>but then it took like a decade of little growth before the true benefits showed up
That's the core issue apollo is talking about. Investors have been told, "Buckle up, we're getting rich in 2027." Not "Hey, after 20 years, this will probably be pretty nice, maybe." This is how bubbles pop. Everyone starts to realize they were oversold and they rush to get their money out at the top. LLMs won't go away, but the financial collapse will be devastating.
The switches with defaults are both switching over a String with only literal cases. That can't be exhaustive without a default, and switch expressions must be exhaustive.
>And in the end, the real issue at the root is that internet traffic, especially egress traffic, still is absurdly expensive, and the behavior of people like Sam Altman that sent RAM, SSD and even HDD prices through the roof is making the situation even worse.
The core problem is that dependencies don't really scale. Find a security issue in one dependency? It has to be updated. All the projects which depended on it need to be updated. Turtles all the way down. AI worsened this further by accelerating the churn with vulnerability scanning. Naturally, they focus on the core projects like apache-commons which fans out to basically everything in the Java universe. Which means maven central becomes overloaded and now needs to make emergency changes to stay solvent.
long-time java dev and did a portion of my startup on dial-up. they've been hostile to any attempt to optimize for bandwidth for a very long time - i had elaborate hoops i jumped through to implement caching that should have been baked in to the tooling
I've been a user of the Java/Maven ecosystem for decades. Maven has had local caching of artifacts for as long as I can remember, and there are several ways to set up a private repository mirror for caching and reproducibility.
The interests of the Maven project (i.e. the Maven community), Sonatype and other actors in the space are not necessarily aligned.
But I do wonder where you had to jump through hoops? A basic Squid caching proxy should be enough at least for a pure pull-through like Maven Central. Once you have to publish stuff, okay, that is messy, you won't get anywhere with just Squid there.
Hey, at least your six year old elementary student hasn't shot you yet... School budgets are perhaps a little thin, but at least you're not struggling to pay out a $10 million lawsuit. So you've got that going for you.
Nothing has changed about modern Intel CPUs requiring binary blobs. Libreboot is no longer blobless. Canoeboot is blobless. Libreboot is like decaf. It's not caffeine free, it's decreased caffeine.
You’re correct, I guess haven’t been following this over the last few years. It looks like blobs are now merely minimized and ME is neutered with me_cleaner. So the only difference versus stock coreboot is that these minimizations are now the default configurations.
Old Libreboot is now apparently Canoeboot, same dev but different project name.
The durdgery is what pushes languages forward to be more powerful and expressive. Thousands of programmers all facing the same drudgework, they came up with new languages. They weren't content to just accept Java, they made Clojure, and Scala, and lots of other languages. That in turn pushed Java to keep up or be left behind. Take away the drudgery and guess what? All that goes away. Just let claude crank out 30K LoC a day, who cares now?
I still remember back to when I was first learning to write code. I dreamed of code that wrote code for me. But it wasn't because I didn't want to code. It was because I wanted to code in something more elegant. Claude is for someone who says "I don't want to code, I just want to get paid" and it really shows. Slop is slop, even before Claude came along. The programmers who just want to get paid always produced slop. They just have a machine doing it for them now. Who needs them anymore really?
That's another thing, I make programming languages for fun. And implementing the AST nodes is absolute drudgery. Now I just have to construct the grammar and play. I do still make games and play with making apps (Air guitar that detects my hands and stuff) I have even taught coding as an adjunct professor, and done weekend long code competitions, so I've been all over it. I still enjoy the hobby, BECAUSE it's no strings. I don't feel "special" and I'm ok with it.
The agebt is very eager to prosuce observable results and doesn't seem to care about mental load or how difficult certain choices will make future maintenance.
Before some idiot comes up and says humans do the same. LLMs tends to go to extreme lengths way beyond human capabilities when it comes to writing brittle and unmaintanable code.
It seems like to me it would be more effective to focus on the object level aspects of their arguments rather than their weird lives? Their argument isn’t “look at my credentials, I’m an expert you must believe me” it’s that “ML research is largely math and science engineering, as AI gets better at math and science it can use that to speed up the cycle at which point something bad could happen”.
These Bay Area people dedicated their lives to AI risk often before AlexNet even showed deep learning could scale, by definition they are eccentric people.
At the same time, people like the AI 2027 guys (who that article speaks poorly of)… have been basically fully on the money so far.
Why that was a weird rabbit hole to go into. Thank you. I don't fall for this stuff though. It looks like a conspiracy theory like the world is flat, etc. That's enough internet for today.
This reminds me of during covid, when one of the biggest public proponents of vaccines in the UK was having an affair. The anti-vaxers then, instead of focusing on whether vaccines were helpful, focused on the affair. That allowed them to dismiss the pro-vaccine point of view without actually engaging on the merits of their argument.
In conducting his affair he was breaking the lockdown rules that he had written, which harmed their credibility. The antivax crowd (I am not a member) quite reasonably extrapolated that if the architect of lockdown was not locking himself down then he wasn't too worried about the virus, ergo vaccines were being oversold.
When you are a public figure like that then the personal is political.
I think the thing is engaging with “ML is mostly math and science engineering, AI is getting better at autonomous math and science, if it gets fully super human the rate of change could be mind boggling” is hard to fully dismiss in the same way you can fully dismiss weird Bay Area people. So that’s why we are seeing the pivot towards the personal attacks on these people.
This stuff? A spanish speaking critic of AI safety says, "Hey guys, it's really not so dangerous." What did you mean by "this stuff" precisely? Is it like "you people" perhaps?
That's the core issue apollo is talking about. Investors have been told, "Buckle up, we're getting rich in 2027." Not "Hey, after 20 years, this will probably be pretty nice, maybe." This is how bubbles pop. Everyone starts to realize they were oversold and they rush to get their money out at the top. LLMs won't go away, but the financial collapse will be devastating.