the ur-text behind this piece is: people just not understanding exponential capability growth. including the author of the piece!
if you could look clearly at the progress from 2020 to 2023, as someone like Gwern did, and from 2023 to 2024 with the invention of reasoning modes, then it was not that hard to understand what would happen in late 2025. Opus 4.5 was not a surprise to anyone who was actually paying attention.
But people (including the author) still mistake the current state as a stable state and future gains as incremental. he says
“I am not asserting that all code will eventually be AI-generated to spec, bypassing human understanding”
I AM asserting that, and it’s incredibly easy to do so.
A lot of folks here are making some version of the observation that an immutable public unforgeable database is, in practice, equivalent to ANY database which is sponsored by the state. That feels persuasive to me.
Does this imply that the blockchain ledger might have greater utility in areas where there is weak or no state control? Basically, the criminal underworld and black markets. What's been written about this?
Magnopus has deep expertise in AR, VR, mixed reality, and virtual production. We’re passionate about creating experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.
We're looking for more than one front-end web developer to join our new product team, working out of the brand new Magnopus HQ in downtown LA (open July-ish). https://apply.workable.com/magnopus-2/j/183A32ACD7/
- You have multiple years of experience shipping production-quality React applications that interface with back-end services -- link us to your portfolio
- You’re strong on the fundamentals of Javascript (preferably also Typescript), React (and React Hooks), CSS
- You are familiar with modern frameworks and can demonstrate your ability to choose wisely among them
- B.S. degree in Computer Science preferred but not required
Magnopus is an experience company with deep expertise in AR, VR, mixed reality, and virtual production. We’re passionate about creating experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.
Come help us build a new spatial product & platform touching on numerous tech stacks and all major platforms.
The crew at Magnopus are smart, they are good communicators, and they are gracious. So ideally you're like that, too. These are growth roles in a growing company in a growing team; you will not only ensure we get good results up front, but you will also have an opportunity to set best practices that will serve us for years to come.
(Other positions are also open, including Security Engineer.)
Magnopus is an experience company with deep expertise in AR, VR, mixed reality, and virtual production. The company was founded by a team of Oscar-winning artists, designers, and engineers from games, films, and other unusual places. We’re passionate about creating rich experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.
We are building a new product and platform encompassing front end, back end, and middleware -- and covering desktop, web, mobile, VR, and AR.
The crew at Magnopus are smart, they are good communicators, and they are gracious. So ideally you're like that, too. These are all growth roles in a growing company in a growing team; you will not only ensure we get good results up front, but you will also have an opportunity to set best practices that will serve us for years to come.
(Other positions are also open, including Security Engineer.)
Magnopus is an experience company with deep expertise in AR, VR, mixed reality, and virtual production. The company was founded by a team of Oscar-winning artists, designers, and engineers from games, films, and other unusual places. We’re passionate about creating rich experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds in ways people haven’t experienced yet.
We are building a new platform encompassing front end, back end, and middleware -- and covering desktop, mobile, VR, and AR. To ensure robustness and quality in everything we build, we need a skilled Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) to design, create, and own automated testing and test infrastructure.
The crew at Magnopus are smart, they are good communicators, and they are gracious. So ideally you're like that, too. This is a growth role in a growing company in a growing team; you will not only ensure we get good results up front, but you will also have an opportunity to set best practices that will serve us for years to come.
(Other positions are also open, including Security Engineer.)
Oblong is a hardware and software company that has always worked at the forefront of human-computer interaction. We are looking for talented folks to help us radically evolve our next-generation meeting tool, Mezzanine.
Currently open positions:
- full-stack engineer (React, Redux, node...)
- back-end engineer (Go, GCP...)
- C++ engineer
- Security engineer
- Director of Engineering
- and more
We have a small, agile engineering team where you can move fast and make an outsized impact.
Oblong is a humane place to work. For example, the company pays 100% of health insurance costs.
Oblong is a hardware and software company that has always worked at the forefront of human-computer interaction. We are looking for talented folks to help us evolve our next-generation meeting room product, Mezzanine.
Currently open positions: full-stack engineer (React; Redux; Electron a plus) or back-end engineer (Go, etc.) We have a small, agile engineering team where you can move fast and make an outsized impact.
Oblong is a humane place to work. For example, the company pays 100% of health insurance costs.
Oblong is a hardware and software company that has always worked at the forefront of human-computer interaction. We build meeting room products and large-scale immersive systems.
We are hiring in LA for positions in full-stack web (React, Redux, Electron a plus) as well as back-end (Go, etc.) We have a small, agile engineering team where you can make an outsized impact.
More positions will open up; we are also interested in graphics experience and experience with video or videoconferencing. Know Chromium? Graphics drivers? C++? Talk to us.
Oblong is a humane place to work. For example, the company pays 100% of health insurance costs.
Please do a google image search for "medieval scriptorium". Then try a google image search for "victorian office engraving" or "victorian counting house engraving". Or check out this list of "Antique Office Illustrations 1770-1879" (https://www.officemuseum.com/photo_gallery_1860s-1880s.htm). What you'll see is different instances of the open office plan, over a timespan of a THOUSAND YEARS. It's a space plan which seems to emerge around collective knowledge work.
These types of workplaces are not a newly-hatched resource squeeze by our ruthless capitalist overlords. They are a physical work pattern which has been reinvented and retooled many times, and isn't going away. In most of history, "office"==="big room".
I don't think it's wild Silicon Valley chatter to say that public transportation along fixed routes WILL decline as a result of new technology, and this is a great thing.
Fixed-route 19th-20th century public transportation networks are inefficient because most of the vehicles are pretty empty most of the time. This makes these systems expensive on a passenger-per-seat-mile basis. Not to mention the colossal waste of people's time spent trying to accommodate their journeys to those fixed routes (and schedules).
In 10-15 years, transport companies like Lyft/Uber/Didi will be able to offer municipalities a much better deal than that. An electric car or van without a driver in it, with an operating lifetime of a million miles, will cost on the order of 20-40 cents a mile to run. Get 3-8 paying customers into the vehicle, and there is absolutely no need for a 50 cent per passenger seat mile subsidy.
Agree! In my experience successful remote work is associated with 2 things:
1. extremely well defined problem domains
2. incrementalism
For lots of engineers, those 2 points describe their job. Lots of (incremental) value is created that way.
But I'd argue that the larger gains accrue to those companies -- or those cities -- where work is being done in non-well-defined problem domains. And not incrementally, but by big leaps, experiments, and messy failures.
In fact, you could go farther and argue that in a competitive landscape, companies will quickly match each other in their performance in well-defined problem spaces, and the only way to actually compete at the margins is in problem areas that are, by definition, newer and not well defined.
> wearing a helmet somehow reduces the odds of exercise
Helmet paranoia DOES reduce the odds of exercise. On a group level, at the level of public health, that's PRECISELY what it does. I encourage you to read about it, that's why they call it the helmet paradox. This piece is a nice summary.
You are mistaken about what the rules are in most states. To take one example, in California, you own the lane and cars cannot pass unless they can give you three feet of clearance.
But it doesn't change the truth of the sentence: "The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it."
For this reason, I wear a helmet. But the health benefits of cycling vastly swamp the risk of death, so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference.
The person who is truly taking a risk is the person who doesn't ride a bike because of the perception that it's dangerous, and continues to be sedentary and drive a car to work. This person is literally reducing their life expectancy by years. (See links I posted elsewhere in the thread.)
You need to be able to think about conditional probability.
if you could look clearly at the progress from 2020 to 2023, as someone like Gwern did, and from 2023 to 2024 with the invention of reasoning modes, then it was not that hard to understand what would happen in late 2025. Opus 4.5 was not a surprise to anyone who was actually paying attention.
But people (including the author) still mistake the current state as a stable state and future gains as incremental. he says
“I am not asserting that all code will eventually be AI-generated to spec, bypassing human understanding”
I AM asserting that, and it’s incredibly easy to do so.
The question of “when” is separate.