It's crazy that a year ago the prevailing discourse would've been, "AI can't do that. Fake news." and now it's "Well of course AI did that. You prompted it! What else would it do? Shame."
It reminds me of putting on noise-cancelling headphones in an already quiet room. You suddenly gain an appreciation for just how much quieter things could've been thanks to the contrast.
Similarly, having a vehicle accelerate/decelerate consistently, always taking turns with the same sharpness, etc.. all of it builds to this subtle feeling of the car ride fading into the background of the experience. You didn't realize those were features of a drive you could appreciate until experienced.
I think we're voting to change to a leap hour in early 2027. Or I'd assume we're going to go that route instead of continuing to entertain the tech nightmares.
Shifting to a leap-minute feels close-enough to me: We might get one every 50 or 100 years. A lot of us reading this today will never live to see a leap-minute, but it's close enough that we'll still have it collectively in-mind when it it needs to happen. (And if we screw it up at that time, the outliers will only be off by a minute. Not so bad.)
A leap-hour, meanwhile: That kicks the can so far down the road that we'll probably lose track of it completely. ~6,000 years is a very long time; society will be a very different thing by then. Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.
edit: accidentally a word, and fixed an off-by-an-order-of-magnitude error on the approximate years required for a leap hour
> A leap-hour, meanwhile: That kicks the can so far down the road that we'll probably lose track of it completely. 600 years is a very long time; society will be a very thing by then. Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.
Something to consider: The use of timezones in mostly 1-hour increments over inconsistently placed areas means that the vast majority of people are already living many minutes off from the "actual" time at their precise location, in some cases even more than an hour. "Giving-up" implies that this is something important worth maintaining, where-as for the vast majority of people they gain nothing from leap seconds or even leap minutes. The most important thing for people is simply that everybody agrees on what time it is, which is easier when leap-Xs aren't done.
That said it's also probably true that a leap-hour would never actually happen, but that's not some big issue. By the time we got to the point that a leap-hour would make sense people would have already adjusted their habits and it probably wouldn't be worth it.
An extreme example is Xinjiang, where solar time can be more than three hours off from civil time (due to the PRC policy of having only one time zone for all of China).
Indeed. On a long-enough timeline, people will adjust to whatever it is that the sun is doing regardless of what the clock on the wall says. That's the way it has always been.
So when we're talking about one second every once in awhile, I'm not sure that [effectively] giving up by adopting leap hours instead of leap seconds isn't the right option -- as long as we agree to do it uniformly.
> Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.
Sometimes, doing nothing is the right option. Sometimes, giving up is the right option. I believe this is one of those times. The alternatives seem worse to me, and the fact that it's even being considered by the curators of time would seem to indicate it's not a completely invalid option.
Every 50 or 100 years is possibly the worst way of dealing with it. You're essentially making it a repeating Y2K / Y2038 problem.
Doing it that rarely means most people will never see it happen in their professional life, so most processes will be designed without keeping it in mind. When it does inevitably happen, everything breaks at once.
With leap seconds it happens often enough that you actively have to keep it in mind during design. Leap hours are rare enough that they'll be a society-wide event, and can probably be handled without too much issue using existing timezone logic.
One way of thinking about ignoring leap seconds is that it's like letting the effective prime meridian drift east/west. And a "leap hour" is kind of like a timezone change. In fact, you could just not have a centralized/coordinated leap hour, and let individual jurisdictions change their own timezones as they wanted, if they wanted noon to be closer to the daily solar peak.
Crazy. I just changed the default for our entire org to Opus because people were continually unimpressed with Sonnet's abilities. It's fascinating to think how varied people's experiences are when interacting with LLMs and how much the outcomes depend on how people approach interacting with the models.
Everyone says SpaceX IPO price is too high, but it's the most interesting IPO in a long time, it's critical to the US government, and America is, frankly, addicted to gambling. I'm not convinced it's going anywhere but up for a long while.
Very little of the IPO is related to anything government, or space for that matter. It's mostly a rental service for some GPUs that were hoarded, with the promise that somehow in the future the $2B/month that Anthropic and Google are paying SpaceX for compute infrastructure will somehow grow, that somehow SpaceX will grab valuable GPU real estate before others and continue renting it to others who actually make productive services.
Even SpaceX's own documents estimate the space stuff to only have an addressable market of $370B, and it's not like it's a document full of conservative estimates considering they estimate their AI at approximately the entire GDP of the United States.
What does that have to do with LLMs? There's morev to delivering value to the customer than just shipping code. We used to understand that technical debt was an existential risk to a project. I can't see how "code nobody understands" is not technical debt.
I disagree. Shipping functionality that works and users consume is all that matters. Everything else is noise. Technical debt can be viewed through this lens - it reduces the rate in which functioning code is shipped. That's bad, but it's only one of many dials.
The author states they feel that using LLMs allowed them to ship years faster. That's years of time in which they can collect feedback and iterate. They might even choose to scrap the entire project and rewrite it based on their learnings. The practicality of this is directly enabled by agentic coding.
Technical debt is aptly named. From time to time it demands it's interest in the form of delaying a new feature, but as long as your overall technical revenue is positive, it's fine.
It sort of isn’t though, because it gives the wrong impression to people who look at things through a financial lens.
There’s no accrued compound interest: if you leave a piece of “indebted” software alone, you don’t pay any “interest”.
Conversely, a small amount of tech debt can actually cost huge amount… but only if you make many changes at a high rate.
That’s why I prefer the “worn tools” or “sand in the gears” analogies because they provide the right financial mental model.
An unlubricated, worn out piece of industrial machinery costs you nothing… unless you try to make things with it.
You can take this analogy quite far: sharp and lubricated but outdated machinery may work “just fine”, but you won’t be able to attract the top talent used to working with modern 5-axis CnC tools instead of having to manually turn cranks like a savage.
You get a discount for paying for a full year on Teams and Enterprise can involve contractual obligations. It's a lot of effort to get buy-in to change providers and to shift an entire organization. The winds change frequently in this space and the pain needs to get to a certain level before it's worth rolling the dice.
Your competition's behavior necessarily affects you unless your company has an unassailable moat.
If other companies are able to tolerate larger amounts of tech debt while shipping new features faster then you'll be out of a job at some point when your company loses market share.
It's fine if you disagree with the idea that AI lets established companies ship faster. I'm not here to argue that. But I think it's pretty easy to empathize with "why might one need to change their behavior due to this new technology?"
> If other companies are able to tolerate larger amounts of tech debt while shipping new features faster then you'll be out of a job at some point when your company loses market share.
I'm saying that B2B services are very common outside of SV and more focused on stability, compliance, long-term maintenance, and the operational knowhow that comes with all that rather than just shipping new features. It's not that there isn't some competition, but that the business is built on much more comprehensive partnerships than just being a software vendor. I can't believe I'm saying this, but "synergy" sometimes isn't just a meaningless buzzword.
When you try to jam "AI" into the mix, the disruption harms the business value. Many including myself would like to be enlightened if you think otherwise.
Well, I'm commenting from a place of bias, as I'm Head of AI at our company and am in charge of rolling out agentic coding throughout the engineering org. So, bear with me a bit.
We're B2B SaaS in the Ed Tech space. It's very sales-driven. There's only so many players in the space, customers come with a laundry list of things they've seen others do and expect you to have those features, too. There are basic expectations that need to be met, some of those are compliance, but, sadly, a lot of what actually drives sales is just... flashy shit that looks good to those signing the checks not those using the underlying software. We lost a sale recently because someone was upset we didn't have the ability to give digital stickers to children - seriously.
You're more than welcome to tell the customer they're wrong and not give them their stickers. Or you can ask Claude to build stickers for you in two days and keep up with the Joneses.
Don't get me wrong. Customers aren't retained long-term with flashy shit. People churn out because of poor UX, security fears, pricing hikes, etc. Those frustrations tend to build over years and pain has to get pretty high because it's effortful to shift software providers. But, for getting new customers, sales is driven by flashy features and, at least in our experience, we need to be able to build those as quickly as our competitors or we lose out.
Economics are economics. If your company is inefficient by not using AI, then it must make up for it and sacrifice some other economic advantage it has over its competitors to break even. If the loss of efficiency is low enough for your particular business, then perhaps you do not care and are content with sacrificing N% of your economic advantage over your competitors.
