> Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience
So you're saying that everyone seeks status, and even the people who say they don't are seeking status by not seeking status? That argument seems like you are overreaching. What, then, would you consider evidence that falsifies your theory?
Similarly, when I was a teenager I knew a guy who built guitars by hand. He is a master craftsman who makes beautiful instruments, but he told me one time that he had customers sometimes lose interest because his guitars were cheaper than similar competitors (5k vs 10k as I recall). He wound up raising his prices, and got more sales as a result, even though the guitars hadn't changed at all. It was a really interesting (and to me, bizarre) demonstration of how people can make decisions very irrationally at times.
Apparently cereal makers were losing money b/c they priced their product at a much lower price point than, at the time, the regular breakfast of bacon and eggs.
They hired a consultant who pointed out they could raise their prices as long as it was lower than bacon and eggs, make more money and still be cheaper.
2. Raising prices
There is a story in one of the pricing/economics books about a store keeper who told her assistant to halve the price of jewelry that wasn't selling. The assistant misheard and doubled the price. The jewelry immediately sold.
3. The shelf that always sells
In the book about Shopsin's in NYC, the author and owner mentions that certain shelves in a store will sell out of whatever is on that shelf. Regardless of price, product, time of year etc.
Apparently, putting things right by the front door in supermarkets is the opposite: very few people buy anything that is there. I noticed that one of the Real Housewives of NJ had her food product there and thought to myself: someone is giving you bad advice and/or humoring you by putting your product there.
Thank you. I kept looking at the page trying to figure out WTF it even was, and was unsuccessful. Damn, I wish I had a cane so I could shake it at these devs.
> I'm kinda leaning towards the analogy that LLMs are to programming as textile machines were to the loom.
The difference is that textile machines reliably produce working cloth. LLMs do not, and indeed probably cannot, reliably produce working software. Instead they generate something which randomly has bugs sprinkled throughout such that a human needs to review the whole thing (which negates the gains). This would be like if a textile machine produced cloth that randomly would rip if you tried to use it for anything. Nobody would have accepted such a textile machine, just like nobody should accept LLMs.
> Heck, one company built a (prototype but functional) web browser
No, they built something which claimed to be a web browser but which didn't even compile. Every time someone says "look an LLM did this impressive sounding thing" it has turned out to be some kind of fraud. So yeah, the idea that these slop machines could build an OS is insane.
I personally observe AI creation phenomenally good code, much better than I can write. At insane speed, with minimal oversight. And today’s AI is the worst we will ever have.
Progress in AI can easily be measured by the speed at which the goalposts move - from “it can’t count” to “yeah but the entire browser it wrote didnt compile in the CI pipeline”
> But it seems that no one truly want that. We want the shiny things. We wrote the same frameworks in Java, then python the go then node the JavaScript the typescript.
I think that people are just afraid that if they use a library in maintenance, they will run into a bug and it'll never get fixed. So they figure it's safer to adopt something undergoing further development, because then if there are issues they will get fixed. And of course, some people have to deal with compliance requirements which force them to only use software which is still updated.
Kinda. I think people want "classic WoW" because they aren't able to articulate what, exactly, would need to change with WoW to make them happy again. But they can pretty easily paint to the old version and say "I liked that, bring that back". I think it's plausible that you could (with time and effort) design something that isn't the same as classic WoW while keeping the players happy.
>I think it's plausible that you could (with time and effort) design something that isn't the same as classic WoW while keeping the players happy.
blizzard tried to do this with the retail version for literal years while people kept saying "please, i just want classic wow."
now, if you mean that it is plausible that those same people would play a different non-wow mmorpg that shared some aspects of classic wow, sure. but that is drifting pretty far from my original point.
Nobody is saying don't pay your developers. Just that VC funding creates perverse incentives within your business where you are pressured to do what is best for your investors, rather than your customers. But there are other business models where one can earn money and still pay the people working on the product.
So you're saying that everyone seeks status, and even the people who say they don't are seeking status by not seeking status? That argument seems like you are overreaching. What, then, would you consider evidence that falsifies your theory?
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