> basically everyone knew the internet would be revolutionary long before 1995. Being able to talk to people halfway across the world on a BBS? Sending a message to your family on the other side of the country and them receiving it instantly? Yeah, it was pretty obvious this was transformative.
That sounds pretty similar to long-distance phone calls? (which I'm sure was transformative in its own way, but not on nearly the same scale as the internet)
Do we actually know how transformative the general population of 1995 thought the internet would or wouldn't be?
In 1995 in France we had the minitel already (like really a lot of people had one) and it was pretty incredible, but we were longing for something prettier, cheaper, snappier and more point to point (like the chat apps or emails).
As soon as the internet arrived, a bit late for us (I'd say 1999 maybe) due to the minitel's "good enough" nature, it just became instantly obvious, everyone wanted it. The general population was raving mad to get an email address, I never heard anyone criticize the internet like I criticize the fake "AI" stuff now.
Regularly trying to use LLMs to debug coding issues has convinced me that we're _nowhere_ close to the kind of AGI some are imagining is right around the corner.
At least Mother Brain will praise your prompt to generate yet another image in the style of Studio Ghibli as proof that your mind is a tour de force in creativity, and only a borderline genius would ask for such a thing.
Sure, but also the METR study showed the rate of change is t doubles every 7 months where t ~= «duration of human time needed to complete a task, such that SOTA AI can complete same with 50% success»: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499
I don't know how long that exponential will continue for, and I have my suspicions that it stops before week-long tasks, but that's the trend-line we're on.
Only skimmed the paper, but I'm not sure how to think about "length of task" as a metric here.
The cases I'm thinking about are things that could be solved in a few minutes by someone who knows what the issue is and how to use the tools involved. I spent around two days trying to debug one recent issue. A coworker who was a bit more familiar with the library involved figured it out in an hour or two. But in parallel with that, we also asked the library's author, who immediately identified the issue.
I'm not sure how to fit a problem like that into this "duration of human time needed to complete a task" framework.
This is an excellent example of human “context windows” though and it could be the llm could have solved the easy problem with better context engineering. Despite 1M token windows, things still start to get progressively worse after 100k. LLMs would overnight be amazingly better with a reliable 1M window.
While I think they're trying to cover that by getting experts to solve problems, it is definitely the case that humans learn much faster than current ML approaches, so "expert in one specific library" != "expert in writing software".
> This could have been prevented by having one person on the team with actual language design experience, who could point this issue out in the design process.
Instead of making a mistake, they could have simply not.
I think it is time for some of those apps to invest into caching. Also APIs are not only about third-party applications. I can think of a dozen ideas for products build around the Reddit API without going over this limit.
> social media sites don’t produce content. They merely host it. Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available.
?
But this feels pretty simplistic. Not convinced that people do (or should) upload content expecting they or anyone else can access it however they want.
If you create the content then it's obviously yours forever. If you also decide post it to a platform, why is it the platform's social responsibility to allow access to that content for free.
This cuts both ways -- if I'm not going to allow access to that content for free, why would you give me your content?
The ToS might allow for it, but people are routinely dismayed when companies stick to the letter of what their ToS allows them to do, especially when they start doing things they never did before.
> if I'm not going to allow access to that content for free, why would you give me your content?
A bunch of reasons potentially, wider reach probably being the main one, but maybe also stuff like ways for your audience to interact with you/the content/each other.
> The ToS might allow for it
"It's in the ToS so it's fine" is a bad argument, but I'm not saying that. I guess there's two things:
a) empirically, do users actually expect that content be available "for free" (in general? just to themselves?) from a platform
b) is there a "good reason" that this should be a social expectation?
a)'s a tricky question with multiple parts but I'm not especially convinced. I imagine a lot of users aren't even really thinking about that kind of thing
b) I could imagine being convinced about, but "they didn't make the content" doesn't feel sufficient.
It depends on your definition of depression. For example I could be either depressed (there are some facts about my life that I've always been unhappy with, even if they don't necessarily distress me every day) or not depressed (I'm pretty happy and can't remember any real recent gripes) depending on how you define depression.
By the clinical definition, I don't have depression, because it doesn't impact my enjoyment of or participation in hobbies, and I also don't seem to have any persistent or recurring mood problems.
> I'm not sure anyone would call this depression? I certainly wouldn't.
Well, that's the point.
> I think I generally mean anhedonia when I talk about depression.
As far as I know, anhedonia isn't supposed to be very common. Though it can be pretty amazing to look at the outside world if you happen to be one of the unlucky ones who do have it.
I used to do this when I couldn't finish any projects because of ADHD. How did people dedicate all their free time to one thing for so long, and actually finish it to completion? I just didn't understand how it was possible because it just didn't work that way for me.
> As far as I know, anhedonia isn't supposed to be very common.
? My understanding is that it's like, a pretty primary symptom of depression?
> clinical depression, is ... characterized by ... pervasive low mood, low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities.
Oh, no, you can have plenty of hobbies but still be too depressed to touch any of that, lived thru that too, and still didn't drop the weight I gained because of that...
Plenty of stress or frustration to be had from hobbies too
I do feel lucky that the thing I don't hate and are reasonably good at allows me to get decent job and money
> We have lots of examples of this in other heritable disease types
You're saying that diseases persist in humans because they're selected for, because they're beneficial to others? That's interesting, do you have some examples?
I would phrase it as the genes are selected for, not that the diseases are selected for, but yeah you understand correctly. Others have already filled in examples like you asked for.
Cherish every sunrise.
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