Ai

I used Gas Town for a week. I ended up with three mayors, 141 orphaned Claude Code processes and a new appreciation for why agent orchestration is hard. Gas Town is Steve Yegge’s framework for orchestrating a fleet of coding agents. It shines when most of your work is pure code: lots of independent tasks, clear specs, and you mostly know what you want and don’t care how you get there. It falls apart when the work is heavily human-in-the-loop or ambiguous. Keeping Gas Town fed with beads that align with your project goals is the hard part. ...

AI, Jevons Paradox, and the Future of Software Engineering The year is 1994. A groundbreaking technology is proliferating—one that would expose all of human knowledge to everyone, anywhere in the world. Industries relying on information scarcity trembled. Newspapers, encyclopedias, travel agents, and countless others faced an existential threat. That technology was the Internet, and while it did eliminate many jobs, it created exponentially more. Entire categories of work—social media managers, SEO specialists, app developers—emerged that would have been impossible to predict. ...

Software systems exhibit a peculiar property: the more sophisticated they become, the more they tend toward catastrophic rather than graceful failure. This pattern isn’t unique to software - it’s characteristic of all complex systems, from neural networks to financial markets. But software’s rapid evolution and ubiquity makes it a particularly interesting case study. A complex system isn’t merely complicated. Rather, it possesses specific properties that make its behavior fundamentally unpredictable: ...

Nvidia is one of the largest companies in the world, frequently taking the top spot. It’s revenue is growing at an astonishing rate, with margins better than a lot of pure software businesses - something usually unheard of for hardware companies. All of this is on the back of a massive AI hype cycle. During a gold rush, you should sell picks and shovels. Nvidia is selling bulldozers. In this post, I will dive into the components of Nvidia’s competitive moat, its strengths and weaknesses, and the competitors trying to cross it. ...

We’ve lived with like ChatGPT for over a year now. Last year seemed to be the height of the hype cycle, at least for me. It felt like everyone, from friends to Uber drivers, was excitedly discussing the potential of this groundbreaking technology. However, as often happens with new technological advancements, the initial excitement has dimmed somewhat when faced with the reality of day-to-day use. The trough of disillusionment is real. In this article, I’ll mostly discuss the limitations of LLMs in technical tasks, though I believe these limitations apply to any sufficiently complex domain. ...

“The Coming Wave” explores the advantages and risks associated with a surge of emerging technologies. Authored by Mustafa Suleyman, a British artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, the book extends beyond just AI. It delves into the merits and drawbacks of other developing technologies, such as quantum computing and synthetic biology. In the initial sections of the book, the author paints a picture of the potential benefits of these emerging technologies, reading like utopian science fiction. It later shifts to outlining the potential threats, evoking a dystopian hellscape. The book ends with a series of recommendations on navigating the fine line between these two extremes. The following review reflects my interpretations of the author’s opinions, except where I specifically state my own views. ...

Melanie Michell is an AI researcher and professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In her book “Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans,” she seeks to make artificial intelligence understandable for laypeople, and for the most part, achieves that goal. She begins by discussing the history of artificial intelligence, starting from the “perceptron” and working up to deep learning for natural language. Michell explains each concept in concrete terms and apt metaphors, with minimal technical jargon and math. Each “AI spring”, heralded by new breakthroughs and followed by breathless claims about potential revolutionary applications just around the corner, are inevitably followed by “AI winters”, where the technology falls short of expectations. She also delves into philosophical concepts such as the alignment problem, the singularity, and consciousness in AI systems. ...

Generative AI PC Build Log Why With the emergence of generative AI, I finally had a compelling reason to build a new PC. Most deep learning projects require a dedicated GPU, making them difficult to run even on an M1 MBP. While cloud options like Paperspace and Colab exist, the GPUs they provide access to are limited. Paperspace, for instance, only allows access to the most basic GPU and denied my request for access to the RTX 4000. AWS was also an option, but it was somewhat inconvenient to use cost-effectively since you would have to stop the instance and snapshot the volume to save on costs. Having a local GPU is crucial to quickly run experiments at a small scale before deploying them to the cloud to run on bigger hardware. This helps me minimize the feedback loop and make faster progress. I had previously built a computer a couple of times in high school, mostly for gaming. I didn’t have a good reason to do it again until now. ...

Kodak was once the dominant player in the photography industry, selling disposable cameras, film cartridges, and developing photos. However, they failed to invest in digital cameras, which they had invented. They were making so much money on film that they didn’t want to speed up the process of making the old technology obsolete. This approach made sense to Kodak, but customers increasingly preferred instant digital photos. Now, most Gen-Zs have probably never heard of Kodak. ...

TLDR I created SocratesGPT to test the concept of using AI to generate questions about a given topic. Its goal you learn topics better by asking you questions about it. I also provide some technical details on the implementation. Why? Over a year ago, I began using Anki, a spaced repetition flashcard app that helps me retain information over the long term by taking advantage of the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. Memory is like a leaky bucket, and it was incredibly frustrating to realize I’d forgotten most of what I learned. Anki has enabled me to confidently tackle difficult technical topics that I would have otherwise avoided. ...