The only question is if it’ll still make sense in six months, or if an even more unreasonable approach will be the correct one. Feels like a singularity.
I completely agree that we haven’t even gotten past the first post yet in terms of the magnitude of change that is likely to occur. People fail to comprehend that we’re still assimilating the Internet as a means of communication. Cell phones. It will be decades before what we have today is fully utilized, let alone what is likely to be developed. Anyway, thanks for the article.
If you're looking for a UX idea, when the phone boots, it asks "What are the top 5 things you do?". And that's how the phone experience starts.
All the best. (Ignore the silly haters, they're lost in their AI pessimism to just look forward to a new intersting thing).
I'm pretty AI pilled, and I'm building a local-first personal software platform, but I dunno... I've been feeling like i need to cram the "AI spirit" into very specifically shaped boxes to actually build robust software tastefully at speed. Like software on the outside and AI on the inside instead of the other way around.
I do think the future of computing will definitely be more like the Linux diaspora than the apple ecosystem, but also.. it is easy to get "duped" by AI without actually shipping. I'm starting to want "KPIs" to help me measure if my time is actually well spent against the things i care about.
I guess I'm extrapolating from your post, but even if the programming language is English, we'll probably still want to spend a large amount of additional compute to produce "artifacts" that have things like performant code, security hardening, and certified taste.
I do think the future of computing will definitely be more like the Linux diaspora than the apple ecosystem, but also... when i first got into linux i spent way too long trying to get my desktop perfectly aesthetic because it was all suddenly malleable. Now i vibe more with Debian.
I wish you luck, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with! Fun times ahead for sure.
This is such incredible verbiage. Thank you for saying something so clearly that I've been saying myself in many other ways. I've been using terms such as "providing structure" and "applying constraints" and "reducing degrees of freedom".
I think very specifically the idea of "taste" is going to be extremely important in these AI-saturated days, and it's really where experienced humans will shine...at least for a while.
The model I see is that it is like a butler instead of a home computer, like you are driving into a strange town and looking for food and you are not going to open the McDonald's app but instead your agent does a search and through a conversational recommender you get sent somewhere. It might be sitting in your pocket the whole time and you are talking to it through something like AirPods. Maybe you put on smart glasses and it can show you things.
Apple can't give you the A.I.-native phone because it is too dependent on the app economy. For a few months I've been asking "Who is working on this?" and figured it was one of those cursed ideas that Silicon Valley would be unable to fund much like the pharmaceutical-industrial complex of Cambridge was unable to fund Facebook. I was expecting it to come out of some hungry Chinese manufacturer so I'm happy to see another horse in this race.
(e.g. I love the image that Meta has developed around Muse which makes it look like it is a "butler" when it is really much more like the old Kraftwerk song where "I program my home computer")
I actually think this post gets the point across better than most.
And then of course it's super self-indulgent of me just to write navel-gazing stuff like this. But I'm an HN person first and an entrepreneur second, so here we are.
I am thankful people are being so nice about it though!
As someone who's building its news project on it, it's both reassuring, but also not since you're leaving..
1. When you write a comment in a discussion of an article, be upfront with being the author. It took me a while to understand that from your comment. "Author here" is a thing.
2. Your article itself doesn't have clear authorship stated. At the very bottom there is a copyright notice, but that's pretty generic and not a single person either. Just place your name at the top together with a date. Not everybody knows you or follows your blog.
3. When I read this ...
> When I was a little kid, a family friend sold us our first “computer” — scare quotes because I’m pretty sure it was a VTech Laser 200 clone, a chiclet keyboard Z80 that ran off cassette tapes and plugged into our TV.
.. I prepared to stop reading since .. how is that not a computer? After another paragraph or two which just felt like rambling, I gave up.
You're getting perfectly reasonable feedback here, and your response is weird.
with 3. being the most prominent one.. I made it a little further than that "hot take" but a few more paragraphs in the thoughts expressed seemed neither novel nor to go anywhere. SaaSpocalypse but on localhost... shrugs
These are bad-faith arguments toward "What about self modifying software".
Self modifying software has no grounds in reality or predictable behavior. It is an unreasonable expectation that software is magic. You would not fly on a self-modifying airplane. This is not a future i want to live in.
No; sorry, no.
But it seems that he is falling for the LLM hype the same way. We all have the kid version of ourselves hiding somewhere within our grown versions, it seems...
The author is smarter than falling for the hype, I think. But if not AI psychosis is a hell of a thing.
Depends on domain, but basically all the same lessons we have for software written the old way by humans.
Which, ah, admittedly isn't great.
> Isn't this the halting problem?
No.
1. The halting problem applies specifically to deterministic systems; there may be a non-deterministic equivalent, but not enough people cared before AI got good.
2. For practical purposes, it's fine to reject things that take too much effort to prove correct.
3. "Proven correct" is different from "proven to halt eventually". I guess Gödel's incompleteness theorems would be a partial fit, but even then the goal here is to reject anything you can't prove, rather than the much harder (impossible) challenge of proving the validity of all possible statements it might come up with.
First, the halting problem is only undecidable on arbitrary programs. Here we would be writing programs specifically to be easy to prove correct. In fact, we would be developing programs and proof at the same time.
Second, determinism is a nice property, but it's independent of whether you can proof software correct.
Have a look at eg randomised quicksort or the 'expected linear time minimum-spanning-tree algorithm' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_linear_time_MST_algor...
Or have a look at HyperLogLog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog
HyperLogLog only gives you a probabilistic approximation of the true number of distinct items. Here the proof would be about the probability that you are within some acceptable window around the true answer.