xyzzy123

Most of the world does NOT optimise for efficiency, particularly at the big end. Really big hyperscale companies (and some startups) are unusual because they at least sort of try, most of the world is not even trying.

The org structure is optimised to reduce or even minimise individual agency, explicitly at the cost of efficiency.

Teams have fiefdoms, private repos that the rest of the org can't see. You are not granted permission to see what permissions you have. Byzantine department structures. Shipping "hello world" to production takes 3-6 months and nobody can imagine it working any other way.

There's actually no central directory of teams or processes. To get anything meaningful done, you need the co-operation of maybe 8 teams but there's no consistent way to engage them all. You have to negotiate with them all in different ways, they're like little warlords, sitting and guarding access to some vital resource you need. They have established a ticket-based interface with a 7 day SLA on top of a perfectly good vending API that could do what you need in seconds. Sometimes a blocking team has a 3 month backlog so your project will just have to wait.

Everything is always in the process of being restructured, so no end to end 6 month process happens the same way every time.

These organisations could use AI to run the end to end process in minutes. Heck, they could just put APIs on top of what they already have. But the way they WANT to use it is to keep doing what they're doing but with EVEN MORE form filling and paperwork.

You would think they would get outcompeted, but no. The "IT organisation" sits like a brain slug on top of an enterprise with substantial regulatory, capital and execution moats.

Big cuts of course do happen in these places, but it's often for optics (we need to signal that we care about efficiency, and AI is a great excuse). But you can't protect yourself by being efficient and good at your job, because the cuts were not about output.

Naively, people have been working for 75 years over the span of the graph to create valuable IP, scalable manufacturing, unique organisational capabilities, partnerships etc.

If capital is being created faster than it degrades or is destroyed, wouldn't we expect its share of income to increase over time?

It's not obvious to me why labour's share should necessarily remain constant as the economy accumulates hard-to-replicate productive assets.

Are you proposing that as part of this settlement, Meta should have to delete the posts and likes and facebook accounts of users in New Mexico?

Households use about 20% less electricity today than in 1985; per person kwh is also down. But household expenditure is up by 20% in real terms and cost per kwh is up by 50%

40 years of technological progress and prices went up :(

What I don't get though is that with increased household efficiency and presumably an increase in population (i.e, density which usually lowers cost), and the benefits of efficiency improvements to generation and distribution... why is household energy spending is UP, even accounting for inflation?

I think this works well until you get into data, state, history, external interfaces etc. Large scale data migrations are still risky, anything with external consumers you can't quickly change is risky, etc. Internals inside a service I agree, yeah you can let it slide a lot.

I also found though, with agents you can quickly create large amounts of code, when you go to refactor / fix some design aspect that touches large parts of the system this consumes a lot of tokens and actually still takes meaningful time.

It's like, with a digger you can quickly create a hole! Digger can quickly clean up the work of 10 people with shovels! But if you use a digger for 1 week and you were putting the dirt in the wrong place, you find you have a HUGE pile of dirt to move and will still take a long time to clean up.

Directionally I agree with you, but I think design still matters.

Right. What I not sure about - even for builders - even when the results are technically verifiable, the details can still matter. AI is really good at proving or building a slightly different thing than you thought you asked for, and if you're not at a level where you can understand key details of the formalisation of your ask, you cannot safely use the results.

Without human understanding you also might literally have no words for the thing you would otherwise want to ask for.

I think it'll be wildy useful but I also suspect human competence will still matter.

I think the difference is that with cancer cures we mostly care that it works as proved by trials, and understanding it is a bonus.

Up until now the prize in pure (as opposed to applied) mathematics was the _understanding_ and the machine can't do that for you. What does it mean if we get "super powered alien maths" but humans can't do it? It's like inter univeral teichmuller theory but imagine if Mochizuki was right and it came with a lean proof?

Whats interesting right now is that those people also see opus 5.5 as being CHEAP because it's something like half the price of fable or astra.

I'm curious about provenance. What you're describing sounds kind of like Etsy and while there are still genuine things to be found there it's mostly flooded with mass-produced stuff. The more of a premium "hand-made" artifacts attract, the greater the incentive to counterfeit them.