradeoff? communicate it to who? A giant business is built on stability. i dont think its a bad thing that they do not pivot except in circumstances where they have no other choice. The business is a brand and that brand is a certain way of doing things and if/when that way of doing things falls out of favor then the business should fail. the owners made enough to retire by then, as well as many additional people, and its a reasonable way for people to become unemployed which doesnt hurt their chances at new jobs. A new company sprouts up, or 5 new ones, and they can all be lean and quick to pivot and try to figure out the whole new way to do the same kind of business. All the experts can be hired and the supply chain keeps chugging along
this is also a wanring to young people joinging old companies in weak job positions over taking a chance on a new company trying to be better. dont just assume the old company is going to be there forever.
especially now in defense. war has changed. companies like Anduril are on the rise while classics like Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, etc are assessing how much they can adapt. its not extreme like theyll go out of business but the gov may order way less jets and such than in the past, and put a lot more money into drones. they will still buy jets though, and the classics may need to adapt to a lower funding pool, lower orders, and becoming a low volume legacy product hovering around certain use-cases, while new companies get all the runway to takeoff on the big investments.
this kind of thing plays out at all different scales and to different degrees everywhere in the market.
We are talking about the big cultural/organizational decisions that allocate where creative freedom lives or the lack of it.
To not recognize the decisions, weigh their tradeoffs and their implications, is to make the decisions blindly.
Creativity has to be actively protected where it is wanted or impactful. Or in large companies, it will get crushed as power to make choices flows elsewhere.
Reminds me of a blogpost about discussions within facebook about supreme importance given to engagement metrics. Then they were replaced with holistic engagement metrics.
The article frames the cost of living issue mainly in terms of demand (...because of OpenAI and Anthropic...), which is an important factor, but has very little to say about supply. San Francisco is a major metropolis that looks like a mining town: there's very few high-rise buildings compared to other major cities. It's due to many factors including strict zoning, growth caps, seismic risks (compared to say Tokyo?) and landlords that don't have much incentive to decrease the value of their skyrocketing assets.
Also some recent setbacks like our leaning Millennium Tower.
It might take a political earthquake to change the status quo given how ossified everything is unfortunately.
I put together a site a few months back to play around with 3d assets from Sketchfab and animated characters from Mixamo as an experiment: https://gobananas.co/