> Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application.
There is another side to this coin: jury nullification.
The fact that, most Americans, are unaware of the concept, or that it is a choice they can make is one of the tragedies of the modern era. Adams had much to say on the topic, and his take is still valid 200 years later.
I think that when you put most Americans in a jury box, they will learn that whether they vote to convict is their choice. Ask the guy who threw the sandwich.
There's some historical stuff happening in that graph that it's easy for young people to not have context for, like the fact that the peak home ownership around 2005 was caused by a subprime mortgage fiasco.
> because they’re so airtight they require expensive mechanical ventilation and make-up air systems unless you want indoor air pollution problems.
Most modern homes have this issue. Building science has driven them to be air tight bubbles. Look at blower door tests on current construction and a lot of "building science" driven construction.
It's still miles ahead of having literal holes in your window frames to let "fresh air" come in when it's -20c outside.
All you need to do is design a house with a sensible ventilation system, which costs virtually nothing compared to the rest of the building costs. It's even more stupid for americans because they already all have complex ventilation system...
After you buy a case, and a real disk, the pi, cost savings is gone.
Meanwhile you can pick up a used 8th gen intel 1L form factor for about 100 bucks. You can pick up one that will take a PICE card for 150ish bucks, with remote management.
The 8th gen or better intel has all sorts of extra features that may make it worth while (transcoding/video support).
There is a reason why "the oldest profession" is a polite idiom for prostitution.
Calling it "parasocial", doesn't change what it is, but the technology as a mediator does. And society has been feeding on itself since we moved past hunter gatherers.
I don't know why people build houses with nail guns, I like my hammer... Whats the point of building a house if you're not going to pound the nails in yourself.
AI tooling is great at getting all the boiler plate and bootstrapping out of the way... One still has to have a thoughtful design for a solution, to leave those gaps where you see things evolving rather than writing something so concrete that you're scrapping it to add new features.
You can pick apart a nail gun and see how it exactly works pretty easily. You cant do that with LLMs. Also a nail gun doesn't get less accurate the more nails you shoot one after another, a LLM does get less accurate the more steps it goes through. Also a nail gun shoots straight and not in random directions as that would be considered dangerous. A LLM does shoot into random directions. The same prompt will often yield different results. With a nail gun you can easily pull the plug and you wont have to verify if the nail got placed correctly for an unreasonable amount of time, with LLM output you have to verify everything which takes a lot of time. If an LLM really is such a great tool for you I fear you are not verifying everything it does.
If the boilerplate is that obvious why not just have a blueprint for that and copy and paste it over using a parrot?
Also I dont have a nail gun subscription and the nail gun vendor doesnt get to see what I am doing with it.
You mention a thousand ways the analogy breaks when you take it too far, but you didn't address the actual (correct) point the analogy was making: Some people don't enjoy certain parts of the creative process, and let an LLM handle them. That's all.
> Some people don't enjoy certain parts of the creative process,
Sure
> and let an LLM handle them.
This is probably the disputed part. It is not a different way of development, and as such it should not be presented like that. In software, we can use ready-made components, choose between different strategies, build everything in a low-level language etc. The trade-offs coming with each choice is in principle knowable; the developer is still in control.
LLMs are nothing like that. Using a LLM is more akin to management of outsource software development. On the surface, it might look like you get ready-made components by outsourcing it to them, but there is no contract about any standard, so you have to check everything.
Now if people would present it like "I rather manage an outsourcing process than doing the creative thing" we would have no discussion. But hammers and nails aren't the right analogies.
>LLMs are nothing like that. Using a LLM is more akin to management of outsource software development.
You're going to have to tell us your definition of 'Using a LLM' because it is not akin to outsourcing (As I use it).
When I use clause, I tell it the architecture, the libraries, the data flows, everything. It just puts the code down which is the boring part and happens fast.
The time is spent mostly on testing, finding edge cases. The exact same thing if I wrote it all myself.
> 'Using a LLM' because it is not akin to outsourcing (As I use it).
The things you do with an LLM are precisely what many other IT-firms do when outsourcing to India. Now you might say that this would be bonkers, but that is also why you hear so often that LLM's are the biggest threat to outsourcing instead of software development in general. The feedback cycle with an LLM is much faster.
> I don't see how this is hard for people to grasp?
I think I understand you, and I think you have/had something else in mind when hearing the term outsourcing.
I don't think people use an LLM and say "I wrote some code", but they do say "I made a thing", which is true. Even if I use an LLM to make a library, and I decide the interfaces, abstractions, and algorithms, it was still me who did all that.
> Using a LLM is more akin to management of outsource software development.
This is a straw man argument. You have described one potential way to use an LLM and presented it as the only possible way. Even people who use LLMs will agree with you that your weak argument is easy to cut down.
You can't stretch it until it breaks and then say "see? It broke, it wasn't perfect". It works for the purpose it was made, and that's all it needed to work for.
This appears to misunderstand both construction and software development, nail guns and LLMs are not remotely parallel.
You’re comparing a deterministic method of quickly installing a fastener with something that nondeterministically designs and builds the whole building.
Nail guns are great. For nails that fit into them and spaces they fit into. But if you can't hit a nail with a hammer, you're limited to the sort of tasks that can be accomplished with the nail guns and gun-nails you have with you.
That's the problem with solving a casually made metaphor instead of sticking to the original question. Since when is AI assisted coding only when you do 100% AI and not a single line yourself? That is only the extreme end! Same with the nails actually. I doubt the builders don't also have and use hammers.
> This is the way with many labor-saving devices.
I think that's more the problem of people using only the extremes to build an argument.
The problem is that there is all this capital and no place to put it, so yes it seems circular, but some of that is to be expected.
As for Burry, he recently called out the changes to how the big players are amortizing their capital expenses for all these data center build outs. He is correct in calling it out, but he's getting the wrong signal from it. Mores law died a long time ago, and now were basically hitting multiple walls at the same time: Node scaling at the chip fabs, power and cooling in the data center, and just more linear growth from product (because of all three factors).
Go back to 2008 ish time period. There were a lot of data centers that hit the wall with availability of power and cooling and they were hard problems to solve then. The solution was not to upgrade rather to "build new", and were seeing a lot of the same types of issues today.
Nvidia has unmaintainable margins, the memory manufacturing side is now in on the grift too... They are sucking up the profit while they can because the dip is going to be BRUTAL (likely a boon to consumers but neither here nor there).
The general concept of the velocity of money is not what I'm talking about, it's specifically about vendors buying equity in their users who then buy the vendors' goods, in a tight circular fashion. See the other comments for more.
I can still make a book like that in my basement. People do this as a hobby now. You can still build chips like that in your garage. People do this as a hobby now.
These things DO NOT SCALE... you cant have 10,000 people running printing presses in their basement to crank out the NYT every day. A modern chip fab has more in common with the printer for the NYT than it does with what you can crank out in your garage.
Let's look at TSMC's plant in AZ. They went and asked intel "hey where are you sourcing your sulfuric acid from. When they looked at the American vendors TSMC asked intel "how are you working with this". Intels response was that it was the best they could get.
It was not.
TSMC now imports sulfuric acid from Taiwan, because it needs to be outrageously pure. Intel is doing the same.
Every single part, component, step and setup in the chain is like that. There is so much arcane knowledge that loss of workers represents a serious set back. There are people in the production chain, with PHD's, who are literally training their successors because thats sort of the only option.
Do you know who has been trying the approach you are proposing? China. It has not worked.
Complexity of the fab processes is isn't what the parent was talking about. They're talking about the major changes in the relationship between fabless semiconductor companies and commercial foundries.
The complexity of actual fabrication was always, and still is, entirely within the foundry. But in the early days of that model, designs could be more easily handed off at the logical level, leaving the physical design to back end companies, which makes designs much more portable between foundries. (The publisher analogy.) What's changed is that the complexity of physical design has exploded, and you can't make the handoff at nearly as high a level, and there is much more work that depends directly on the specific process you are targeting. Much more work at the physical level falls to the fabless semi companies. So it is much more work to retarget a design to a different foundry or process.
> I can still make a book like that in my basement. People do this as a hobby now. You can still build chips like that in your garage. People do this as a hobby now.
You can absolutely manufacture a convincingly-professional, current-generation book in your basement with a practically-small capital investment.
You cannot manufacture a convincingly-professional chip (being generous: feature size and process technology from the last two decades) in your basement without a 6-7 figure capital expenditure, and even then - good luck.
Gibson was writing about California specifically, and the Bay Area specifically. That state and that part of it had already had, since the 1960s at least, a reputation for attracting homeless people from across the country thanks to its clement weather. He could have merely been extrapolating from that and not necessarily prophetic about any of the issues today.
We dont build high density housing. We killed off the boarding house. There's like one left in DC when there used to be dozens... They were common enough that even in the 80's you could make a tv show about it, now if you said bording house someone would look at you like you had 9 heads.
We dont have SRO's any more... In 1940 the YMCA of New York had 100k rooms for rent...
> If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
Do you know what the largest predictor of voting is? Home ownership. DO you know what drives home owners to the polls more than anything else? Protecting the value of their home.
The state has, and continues to sue towns for the fuckery that they have been doing to block housing development to prop up property prices. 60 percent of people who are the most likely to vote will turn up to the polls to make sure the costs do NOT go down. It is the tyranny of majority...
SO yes there are plenty of HOUSES, and not enough of everything else that we need for people to live.
There is another side to this coin: jury nullification.
The fact that, most Americans, are unaware of the concept, or that it is a choice they can make is one of the tragedies of the modern era. Adams had much to say on the topic, and his take is still valid 200 years later.
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