istewart

Despite the industry's deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.

I can't help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to "coding for non-programmers" akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet there's a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.

Point well made. Engineers, however quantitative they may be, are not often finance people. If the true believers were left in charge, they'd probably bankrupt promises much more rapidly, and auger the whole enterprise into the ground that much quicker. I can't see that Altman is actually that great a finance guy either, at least in stewardship of other people's money, but he has cultivated the ability to manipulate cash out of people and institutions during this grift-dominant era of Silicon Valley.

I guess in this scenario, Balaji's fetishized hyperinflation finally happens sometime in the next 6 months.

Yeah, "thousands of days" seems like a first-draft attempt at "let's choose a unit of smaller magnitude to make this seem more serious to the plebs." And everyone around him drowning their brains in GPT slurry shouted, "excellent turn of phrase, sir!"

Imagine if he turned up among the guest cast on Star Trek. He'd probably play a Bajoran who narc'd out to the Cardassians

Altman is certainly aware of what it takes to be a Jobs-like marketing personality (and probably holds Hubbard-like totalism as a not-so-secret ambition), he's just not, uh, very good at it. He's put the most effort into the strictly lower-case, faux-casual persona on Twitter to seem "approachable" in a social media context, and that doesn't help him at all when trying to actually appear serious.

I also don't doubt that he's beginning to succumb to the yes-man filter bubble that traps so many public personalities. That's surely made worse by the likelihood that any underlings he might have reviewing this crap are drinking the AI koolaid and "punching everything up!" with a few rounds of ChatGPT.

please be gentle with my child, they will soon have a presence on the discount paperback rack at the local grocery store

Dragon Ball A16Z: We have replaced interminable screaming powerup sequences and planet-destroying energy blasts with long panning shots of the characters using their abilities to light giant mountains of cash on fire. If you give us a series C at a valuation of $420 million, we may be able to determine why test audience surveys have thus far come back unfavorable

This post serves as your periodic reminder that the bald people were the bad guys in Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo

This causes me to reflect on contrasting currents in tech culture. I remember growing up with the Apple/Mac rumor culture around the time Steve Jobs came back, and how people had conditioned themselves to get hyped for any little tiny leak about upcoming products. A culture which obviously persists now, albeit in streamlined, advertiser-friendly blog spaces. By contrast, MacWeek magazine had a columnist calling himself Mac the Knife who claimed to have clandestine rendezvous with shady trenchcoat-clad characters in the back alleys of Cupertino... And somehow the new product reveals were almost always somewhat less whelming than the rumormill had built them up to be. Part of the Jobs idolatry that still dominates Silicon Valley is the clear strategy among empty-suit grifters like Altman that such hype is vital but Apple didn't do enough with it; that you should always be marketing what's around the corner rather than keeping it hidden away under lock, key, and NDA.

Contrast this with open-source culture, warts and all. What's in the repository is the basis of what comes next. You think superintelligence is imminent? OK, where's the code stubs that will serve as the foundation? Make a pull request for your mega-brain's medulla, let's review it. It's also a big reason why the current round of AI doesn't fit with open-source culture, no matter how many people are trying to force it. It is inherently an obfuscatory technology. Not just due to the sheer size of the data sets and weights involved, but also through the weird non-deterministic practice of configuring software through natural-language prompts. GIGO at scale, but you can keep the hype going by promising a lower percentage of garbage in the future.

this mf'er watched all the naruto filler and fuckin' loved it

emails SHFiguarts every week from their work address, "Deluxe Mecha-Naruto when?????"

The Hollywood bankruptcy auctions in a few years are gonna be lit