jmoiron plays the blues
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I said this more or less but I'm not a liberal and also like, who am I anyway? But I don't think that private gun ownership is a useful way to resist state violence.
jmoiron.net/blog/abolish...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Bert Hubert wrote a great piece about how if you outsource enough of the production of something, innovation becomes impossible:
berthub.eu/articles/pos...
I can see this happening with software. With no humans writing software, who will have the knowledge to innovate that proc...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: As Cindy Sridharan has noted on the other site, despite the supposed productivity gains, there doesn't appear to be a bonanza of envelope pushing software in the post-AI era.
If anything, the state of the art for systems software was changing much faster in the 2010s.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Of course this is silly to do in a professional context, but up until now software engineers have often worked under a process of continuous skill development over their entire careers.
When the job market was good, people would often switch jobs when they felt they had stopped ...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Back in the day, you could get coding lessons from magazines. Part of the lesson was typing the code in the magazine into an editor and saving it.
Many of these lessons stressed that this rote copying still had value. It familiarized you with the structure of your programs.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: This concern isn't limited to AI. There are studies that show cognitive gaps between writing with a pen/pencil and typing: www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...
But it's a safe bet that the cognitive gap between handwriting and typing is smaller than between writing and vibe-writi...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I believed this because of the observation in my quoted post above; generating code with AI doesn't feel cognitively similar to writing code.
As Lamport said, if you think without writing, you only think you're thinking. In my experience, this mirage is very convincing.
@jmoiron.bsky.social In my article on LLM environmental impact, I mentioned "erosion of human skill" as a potential downside to AI.
I've always assumed this was real based on personal experience, but there was a paper released recently from Anthropic backing this up, so I don't have to rely on vibes...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Flying is something that has not really tracked inflation. The result is the experience of flying is garbage now unless you pay "extra" to get what used to be the standard experience.
Games are going the same way and it's probably bad.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: A bunch of stuff has happened to offset costs since the 90s.. the market is much bigger, you don't need to produce costly media. But you also need a much larger team to produce an AAA title.
There's no reason to assume this balance will last in perpetuity.
@jmoiron.bsky.social I don't understand why people think the economics of the games market will continue to support games getting cheaper every year.
Chrono Trigger cost $80 new in 1995, $170 in 2026 dollars.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: This isn't a defence of the American system, I'm just describing what I see. A lot of Americans want European style systems (myself included) but we also need to reckon with what that means for the global health system.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The conversation we actually have, over and over, is Europeans saying "oh we get that medicine for 5€, American health care is really terrible" and they refuse to believe "our healthcare is subsidized by American suffering" over "Americans are stupid."
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: How can you say "you've got it backwards" and then start after the drug has been developed? That's where all of the costs are. That's what the quote claims doesn't happen without the US market.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Tolstoy and Hemingway agreed that all war is a crime. Mass death is not the exclusive domain of "cruel bombs."
But it's a harrowing and timely reminder that whatever nuclear weapons controls we can muster, however inadequate, are better than nothing.
Letting them lapse is inexc...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Sadly, it is most famous for being the target of the 2nd Atomic Bomb dropped in WWII.
If you look at it "by the numbers", the decision to do so can seem complicated. But bombs do not kill numbers, they kill people.
Today I stood where it fell.
@jmoiron.bsky.social Tonight's the last of 3 nights I'm spending in Nagasaki.
A beautiful city with rolling hillsides and terraced dwellings, it was an early point of contact with Europeans. Its regional specialties have an international flair with Chinese and Portuguese influence.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Booing of Trump was filtered out of the US Open tennis final last year.
@jmoiron.bsky.social I am on the Nozomi Shinkansen and the wifi they provide seems to be the same one they used on the TGV in Mission Impossible (1996).
I keep looking around expecting to see Ving Rhames.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: dunno what he's done now but I'm still struggling to understand how you can parlay an online bingo card app into being trusted and respected in the upper echelons of the tech world
@jmoiron.bsky.social One of the best things about Chinese portable consumer electronics is that they all have charge indicators and USB-C.
I need to bring two custom chargers for my toiletries bag alone (toothbrush & trimmer), but Xiaomi sells these with USB-C. Barely any western brands seem to do t...