staticshock

2010's Google search code has been gamed many times over by sophisticated SEO schemes. So you can't bring it back "as it was". Best you can do is to restore its mission to "organize the world's information", but today's problems (e.g. AI slop) demand a new wave of technological innovation for them just to keep their head above water.

Also, it's funny you brought up politics, as if the current political regime is the last corrupt one we'll ever have. If you have the incentives for corruption in place, you will have more corruption. If you give Google to the government, it will use Google to support that corruption. The Trump era is a great time to be asking, "would I want the government to have even more control?", because there will be another Trump eventually.

you can't touch type without any tactile feedback. you just can't. there's no way to position your hands correctly relative to a keyboard you can't feel. that part of the "productivity" demo drives me bananas.

медвежья услуга

PostHog has this feature today. They have the concept of "Scouts", which are agents that scour ingested event data, replay sessions, and possibly also other kinds of data (though I haven't looked into what that means in practice), triage what they see, and put up PRs against them.

Update: I hope that didn't come across as a detraction; it's cool that you're building this. PostHog is open source, so if you haven't looked at their implementation yet, take a look, maybe it'll be useful to you!

Not sure if this is productizable as-is, but I think it's absolutely the right direction. A lot of software has to become WAY more malleable directly in the hands of users.

Software vendors should be providing the platform, including any hard-to-build widgets, and "stock" look-and-feel so that the software is usable out of the box, but then the customers should be able to send their product feature requests directly to a chatbot, whether it is embedded into the platform (i.e. same vendor) or rides on top (i.e. different vendor).

This is the new form of UGC. The vendor can turn it into a marketplace within that platform, promote popular 3rd party features in that marketplace, etc.

Whoa, great catch! I can't unsee it.

That's more forced laughter in one blog post than I was interested in suffering through.

What are some examples of his vitriol? I'm not familiar.

The comments here indicate a surprisingly, in my view, mixed reception, for such an unambiguously good talk?

The main thrust is simple:

- Technology is not good or bad, it is an amplifier of human values and our collective ambitions.

- Those of us who are terrified of where technology is going are actually terrified that humans are, on the net, bad, and technology will amplify that, bringing about dystopia.

- Believing this this is self-fulfilling. By embracing such beliefs you surrender your agency, which is what actually brings about dystopia. If you, instead, have a positive vision of humanity, then you are one of the people that drives society forwards rather than backwards.

We are currently at a moment in history where this message bears repeating.

A lot of things feel unstable, and as a result we have an opportunity to redefine the world in good ways and bad ones. Those who choose to redefine it in ways that are intractably bad will often do so from the point of view of a system observer, not a system participant. This is cope, because in reality everyone, whether they choose to accept it or not, is a system participant.

You're surprised they didn't eat the tokens to churn on lots of open problems instead of asking others to pay for those tokens? They're in the token business. If they're eating the tokens, it's in support of a marketing effort, not in support of innovation across the frontier of all the other academic disciplines. The collective frontier is way too big for them to just "solve it" without asking society to at least help them break even on such an enormous public good.

The pelican on a bicycle test is specifically about generating an SVG, fyi, not a raster.

I suspect this article got upvoted partly for the headline & content, and partly because of who said it. Lots of people already have a good feel for the AI/journalism niche Simon Willison occupies, and can use that background knowledge to read into his words more productively.