We've had the AI tools for maybe two years, and they have only gotten really good in the past half a year or so. For fuck's sake, adopting electricity took like 50 years, why would you expect to see any kind of effect from the AI so quickly? The tools are still developing - rapidly - and people are still figuring out the best usage patterns for it.
Electricity analogy is fairplay, but ChatGPT had something like 110% global adoption 5 minutes after its release. The infrastructure and the electrical appliances had to catch up, but the Internet is all built out already.
So I think it's fair to be looking at results a few years in.
Andrey Karpathy famously mentioned in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel [0], that the computer doesn't show up on GDP numbers, there's no noticeable jump or change in slope. Even if Excel is so damn fast, people are likely not drawing its full potential, and institutions are likely actively resisting change anyway.
My take is that the general population hasn't found the productive levers yet, they're at the stage where they're happy to drag down and auto generate the date list in Excel, but don't know to adjust diagrams or read function docs, not to even mention VBS scripting. And the enthusiast (dev) community I'd say is starting adoption with internal tools, and shot-in-the-dark apps, but big successes need time to mature in all the other ways (design, reliability, user feedback, marketing...), which comes back to what you said also, that needs time. Product Market Fit isn't happening automatically by chance or good prompting, I would like to think.
I agree. I'd also argue that local effects of productivity were already visible since the start of ChatGPT. I was already using it a lot back then for writing tests and as a "smarter scaffolding", even before Copilot and such. Often cutting the time of doing something from half an hour to a few seconds.
IMO the bottleneck remains the same: doing proper engineering is more than writing code. Even 20 years ago a big corp would spend a few years writing something that a startup would do in weeks (and yes: even 20 years ago) just because of laser-focused requirements, better processes/less bureaucracy, using the right tools for the job and having less friction in tooling. That hasn't changed.
I've had the same idea. Especially regarding anxiety. You start getting anxious and scared of everything, because your brain knows that your body is out of shape and incapable of dealing with stuff if anything happens. If you can't deal with any problems, then you must constantly be on lookout for them so that you can avoid them.
Every major technological invention nowadays quickly breeds open source clones that evolve to be on par with the commercial ones on some time scale. Why hasn't this happened to Wolfram Alpha/Mathematica? I know there's Sympy, but it's so far behind Mathematica that it's not even comparable. Is the heavily mathematical nature of the tool somehow an insurmountable obstacle to the open source community?
It’s a great question. As soneone who has been fascinated by Wolfram Aplha for a loong time (and might or might not have thought about cloning it), i think that growing up i ended up realizing that Mathematica in the real world just doesn’t… Do much?
Maybe i’m just missing something. But it looks like nobody is really using it except for some very specific math research which has grown from within that ecosystem from the beginning.
I think one of the basic problems is that the core language is just not very performant on modern cpus, so not the best tool for real-world applications.
I used to be a university researcher in theoretical physics and, in that field, everyone uses it, but I suppose that would count as "very specific math research" Any kind of complex integrals, systems of equations, etc. and Mathematica is invaluable, and, as I said, so much ahead of Sympy.
You could do stuff other than theoretical physics research with Mathematica, though. I has a lot of functionality and I always felt that I used only a tiny fraction of it.
What you're missing is everything not on the public Internet. Everything hidden away from you and me. Everything done in secret. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, does it make a sound?
What Micoloth is missing or what I'm saying, is that people are using Wolfram Alpha but don't feel the need to post to Instagram or wherever about it, so Micoloth isn't hearing about it. Micoloth is assuming that because they aren't hearing about it, it isn't happening. I'm pointing out that things can happen that you don't hear about.
I think in practice it's less of a programming language and more of a scripting environment. It's like excel for math. There are many more people using it to produce mathematical results (like how excel is used to produce reports and graphs) than people who use it to produce programs.
This is why its not particularly problematic that it is closed source. Most people I've worked with who use it produce mathematical results with it that are fully checkable by hand.
Serious question for early adopters of Claws: what are you using them for? What things do you find them actually useful? Can you give examples of tasks where you actually save time and/or effort using them?
we will need some sort of payment-block checkmark for use of social media soon enough. This claw phenomenon is opening the floodgates of spam even more than before
To be fair, multiplayer via LAN is such a marginal feature nowadays that you can't really blame the companies for not supporting it. You don't really need "greedy corporate fucks" explanation for this; it's just that you don't want to develop, support and test features that maybe 0.1% of the user base is going to use.
This is not an accurate assessment in the StarCraft II case. It was released in 2010, and LAN play was definitely still popular. I remember because I was part of a University club/society that was running ~200 person ~3 day LAN parties at the time, and I recall the intense loathing we had for how incredibly difficult Blizzard had decided to make it to actually play the game you had paid for, on your own network.
If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.
Games like StarCraft, CounterStrike, Warcraft 3/DotA etc were definitely popular at the time of SC2's launch and still are played in "cybercafes" etc.
Hell that LAN environment WAS the reason StarCraft got so hugely popular in the first place, before Blizzard got jealous and wanted to have their fingers in everything, and people still continued to play Brood War after SC2's launch.
Now, when the servers inevitably get graveyarded permanently some day, how is anybody gonna play SC2 or any of the always-online games?
> it's just that you don't want to develop, support and test features
Just let one player's machine host some of the same server code they use for their internet services?
> multiplayer via LAN is such a marginal feature nowadays
WHY?? Literally everybody has phones now, but how many local multiplayer games are there? Imagine if you could just bop your phone to your friends' and immediately start playing something together. The technology and social saturation has never been more favorable than now, but as always it's corporate greed/spying which is the biggest antifun cancer everywhere.
It was the "greedy corporate fucks" entirely though?
LANs empowered gamers with full ownership and a better ability to self organize player communities and tournaments. The always online model was heavily hamfisted by Activision Blizzard who wanted to launch their esports ambitions with SC2, seeing the KR broodwar scene as missed revenue. Look at the failed Overwatch League (OWL), Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and even reforges of classic RTS.
DOTA/League spawned from lan/bnet use map settings games and arguably Dota rise to success started in Lan cafes before hitting mainstream success on bnet.
I acknowledge that many likely don't ship Lan because it's being seen now of days as extra, but I think that's pointing to the consequence as the root cause what the major entities wanting control and ownership on their platforms. It didn't used to be an extra feature 0.1% used, we were pivoted into this to profit larger corps and it's not a tinfoil hat conspiracy, it's just following where the real money was and investors want to be middlemen on platforms.
I recently joined back to Facebook to follow some local groups. I barely see anyone I know posting on Facebook anymore. Even the local group seems kind of dead considering how many people live here.
So where are people now? If I want to get informed on local events, etc., where should I go?
Your local library? Mine has a bulletin board where anyone can pin something (like Pinterest, but in real life) and numerous events. If yours doesn't, start one?
> Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?
The US and China pulling all this shit is exactly why the whole European alternatives thing is trending. Before Trump started threatening everyone, we had no problem using US tech.
I think that it's more a case of "Before Trump started threatening everyone, there were problems with using US tech but we chose to ignore them because it was too hard to do anything about it"
To my reading the US, despite the 'safe harbour' assurances, has never been somewhere that European people's data should have been sent, because we know that the US requires its companies to give access to that data on demand, usually secretly. So any assurances that data is entirely confidential are meaningless.
It's one of the reasons I was so incensed with gov.uk using google analytics and Zendesk (even though Zendesk has its origins in Denmark, it's now based in SF). Their pleadings that 'data is anonymised by google' were not reassuring at all, and it constitutes a complete record of UK citizen interactions with their own government, handed over to a US company on a silver platter.
At least now people are thinking about this stuff a bit more.
Yeah. We are only just beginning to get the most out of the internet, and the WWW was invented almost 40 years ago - other parts of it even earlier. Adoption takes time, not to speak of the fact that the technology itself is still developing quickly and might see more and more use cases when it gets better.
Indeed. Most large companies don't need AI to increase productivity - they just need to stop wasting time on stupid bullshit. However, figuring out what is stupid bullshit and what is not seems to be an impossible task, and I don't think AI is going to help here at all.
What are you talking about, if there is one thing on which LLM shine, it’s generating vast amount of bullshit. That’s extreme productivity gains.
Also flame-wars can be autofed ad nauseam now, so there’s going to be less and less interest in engaging into them. In an act of desperation, idle trolls will turn to tasks tracked by KPIs.
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