And this is the classic ball of mud where you end up with a system that's a ball of mud-... because it's just put together in a way where nothing is connected and it's just a real mess, right? I've seen that with agents, and I've seen it in our own code bases where, again…
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It had one megahertz CPU and 64K of memory. Everyone who wrote software for that machine internalized certain constraints. Well, all the constraints. That machine was nothing but constraints. If you put that programmer in a time machine and teleported him or her to 2026 and gave them a modern computer today and said, "Now write me a piece of…
`1:04:17`
It's romantic too, though. Let's also imagine that. This is one of the things, whenever we bemoan modern car culture, for example, right? And then we think like, "Oh, wasn't it better when we all had the horse-drawn carriages and so on?" No, it wasn't. Do you know what New York smelled…
`1:04:43`
... to experience the nostalgic past, when you don't get the all the furry impulses and senses.
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It's already happening, the romanticization of handwritten code. And I have some of it because it was a very romantic era. I'm grateful to have been alive for 20 years of economically valuable handwritten code…
`1:05:20`
Correct. Because handwritten beautiful code exists as much today as it did yesterday. There are people who willfully write new video games for the Commodore 64, or for the second Mega Drive, or for other vintage consoles. In fact, one of my favorite video games of late is ModRetro's. Do you know Palmer Luckey's-... side…
`1:05:51`
It's amazing. Look it up. It's really cool. But what's even cooler than the fact that he recreated this hardware and the original chunkiness, but brought it up to date with sort of modern screens and so on, now they just put out the Nintendo 64 too. Incredible. Super cool. Wild attention to detail…
`1:06:23`
I played a lot of Tetris on the original Game Boy. Probably one of my top three favorite games of all time. And they rewrote it with one change. If you hit up, the brick slams. And that speeds up the game by about 400%. It is an incredible game, and it's a new Game Boy…
`1:07:31`
We gave birth to this moment. What a privilege, and I feel that very personally because I... Almost all of the code I've ever written is public code. The vast majority of my career has been dedicated to writing open source code, and therefore, some of that code, some of those beautiful lines are in the…
`1:08:29`
Am I sad that if I had to get a job tomorrow, it's unlikely that I could apply my skills in such a way that I would be paid to write these manual lines of code? No. I did it for 25 years. Like, I wanna see something new here, especially if we're all gonna…
`1:09:30`
I am grateful for every moment that brought me to where I am right now, and therefore, I have also tried, and maybe this did take some practice. I will concede that. Maybe I wasn't always like this, but stoic philosophy, amor fati, loving your fate, is an incredibly liberating way to live. And you could…
`1:10:51`
Hugely. Because just because I have this disposition, I'm keenly aware that that's not evenly distributed, that not everyone sits with this position and this optimism for the future. But I do think I wanna separate things a little bit. I think you're gonna have a hard time coping with the new reality if…
Well, what the ATMs did was lower the price of a branch, and suddenly banks could afford to open a lot more branches, and we ended up with more bank tellers than we did before. Now, none of this is guaranteed. There are also moments where things do change. The vast majority of people worked in the fields up until…
Productivity means fewer people to do the same number or the same job. Now, the amount of job you want done may increase, and therefore you get more people, but it also may not. There may be pockets where a company just needs a certain set of fixed tasks done, and suddenly they can do them with a 10th the…
I think all those answers could be plausible for someone. And taking that drudgery, handing it over to machines, that is the history of civilization.
`1:16:16`
A lot of it is gone in a lot of domains, and the rest of it may be gone very soon. So that's where some of the romanticism also comes in…
`1:17:11`
Don't try to anticipate anything. You will literally go crazy. Because even the smartest brains in the business cannot anticipate what two model hops from here is going to look like. It's an absolute waste of time, and you will develop an AI psychosis trying to deduce what two years from now is gonna look…
`1:17:59`
I think it's optional actually to build publicly. I think it's nice to do because then you get to be part of a community, and there's some camaraderie in open source. Not some camaraderie. There's an enormous amount of camaraderie. Open source is an incredible source of community and camaraderie, and it's…
And if you're just sitting in your little isolated cave worrying about the future, yeah, you're gonna go a little nuts. I think if we learned anything during COVID is that people will go nuts sitting in their little cave inside by themselves worrying about what's gonna happen. That is indistinguishable from depression, ruminating endlessly about things…
`1:21:55`
We don't know, and therefore, we should choose to have faith that it's gonna pan out. That is my best advice towards fighting anxiety, is that you have a choice, to a large degree, of how to lean. Do you wanna lean into PDoom? PDoom is gonna happen whether you lean into it or not…
`1:23:22`
You're not gonna miss anything. This is the part that actually grinded my gears in the early phases of this transition. Everyone was so up in arms that if you didn't... It's loops now. Oh, no, no, we're done with loops. It's graphs now. Oh, no, no, we're done with that…
`1:25:04`
You might as well have been in the cryo chamber for 100 years
`1:25:12`
It's startling, and I actually... I mean, I'm putting some of this on slightly for effect. I also recognize that it's okay to grieve for a hot moment. That's not my disposition. It's not how I…