Yeah I don't get it. Why the maximalist hyperbole? AI is going to kill ALL humans! That's crazy. Why can't they warn about increased likelihood of cyberattacks or scams being easier to perpetrate like normal adults talking in public?
I don't know how to read this and not see that this is a direct accusation to OpenAI of having used the researchers data to try to front run his discovery on purpose. The evidence is not completely proven and also circumstantial but to me at least looks like a fairly suspicious situation.
I've said this before in here but Zitron is completely captured by his audience at best and a grifter at worst. A couple of months ago he was tweeting that people were crazy talking about _agents_, that they didn't _exist_ and that people talking about them were shills or bots. The responses were full of incredulous software developers saying but but but I use them every day, they're so good they're scary actually...
Zitron is just, like Dan Luu says, wrong about everything and doesn't care anymore, he's in the business of extracting money from his engagement.
I'm staff+ too. I don't need to find problems, they find me, very quickly and it's mostly a triage operation on problems from then on. I always have a list as long as my arm of problems that are worth my time.
It's all so sketchy. Jane Street were investors in SA but presumably were much more sophisticated and savvy than Leopold. When SA got in trouble, 3 firms got into a bid war for the assets at fire sale prices: Citadel, Jane Street and a third I forgot. Citadel outbid the other 2, but it's all weird, like Jane Street wanted in on the popular boy's book that they knew was going to tank and just were waiting around in the water like sharks.
It’s sketchy to invest in a fund they probably knew full well had terrible risk practices and was likely going under on the first drawdown.
When Leopold went to pitch NY investors they all passed and thought he was full of it. He could only convince California tech guys. Savvy finance guys saw SA for what it was (leveraged beta trade). Jane street are finance guys, not California tech bros.
One theory (I don’t necessarily believe it): Jane Street was after the private part of SA’s portfolio (Anthropic), which is difficult to come by. Losing a few million dollars investing and getting in that network was worth it for them to try to groom Leopold to eventually sell them the private stake
But the private stake was sold to the highest bidder and Jane Street didn’t get it. It was always going to be shopped around if this situation occurred.
re: the crisis of the Mittelstand in competing VS China, I'm reminded of this tweet. It's a fictitious illustrative case not a serious study but I think it describes some of the root challenges of western industrial culture when it comes to competing against China
I guess it depends on where you would draw the line with respect to what still constitutes "Mittelstand", but in the small-town circles where my family operated our company, outsourcing wasn't really a thing. Most of the companies were around 30 to 3000 employees, and mostly operated B2B for the automotive industry. There was exactly one company which got overly ambitious and started to emit shares. It was a big deal back in the 90s, SHARES! From our hometown! Like, you could watch it in the Ticker in the evening news if you waited long enough!
But they quickly faltered when the golden 90s turned into the permanent state of crisis beginning in the 2000s.
Most of the others were still family-owned, including our own (electroplating, ~130 employees), and stuck it out much longer.
But we've since had to close doors, too, as have most of the others.
It's a combination of things. Regulations have you in a chokehold, you can't get decent employees, and every process input from energy to equipment to real estate related costs and whatnot just cost an arm and a leg and slowly bleed you dry. Nobody here ever flew business class (except maybe these flashy idiots with their shares). The families always re-invested.
This seriously needs to be repeated again and again. It's not that Mittelstand got greedy. Neither did most other small and medium companies in Europe and US. They gradually became less competitive by overregulation, high input costs, and complete lack of state support. The last sometimes bordering on hostility.
Anecdote time re: Over-regulation:
We had a side-hustle, automatic sorting machines. Mostly nuts and bolts, but other stuff, too. About 10 employees. By some miracle, it managed to survive the loss of it's biggest customer (the aforementioned electroplating company). But we had to move shop. After we got a place, the city terminated the operating permit for the building. Why?
Because, you see, the company that operated the building before had it filed as "metal working", so that is what the permit said. But _sorting_ metal doesn't alter it, so the permit doesn't hold! And they wouldn't issue a new one. Fun times.
Honestly, in my view it's not an issue of overregulation but a malfunctioning administrative apparatus. Too much power is concentrated in the hands of few administrators who can interpret the law according to their own vibes, leaving businesses with few options of recourse without resorting to spending money on lawyers. It's the mideval mindset in the local administration that makes it so difficult, not the regulations per se.
Sadly even eliminating all bureaucracy isn't the Holy Grail of saving the local workshop. The company has to pay German level taxes, the workers have to pay German cost of living, and most business owners also want to enjoy the fruit of their labor and that fruit in Germany usually wears a Porsche badge. These are the obvious and "easy" ones but probably not the most important ones.
The difficult problems are the entire ecosystems, supply chains, and tight integration that are just on very different levels between Germany and China. Every part of the supply chain has to be optimized or else it eats into the margins. China is a beast at "extreme supply chain micro-optimization". It would take decades to build equivalent ecosystems elsewhere, and in the meantime implement artificial barriers to keep China less competitive on Western markets.
This is true for all of Europe and the Western world at least.
This video [1] highlights just how big a gap there is between China and everyone else.
Germany has such a supply chain for some sectors (e.g. cars, chemicals). The question is do we want to protect it to some extent or let the free market do its thing?
Almost 50% of the energy consumption of the German chemical industry is natural gas. Its competitiveness is at the mercy of countries with no duty to Germany and they're the root of the supply chain.
> let the free market do its thing
The problem with the free market is that there's no such thing. Every market is regulated to some degree, the state has its finger on the scales somewhere. It needs to for things that are are strategically important or for the welfare of the citizens. It can be subsidies for fuel, tariffs for some import, market abuse regulation, there's always a mechanism in place to keep things on a specific track. As much as the 4 year democratic cycle allows in specifying that track.
The free market suffers from the same weakness communism does. It relies on deeply flawed humans. The more flawed, the more likely they'll be the ones pulling the strings. And they'll tear apart the fabric of society to make more money.
Natural gas can be replaced with coal gasification, and Germany has an endless amount of coal. It would probably even be cheaper, although much dirtier. China is already doing this.
Agreed, however there are only two ways to handle this, race to the bottom and then everyone has Chinese working conditions and salaries, or it is about time that we build our walls and kind of, no kidding, make each country great again, which is why right wing parties are going up all over the place.
I still remember how it was in most European companies before we started offshoring everything, textil, shoes, TVs, mobiles, software,..., the whole bunch, with the colonist mindset that of course the "slaves" would never have the skills to master the end to end production themselves, what a joke, naturally as humans they have exactly the same skills.
And it isn't only China of course, we even do it among ourselves across European countries, for the new factory in some random eastern country, a bunch of folks in western Europe join the job center line.
All for the bank accounts for the managers of course, as employees get thrown around like pawns in the MBA chess, more akin to mediaeval lords managing their feudal servants.
> race to the bottom and then everyone has Chinese working conditions and salaries
I think it’s doable to be competitive even under Western conditions assuming you have the rest of the ultra optimized supply chains because you can find ways to support them even with just a nudge here and there, compared to when the only German part if the business is the one who says “designed un Germany”.
> or it is about time that we build our walls and kind of, no kidding, make each country great again, which is why right wing parties are going up all over the place.
Right wing parties are going up to say they’ll make the country great again. Can’t think of a significant time in history when these parties actually did make a country great.
They didn't of course, however when they happen to have such an easy speech to sell about who is to blame about factories closing down, queues increasing sizes at the job center, no longer able to afford the same supermarket basket size even when employeed,....
It is no accident that in a way we are reliving the same uptake they had during the big depression, and there doesn't seem to be any way to counter that.
There has been at least indirect state support for some by support for the automotive industry. They might have gotten squeezed as a supplier but the ecosystem got help to keep moving.
This is why the West is getting its ass kicked in non-legacy industries.
Our MBAs have internalized the idea that you "win at capitalism" by buying out your competitors, making products shitty and expensive, and making shareholders filthy rich. Their MBAs believe that it means selling the best product possible at razor-thin margins, killing your competitors by being the better choice.
Everyone is always complaining about Chinese companies "stealing IP", "getting state subsidies", and "dumping products". No, they are just being better at capitalism! We bootstrapped their industry with outsourcing, and then killed our own subsidy system by retooling it to give free money to large shareholders. No wonder our companies aren't able to compete - we reward incompetence...
Somehow MBAs, our champions of capitalism, completely forgot that capitalism only really works for society when free market competition takes place.
This is what's attractive about the "Mittlestand" - having a wide variety of companies competing in the same market so they push each other to improve services.
21st century consolidation is a direct opposite of that.
Some of these contradictions can be fixed well enough by government intervention to make capitalism the best known system. It used to work pretty well for several decades.
Those decades of working capitalism in Germany were subsidized by cheap Gastarbeiter labor from Southern and Eastern Europe, and cheap Eastern Bloc manufactured goods on unfavorable terms.
In the US, they were subsidized by overthrowing democracies across Latin America to keep the extraction flowing - key words being United Fruit Company, Guatemala, Chile, Operation Condor.
The prosperity in Frankfurt and Detroit was always paid for elsewhere. The economic miracle was a miracle of exploitative extraction, a miracle only for the already privileged.
Oh, please, stop this guilt cult nonsense. Economic progress (much of which is technological progress) is a positive-sum game for the most part, it doesn't require exploitation of this or that foreign ethnicity, and that was never a critical part of it after the East India Company or something. That exploitation has also been more important to make the rich richer than to make the poor richer, which is what "capitalism was working" is about.
Countries have stopped relying on imports for national security reasons often enough in history and they did fine after a few years of adjustment. I mean, apart from the consequences of war.
It's worth repeating, since so many people have different ideas about what capitalism is, but it's only having the means of production (factories, tools, employees, etc.) in private hand (as opposed to being owned by the government - a monopoly) with the purpose of making a profit (so you do not have to live paycheck to paycheck).
None of that has consolidation (might as well call it monopoly) at the end game. But then again, we can't really have free market capitalism while also having state granted monopolies (IP laws). When you have a monopoly you can set the price, but in a free market supply and demand sets the price.
If the means of production are in private hand and private individuals acquire profit, they will inevitably use said profits to acquire more means of production, which will beget more profits, more means of production, etc etc.
They will use those riches to buy out competitors, to bribe (or "lobby" in polite parlance) legislators to tilt the rules in their favor, until they have reached near-monopoly.
The free market always means monopolization, this is precisely the core contradiction of capitalism.
The perfect free market with fair competition only exists in ideological fantasy.
To say what we have now isn't capitalism is nothing but a no true Scotsman fallacy. This is actually existing capitalism.
> The alternative is the government owning everything from the start, which is worse.
Why? That's just an assertion with no backing. If the government is democratically elected, how is democratic control over resources worse than a few oligarchs acting autocratically?
> which currently is not happening sufficiently.
This is not by accident. This is due to the mechanisms described above, a direct result of capitalism. A few have been able to amass enough resources to use them to influence lawmakers and tilt the board in their favor. It's not an accident. It's what actually existing capitalism does.
Because the government then by default has a monopoly on everything. The worst of the worst. It doesn't matter who the people with the monopoly are, it matters that there is a monopoly. It's like saying that a just king is better than separation of powers. Maybe, but in which way do you ensure the king stays just?
How is it that the means of production being privately owned for profit has the consequence of legislation failing to prevent monopolies? The government managed to break up the monopoly that Standard Oil had become back in 1911 just fine with capitalism existing, did it not?
Come on, it's not just MBAs. I remember when patio11 (nothing against him personally, it's just the best example I can remember) became a star here on HN by saying that the solution to every problem as a consultant was to hike your rates. The idea of just asking as much money as you can get away with, which was seen as reprehensible by most of the population (my guesstimate, I don't have hard data) until more or less the eighties, Reagan and Thatcher era, has now permeated Western society at most levels, not just MBAs.
PS Chinese companies were (and probably still are, when they can) stealing IP, just like the USA did when it had more IP to steal from Europe than to protect from others. Western companies were very happy to let that happen when in exchange they could make more profits in the short term by using cheap Chinese labor and infrastructure.
I don't think the fundamental premise is much of an issue - it's what a (mostly) free market is meant to do. Someone sells a chair for $100, someone else believes they can sell it for $80, so they do. There are two main complicating factors (outside of brand reputation and possibly some others?)
1) quality - someone accepts the $80 chair which is a little bit more wonky
2) the $100 company spent a few years developing the technology to steam and bend timber to make the chair so they're marking up based on R&D and ip. The $80 chair company just copied the other tech
There is absolutely a lot of profiteering (charge what we can, not what we need to) happening, but honestly I believe that happens everywhere, including China (trivial case - wild price swings on aliexpress - they're maximising profits).
In the digital world quality is a post purchase signal and the ability for consumers to communicate about quality has basically been destroyed by allowing paid counterparts by businesses to drown out the signal
> There is absolutely a lot of profiteering (charge what we can, not what we need to) happening
I think that profiteering is the default behavior for companies. Maybe not all companies behave this way, or maybe in the past it wasn't the default behavior, but I'm very confident it is now
Both companies are very profitable, but I'm sure IKEA shifts a lot more units. And the Aalto stool is solid wood and will last forever, while the IKEA copy is probably laminated cardboard or something.
Agreed, it's that the free market _allows_ you to do. What's concerning is that we're used to the "semi-benevolent" image of the free market where a company succeeds and then returns value to stock holders, and the employees and the investors and the country all share of the riches. Of course the executives and main shareholders get outsized returns, inequality might raise, but many people see a bit, and capitalism works, kind of.
This new Chinese "involutioned" capitalism is much more scary and robotic. The companies never really make money, becoming just an operation that maintains itself on minimum wage workers, all to the service of reducing prices. Shareholders don't make money, employees are semi-poor, nobody sees any returns.
But the customers see cheaper prices! you say. Sure, yes, the products get cheaper, but now think of yourself as an employee not a customer. Imagine the involutioned companies triumph. Your previous company, where you had a good salary goes bust. You find a job in an involutioned company where everyone is almost poor and worked to death just to reduce prices. Your portfolio goes to shit because companies don't make money anymore.... Sure, everything's cheaper now but I'm not sure that makes it better.
You forgot the last part about now no one having money anymore to buy the companies products, so you go into a deflationary spiral.
To solve that you'd want to increase wages by e.g. improving workers rights, giving them mandatory pensions etc. But that is scary: They might get too much power and revolt!
This works for China currently for a while, because they are exporting more and more. They have realized that they need to grow internal consumption, but are not managing to grow that sufficiently.
But if everything is cheaper, isn't it exactly the same as if everybody is richer?
Except that it could incentive people to put their money into rent seeking businesses and increase the real estate prices for example.
Like many others in the comments, I feel there are a lot of assumptions in this piece. Before, coding is only 14% therefore, small slice. I think that's a very superficial assumption. That was because coding was expensive and we needed to be sure we didn't code the wrong thing. If code is as cheap as it is now, we will optimize differently, we will structure around it. Instead of so many meetings we will code 5 different versions of the same thing and choose, etc.
Coding was expensive in the sense that once you decided what to do, it took a few engineers months / years to do moderately complex projects. That's not true anymore. Therefore the risk of "coding the wrong thing" is less.
Is it? The temptation to start without a thorough design is now much stronger because the implementation osnperceived to be cheap and easy to replace. But if you start building the wrong thing fast, you still get the right thing later than when you had checked properly at the start.
CICD and iterative development and agile work because interactive building leads to better product. Otherwise we'd all build perfect software using waterfall methodologies and release only once a year. If implementation is cheap then you implement, review and then re-implement. Not even iterate in the extreme case. Throw it away if needed and start from scratch if needed.
Lots os engineering projects took as long as you mentioned because they were horribly specified. Then the engineer either waits for an answer (which they generally do not get) or takes a decision (which might not be ideal without domain knowledge). Then you release and the customer suddenly starts explaining what they want.
You can improve some parts with LLM (make more prototypes, iterate faster), but if humans are the bottleneck and the problem itself is complex it will not be 10x improvement.
Of course, maybe we talk about different type of project, there are also the type of projects like "a web-shop that sells stuff" that someone considered "expensive to code".
Specification is hard because you are trying to predict a future state in a vacuum. You need to do that because creating the product is very expensive coding wise. If instead you could instantly build to your current specification then you could iterate on the specification against a real product. Even if all that code is thrown out the end result would be a better specification.
For some projects specification is also hard because of interdependence between modules or data or parts of the project. To which you might answer "make more tests". And we turn in circles, because it is hard to test something you did not thought of.
My experience is that users (customers) even when presented with a prototype (done fast by AI, or previously, in the slow way) can take days to "discover" or "think" about things they wish. Then more days to understand why some wishes can't be done because it breaks other stuff they want.
Maybe you have smarter, faster, more experienced and decided users. Then I can only say: good for you, you are lucky!
> Coding was expensive in the sense that once you decided what to do, it took a few engineers months / years to do moderately complex projects. That's not true anymore.
This conflates two orthogonal concerns; understanding what needs to be done with encoding a solution for what needs to be done. I am reminded of an axiom I have long held:
When making software, remember that it is a snapshot of
your understanding of the problem. It states to all,
including your future-self, your approach, clarity, and
appropriateness of the solution for the problem at hand.
Choose your statements wisely.
> Therefore the risk of "coding the wrong thing" is less.
I disagree with the proposition that being able to generate "wrong code faster" has anything to do with understanding what ultimately needs to be done. In fact, exploratory efforts having the intent to refine problem domain understanding (a.k.a. "proof of concept" projects) is an established industry technique whose work product is best discarded.
> Before, coding is only 14% therefore, small slice.
But also, no, because they write:
> “coding” (not including bug fixing, testing, etc.)
What if bug fixing includes "coding", or "writing code", or however one would want to define that? Especially in the enterprise setting they evoke, a lot of work will not be "coding" in the sense of churning out new features, but "coding" in the sense of fixing bugs. I know a lot of my "coding" is in this category. But we're not given a number for it. I suspect the slice would be bigger if they included this type of "coding".
Basically yes, there will be more coding in that phase, more prototyping, the PRD phases will be shorter too, there will be more pressure to deliver quickly and the PRDs will be under more pressure to move more quickly. This is what I'm already seeing to be honest.
I think the collapse of SA is very simple (as long as I'm not wrong about it of course hehe).
SA weren't geniuses, they weren't sophisticated. They just did the same thing everyone else did, all in on semi-conductor, AI and memory positions. They got great returns because 1) everyone got great returns and 2) they were leveraged through their ears. In fact, not only they weren't geniuses, they were pretty bad at risk management, so bad that the first mild drawdown triggered margin calls on their over-leveraged bets and they couldn't cover them.
TLDR: SA didn't have alpha, they just looked good through over-leveraged beta and got caught
Even in the optimistic case where SA did have alpha, the position sizing was way out of whack. Based on the volatility of the stocks they were buying, the Kelly Criterion meant you'd need to expect a 900% annual return on the stock before leverage to justify being 4x levered.
What guys like Leopold either don't understand or understand but ignore is that being right directionally and being right on market timing are two different skillsets. When you've juiced a stock by 800%, the existence of alpha pales in comparison to your vulnerability to the stock market.
Isn't the better abstraction here to use a higher level library in the style of pandas/polars that will operate as vectors, compose and feel readable and inuitive, while (almost?) maxing out SIMD?
That can easily cause you to traverse your data several times when once would be enough. Let’s say you wanted to compute “mean of array divided by max in absolute value”.
NumPy-like:
mean = np.mean(array)
maximum = np.max(np.abs(array)
return mean / maximum
As far as I’m aware, that will be evaluated as three traversals.
Highway:
HWY_FULL(float) d;
using V = decltype(hn::Zero(d));
V sum = hn::Zero(d);
V max = hn::Zero(d);
hn::Foreach(d, values, N, hn::Zero(d), [&](auto d, auto v) HWY_ATTR {
sum = hn::Add(sum, v);
max = hn::Max(max, hn::Abs(v));
});
const float mean = hn::ReduceSum(d, sum) / N;
return mean / hn::ReduceMax(d, max);
Just one pass.
When the actual computation is made so much faster by SIMD, memory bandwidth starts to be a significant bottleneck.
Thanks, that's insightful. I haven't thought about it that way but in retrospect it's clear. In practice I think we've all seen that the numpy style construction is quick to write and performs (and reads) much better than "dumb loops", but if you really want to optimize your code, the highway version will give you more control (and will read similar to the dumb loop with some decorations). I guess just more tools in the toolbox!
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