Memes of Production

He says that tech as a phenomenon is largely a 20th century phenomenon and is generally over now, that the things that can be invented have been invented, that we’ll never see another Walkman, a device that changes what is possible so radically that stores can’t keep them on the shelves.

That's difficult to square with diffusion and transformers. There's no gizmo for video generation, but we nonetheless went from "ha ha avocado chair thumbnail" to real-time high-def photo-real CGI-for-dummies in five years. And dumb as LLMs are, they demonstrably perform some worthwhile labor. These are just two uses of backpropagation becoming practical thanks to one expert testing an alternative function on a whim, and raytracing dorks making video cards run serious programs.

Any problem with examples can now be trained on a supercomputer and run on a potato. Human comprehension is not a necessary component. This is a whole new kind of software, currently caught between blatant grifters and identarian haters. Shit's gonna get weird.