ThePhysicist

Are people vibecoding fonts now? Just wondering as I see at least one new font pop up here every day almost...

I built myself a full walkabe 3D plan of my house for my renovation project over the weekend, complete with path tracing renderer, different drawing styles, furniture arrangements and accurate models of different windows styles that I consider ordering, all based on actual blueprints and materials. I looked for usable software for that before but everything was either commercial garbage that wanted you to pony up a lot of money beforehand or hard to use manually. With AI I can build stuff like that over a weekend and I can tell it to place stuff and design things in text and using photos and 3D scans, it takes care of actual implementation. That's much better than spending days or weeks with locked down software trying to make it do what I want.

So maybe the big revolution is that we won't have "big software" that tries to cater to all kinds of users but "small software" that is tailored perfectly to the needs of a single user.

It's more about attention and getting traction, with a good idea you will get some but there's just so much more noise. Look at Steam, every day so many great looking games that probably play quite well come out, honestly 5-10 years ago they would have blown my mind, now apparently every week we get a release of a game that is super polished and has great mechanics. So yeah, I love that more people can make great stuff, it's just that everyone is competing for my attention and I only have so many hours to spare.

Overall it's a good thing, I think we will see the big studios loose footing in the gaming market even more, with the whole Microsoft restructuring blood bath we can already see it, big studios and brands still have their exclusives for now but I imagine they will lose market share overall since there's just so much exceptional stuff being produced by indies, and a good indie game can be just as much fun as the most expensive AAA title.

I find the paper about beating O(n log n) for integer multiplication also quite fishy, not sure but it seems like too good to be true, I feel like there must be a subtle flaw in that. Maybe that's just me hating these small numbers in the paper, but it seems wrong, unnatural even! I would be similarly skeptical about a physics paper that claims to be able to exceed the speed of light by a tiny fraction. There's no reason n log n is the natural limit here but I see a few good intuitions so having something else that can't be represented in an elegant form seem very "unmathematical" to me.

When I did my PhD we had theorists come up with new candidates for high- & low-temperature superconductors all the time, that wasn't so difficult, fabricating the stuff is the hard part! You need to layer atom by atom using chemical vapor deposition or another technique, that's akin to alchemy, think of a hugely complex machine mounted in a temperature controlled room with a 30 ton concrete dampener below. That machine was hell to operate and ruined so many PhDs lives, sometimes they went years without ever producing a single working sample. I remember we used some high electron mobility amplifiers in the lab and at the time there was only a single lab in the entire world that could fabricate these because no one else could figure it out.

So, while this is great and I think LLMs will accelerate materials science the main bottleneck isn't having enough promising candidate materials, I think we have a backlog of at least a few hundred candidates that are worth pursuing. Maybe some money that goes to data centers would better go into CVD machines.

Then again, investments in AI are 1-2 % of worldwide GDP I think, if you think that this technology can probably increase efficiency at least a couple of times in anything that has to do with information processing it doesn't seem so ridiculous. The electric grid, railroads and other large-scale infrastructure required similar amount of investments, though they took much longer. I guess the main risk here is the speed at which everyone races to capture this market as unlike electricity or railroads this revolution is entirely digital so competition happens nearly on a global scale and everything is much faster. That is probably the main risk, going this fast will definitely cause overshoots in one or the other direction.

For shopping and basic research it's very good. It's not nearly at Astra or Fable level and sometimes it gets facts wrong, but it's super fast and it has the whole web available through some vector search facility I assume. I can just give it a product name or number or throw a whole bunch of items from my shopping cart at it and then discuss what I need e.g. for a heating installation in my house, it's obviously not an expert but it always finds stuff that I overlooked or that can be improved.

But yeah I noticed how they play with your emotions, it's a bit creepy. Whenever it asks a hook question and I tell it "Actually I did X and Y" it will invariably go like "Wow that is such a brilliant and well thought out strategy, almost a stroke of genius!" (not literally but you get the idea). I guess they found out that people really like having their ego stroked, the other providers are also doing that to some degree (I assume since no one likes an unfriendly AI that makes you feel stupid) but Google really cranked that setting to 11.

Move fast and break t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ the law. Because the law moves very slowly.

It is really overflowing with "business influencers" now, crazy how all social media websites are converging to the same soup of human slop. The UI/UX is the smallest issue, it's a dopamine trap like most other social media sites.

Reminds me of that joke with the two economists paying each other to eat shit from the street. In the end they accomplished nothing (actually it's way worse than that as they have eaten shit), still have the same amount of money as before, but made the GDP rise by twice that amount!

Some skills are impressive, hard to learn and take years or decades to master but are essentially worthless in a monetary sense. Just yesterday I witnessed a musician masterfully playing a beautiful piece on the accordion. Only he wasn't playing in a great music hall, he was in a busy subway station hoping to collect a few coins from passersby. I assume he mostly did it for the love of the game, while he could have made more money delivering food or sorting boxes at Amazon.

That got me thinking that programming might be like that in the near future, it's still an impressive skill for a human to learn and master and it takes tremendous effort and the craft itself is beautiful, but economically it will just not matter anymore. And in the same way as the music industry today is bigger than it ever was and there's tremendous money in it but 95-99 % of highly talented musicians will never earn a decent wage with it, the software industry will be bigger than it ever was but the money will be highly concentrated in the hands of a few players. Maybe we will still have some rockstar programmers than can masterfully command legions of agents or that win the love of the crowd for their unique work, but most of us will be enjoying this craft as a creative hobby and will do other things for a living.

Then again, coming back to the music parable, for a long time "amateurs" can make music with software tools without having any talent or even knowing musical notation or anything about tempo. Does that make them musicians? So take solace in the fact that these people aren't programmers and never will be, they're just pushing buttons on a synth board watching the "music" that comes out. Mastering a skill, regardless of what it is, will still matter to people, it will just not be worthwhile economically for most of us. There are so many things in that category, running for example isn't worthwhile for most of us in an economic sense as you have to be at the top 0.1 % of runners to make a living with it, still it has tremendous benefits and brings enjoyment.

What a time to be alive, repeating questions to a model twice to increase accuracy.