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“The German army in 1941 invaded the Soviet Union with somewhere between 600,000 and 750,000 horses. The horses were not for riding. They were for moving guns, ammunition and supplies. Weeks prior to the invasion, 15,000 Panje carts were issued to the infantry units that would trail behind the fast-moving Panzers. The vast majority of Germany’s soldiers marched into Russia, as they had into France, on foot.”
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Software eating the world was predicated on zero marginal cost. Cognition eating software brings back a metered bill. The firms that thrive will treat compute as COGS, UX as moat, and rapid iteration as life support. Everyone else will discover that “AI shaped holes” can also be money pits: expensive, probabilistic, and mercilessly competitive.
from Strange Loop Cannon
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Just back from the gym - thinking about Doing More is Often Easier by David Cain
always be curious about what’s just beyond your usual stopping point. Doing more often makes things easier, not harder.
My usual stopping point felt like just about the end of the road, but it was actually the beginning of a hidden, hyper-rewarding territory where exceptional results happen.
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Key take away from “What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers” - the process matters for creativity:
“I have no idea how he ended up as an art director when he can’t visualise what he wants in his head unless can see some end results”, Bradley says. Rather than beginning with sketches and ideas, then iterating on those to produce a more finalised image or vision, Bradley says his boss will just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it work.“He doesn’t know that the important thing isn’t just the end result, it’s the journey and the questions you answer along the way”.
“What follows from these discussions is me explaining why, usually over hours rather than minutes, that these tools have no place in a professional game development pipeline or production and actually hinder the development of visuals”, Francis says. “I also find myself explaining to them how the iteration and ‘idea’ phase of a project is where the best stuff happens, how exploring things through artistic labor is where your best ideas come to fruition, and why would we want an AI (that we don’t even own) to do that for us with art that isn’t ours to use?”
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Just reading “What it’s like to interview a software engineer preparing with AI” where candidates basically used AI to fake or puff up their experience. Seems to me like meetups/in-person connections will become more important to validate what people really know and what they are really like.
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On Trump Tariffs, Mckinley, and Closing Society, DigressionsImpressions
“Mercantilism is never just about the balance of trade. It’s always and everywhere an attempt to direct state violence against those who wish to shape their own lives unguided by the superior wisdom of the nation, the people, or race. Policing the border means control over romance, marriage, friendship, and gender, that is our most meaningful choices; it is an attempt to control who plays with who and who learns from who. Free trade and free meaningful control over one’s life are the same side of the coin.”
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Impossible progress can come quickly. The Information, James Gleick:
“Across the English Channel, a submarine cable twenty-five miles long made the connection between Dover and Calais in 1851. Soon after, a knowledgeable authority warned: “All idea of connecting Europe with America, by lines extending directly across the Atlantic, is utterly impracticable and absurd.” That was in 1852; the impossible was accomplished by 1858.
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Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first (the secret is that the innumerable company of the heavenly host sings in a slightly different key each time).
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Nice quote from Einstein describing fundamental science discovery: “highest form of musicality”
““That [the] insecure and contradictory foundation [of Bohr’s quantum hypotheses],” Einstein would say, “was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr’s unique instinct and perceptiveness to discover the major laws of spectral lines and of the electron shells of the atom as well as their significance for chemistry appeared to me like a miracle. . . . This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.”” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb)
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From Open Socrates, Agnes Callard:
“My own approach to Socrates might be described as “hard-line intellectualist”-I think that Socrates is just what he seems to be, namely someone who believes that we don’t know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that philosophythe pursuit of such knowledge-is the only sure road to becoming a better person. Why is this collection of views so implausible?
If you posed this question to the many scholars who try to save Socrates from his own intellectualism, they would say “because it is obvious that someone could have knowledge-such as the knowledge that it is wrong to steal, or kill-but be unwilling to act on it.”
Socrates' response is: What makes you think that was knowledge?
The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways they are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called “knowledge.””
