Elon Musk Is Wrong (Simulation Theory Explained)

Apple is cutting off social media support!

Can AI Ever Understand How Humans Think? - YouTube

What I believe to be one of the most underrated features of LLMs is the ability to convert imprecise human text into code.

In the past, writing a computer program required writing code - aka writing text in a very specific, tedious way such that it can be understood by a computer. A single erroneous character will crash an entire program. Writing code is difficult and tedious enough that it is a professional career that tends to require some degree of study (eg. 4 year CS degree, coding bootcamp), and the job can command annual compensation packages from $100k-$1m+/yr.

LLMs for the first time enable writing programs through natural language, ie. without writing code.

What this will do is make it dramatically easier to create computer programs. The technological jump is the equivalent of trying to talk to someone in Icelandic in 1989 (assuming you don't speak Icelandic), and then suddenly being given access to a modern smartphone with Google Translate.

Some implications:

- Anyone will be able to easily create or update computer programs
- Computer programs will easily be able to create computer programs
- Coding for the first time in history will just be done by regular human language instructions that any non-technical person can write. A disgruntled customer or product manager will simply be able to create a bug report or feature request, and an AI agent will immediately be able to take that and update the codebase (eg. submitting a pull request after testing and code reviewing its own work)
- Programming languages will become unimportant, because any language will easily be able to be translated into any other
- Coding will be commoditized

The human programmer is the translation layer between the human and the machine, and AI is automating that work away, just like it's automating human language translators.

*AI skeptic: So what? Who cares if some geeks can make computer programs easier?*

AI and automation are computer programs!

**AI is making it easier to improve AI.**

This is a feedback loop that results in exponential growth of AI. The more AI improves, the more AI is able to improve itself. Eventually this feedback loop gets so out of control that humans cannot keep up, a point known as the "singularity".

Humans are terrible at comprehending exponential growth, and thus I believe are drastically underestimating how quickly this is all developing.

Most seem to think that the job market for most people is going to be fine over the next decade - I vehemently disagree. I believe that AI will dramatically change society over the next few years and make the workforce drastically more competitive as AI starts to outstrip human ability. The labor market will become so competitive that UBI will become inevitable (I've been saying this for a decade, but never before has it looked so obvious and imminent).

The nature of work will move to a higher level of abstraction. Workers will become more like managers who delegate the "grunt work" to AI - responsible less for the nitty gritty of implementation and building tedious things, and responsible more for deciding what to build and where to direct the AI agents' focus. Just like fast mental math skills hasn't really been a competitive advantage since the invention of the calculator, doing any sort of repetitive, automatable work will not be of any advantage because the AI will be able to do it faster and cheaper at a speed of gigabytes/s, while being able to self-correct and debug itself. As tech becomes commoditized, humans will have to focus more on the "human" aspect such as marketing and zero sum games to economically compete.

The mistake that people who dismiss this tend to make is that they often believe that AGI is required for this mass societal transformation. I disagree. All it takes is for computer programs to be able to make the creation of computer programs easier to achieve this AI flywheel effect.

Anyways just some random thoughts here at 2:11am in Seoul.

LLMs create an Exponential Flywheel for AI Advancement

Hi I'm Jeremy. I'm building this site because I'm not satisfied with other online community type websites and their lack of innovation (see the /about page). The goal is to make a superior, more open, and more decentralized online community.

The site is still in early stages in active development (see the dev masterthread here: https://zsync.xyz/p/zsync-dev-update-masterthread)

Join us if this sounds interesting! Feel free to send me any feedback or reach out directly!

HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37345727>

Everything I wish I knew before moving 50,000 lines of code to React Server Components

Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web

<https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1683656350046232578>

From Elon Musk:

*"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.*

*The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.*

*In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."*

Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

MetaGPT takes a one line requirement as input and outputs user stories / competitive analysis / requirements / data structures / APIs / documents, etc.

Internally, MetaGPT includes product managers / architects / project managers / engineers. It provides the entire process of a software company along with carefully orchestrated SOPs.

MetaGPT - Given one line Requirement, return PRD, Design, Tasks, Repo

"Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has a message to employees who don’t want to return to the office: “It’s not going to work out for you.” That’s according to [a report from *Insider*](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-rto-office-policy-employee-jobs-2023-8), which says Jassy made that statement during a meeting earlier this month.

While [Amazon ordered its employees to return to the office](https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/17/23604485/amazon-return-to-office-three-days-a-week) for three days per week starting in May, many Amazon employees weren’t happy about the decision. [Thousands of workers signed a petition](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hr-chief-rejects-petition-against-return-to-office-policy-2023-3) against the mandate and [staged a walkout in response](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/amazon-workers-plan-to-walk-out-over-lack-of-trust-in-leadership.html)."

Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: ‘It’s probably not going to work out’

This is super inspirational. Long read but well worth it. Also his blog is great and he posts very frequently there and on Twitter [@alexwestco](https://twitter.com/alexwestco)

*"There is no epic launch. No epic event. No going absolutely viral.*

*I built the website with a no-code tool and launched it on ProductHunt out of the blue. If people did indeed subscribe, I would rush and create it before by the 1st of the next month and deliver them the list, as my website stated.*

*No pretend work this time.*

*Even those mockups, soft launches, Reddit posts and cold emails had started to feel like "pretend work" now.*

*Just launch already.*

*The launch went well, and I got ten paying customers. Just like that. With a $29/mo price tag, I was at $290 MRR!*

*Some subscriners had business emails as well. I had officially built a B2B product at last!*

*All and all, I went from no idea to $290/mo in two weeks."*

Alex West (getcyberleads.com, $500k/yr) - Two and a half years of building products [2020]

HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37301991>

WebLLM: Llama2 in the Browser

66% of Americans want European-style vacation policies, like being OOO for the entire month of August

It's clear that we're approaching the singularity, & most are drastically underestimating the impact that AI will have on society within the next couple years. Some predictions:

\- Humans will not be writing code by hand in a few years.

\- Workers will be expected to move "up the stack" of abstraction. Software engineers will be expected to be more high level product manager hybrids, serving more as technical business managers who delegate low level tasks to AI agents + cheap offshore workers

\- Rise in generalists. Expensive specialists are most at risk since AI democratizes knowledge + power

\- Gutting of the middle class, since most peoples' jobs are now very easy to automate

\- Rise in AI agents. Most of what you read online including on internet forums and in DMs, you won't be able to tell if it was written by a human or AI (already the case with recruiting). There is currently an arms race in AI agent development, the results of which we'll start seeing on society within the next 12 months.

\- The glory days of working in tech are over. Just like very other industry, it's only going to get more and more competitive. Salaries will at best remain stagnant. This is not specific to tech and will be the case for every industry. The industries most resilient will be those that require a human (eg. physical therapy)

The winners will be those who harness AI to their advantage, the losers will be everyone else.

I think most people are drastically underestimating the enormous impact that AI will have on society within even just the next 12 months. People are treating AI like a temporary fad or bubble, as if things will just return to the way they were before. But AI is not only here to stay, it's just getting started, and it's an arms race because everyone knows that AI will eat everything. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential growth, and most cannot comprehend how fast things are about to change.

Not trying to make this political - but I don't see any easier method of alleviating the hemorrhaging of the middle class than governments implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Humans just cannot compete with a superintelligent autonomous AI that has parsed every book and document on the internet. We can continue to be in denial of this while our citizens suffer and overdose suicide to cope with the depression and bleak opportunities, or we can embrace AI and leverage it to free people to spend their time at their own leisure, moving society collectively up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. But given how blind and reactionary most people are to this kind of stuff, I don't predict anything changes until we reach a serious boiling point, so unfortunately billions will needlessly suffer in the meantime until the masses wake up to the cosmic societal shifts that are taking place as we speak.

<https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1695350480388714605>

Implications of Approaching the Singularity

Just arrived to Osaka, Japan for a few days and looking for some nice cafes to work from. Any suggestions?

I'm writing this from a nice cafe I found here, but unfortunately they charge for the wifi (1,100 yen for 2 hours, 2,500 for day pass. I wish they told me this before I bought my drink)!

In Tokyo and Fukuoka I was able to find nice ones to work from, but in my brief walk here I didn't see much. But perhaps I'm not in the right area (this area feels super hipster [😂](https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/)).

On a broader note, I wonder if there's a way to foster the knowledge share of nice cafes to work from. I recognize that it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma problem. Had a vision for a site to solve this and built a basic prototype [nomadz.app](http://nomadz.app), but stopped working on it due to time constraints, but it's definitely something I want to build out in the future. There's just so much opportunity now with AI and everything it's hard to justify working on something like this, especially since I'm not financially independent and thus ultimately to a degree still a slave to money.

Just Landed in Osaka, Japan - Looking for Nice Work Cafes

I've been building a Notion clone + publishing tool. Here I'll post dev updates (as well as on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jeremybernier)).

Site: <http://mindgarden.app>

**2023-08-08** Just added Stripe payments and created landing page for <http://mindgarden.app>, my Notion clone (note-taking app) + publishing tool

Next I will prob make a video for the landing page showing what this is + how to use it b/c I don't think it's very clear. Then will try to get it in front of people to get feedback to validate the idea and/or refine the product/marketing.

I know the landing page is ugly because it's not a separate page, but a file directly in the app. I thought it'd be cool to immediately load the app and allow people to instantly start using the product (also I personally hate landing pages, but maybe I need to get over that). This makes it tough to style this page, but perhaps can figure something out later.

I'm building out some sites using <http://mindgarden.app>. Currently <http://codefire.dev> (built a couple days ago) and <http://jbernier.com> use the MindGarden API, and planning to build out those sites + more to show what it's capable of.

Will this succeed? Who knows. In any case I use the product myself, so at least there's one happy customer. We'll see if I can turn this into something useful for others as well.

Let me know what you think / open to feedback. I'm new to the whole entrepreneurship thing - this is actually my first time adding payments to anything I've made (wish I'd done this sooner).

<http://mindgarden.app>

<https://twitter.com/jeremybernier/status/1688814645598208000>

Build In Public - MindGarden

I made a tax calculator mainly for IT contractors in Poland.

IT professionals earn from 4k - 7k EUR/month in Poland, where the cost of living is quite low compared to other Western EU countries.

See how much of tax you would pay as an IT contractor in EU, Poland

HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37250821>

Build a chatbot with custom data sources, powered by LlamaIndex

United Airlines loses customers' bag due to check-in agent tagging the the bag with wrong passenger's details, customer forced to back to the airport to retrieve it because their customer service refused to believe that it was still there.

The airline said her bag was lost, but her tracker said otherwise. So she flew to get it    

Built this today: <https://codefire.dev> (work in progress)

Plan is for it to be a no-BS site for useful code snippets, boilerplates, and dev resources. No unnecessarily long-winded tutorials and SEO whoring, just straight to the point.

Backend API will be powered by my other app <http://mindgarden.app>, so it's simultaneously an excuse for me to battle test my own product + serve as a demo.

Currently just my content, but down the line will be publicly editable (eg. like Wikipedia) 

Tech stack: Next.js, Tailwind, MindGarden (API), Cloudflare Pages

Will post updates here