Chud Waterloo
Software might be doomed, the chuds lose big, and some thoughts on a little racoon.
Hello and welcome! I am happy to see you here. There is a lot going on right now, financially speaking. Numbers going up, numbers going down, it is quite a ride. Anyway, I ignore all that and for some reason name-check Moby Dick twice in this newsletter, which must be a sign of something. Like, maybe Christopher Nolan should do it for his next 3-hour movie about boys having big adventures. OK, let's get to it:
No way back (why software might be doomed)
One possibility for the future of software is that we wake up from this mass AI hysteria, conclude that using LLMs to write code produces worse software, and switch back to well-established software engineering practices. Another possibility—and one that I think is increasingly likely with every day the AI bubble fails to deflate—is that the software engineering profession has changed permanently, software engineers lose the capacity to read and maintain their own code, and software gets worse and worse until people stop using it for important things.
It's easy to blame LLMs, but this would be the culmination of a longer process degrading how organizations build and deploy software, mainly around efficiency.
Efficiency is a core engineering principle of computer science. Especially back when things like RAM and storage were measured in kilobytes and clock speeds in megahertz and network speeds in Kbps, it was hugely important to process, move, and store data as efficiently as possible.
So over the years, very smart people had to come up with very clever ways of compressing, sorting, searching, processing, and moving data efficiently. Time is money, running a CPU takes electricity, a computer tied up doing one thing is not available to do another thing. Also, users hate looking at little spinning wheels or hour glasses while they wait for the machine to do something.
Fortunately, exponential hardware improvements in computing speed and data storage (loosely, Moore's law) made compute cheaper and cheaper every year, giving software engineers vastly more resources to work with. Unfortunately, this started a vicious cycle whereby software engineers could slack off and build progressively less efficient systems because there would always be more compute to throw at a problem.
Very generally speaking, this is why you get a faster computer every few years that does basically the same thing. Like a poisonous gas, software expands to fill its container. Efficiency degrades.
Cloud computing turbocharged this dynamic. Now software engineers didn't need to make their shit code fit the resources of a single machine, they could run it on giant servers with essentially infinite memory, storage, and processing power that were someone else's problem.
The lack of constraints led to bad practices. Who cares if a website downloads 10 megabytes of code (equivalent to 8 copies of Moby Dick) over a mobile network so someone can check a restaurant's menu? Ship it. Compute, storage, and bandwidth kept getting cheaper thanks to hardware advances, so efficient code took a back seat to speed of delivery.
Which brings us to the present. AI companies introduced LLMs at a moment when efficiency, as a guiding principle of software engineering, was on life support. It is now dead.
LLMs are possibly the least efficient software solution ever devised. Essentially, software engineers finally wrote software so grossly bloated that it requires more hardware than exists on the planet. This is why the prices of all consumer electronics have gone crazy in the last year and will continue to surge in the years to come. There is literally not enough silicon wafer in the world to solve computing problems using LLMs.
And yet every software company is rushing to stuff the technology into their software. Not only that, they are stuffing it into the processes they use to build the software. Efficiency degradation loops back in on itself, recursively, as LLMs churn through billions of dollars worth of tokens to generate code that is itself more bloated, unreadable, and unmaintainable than anything even the sloppiest developer could have produced in the past.
The industry could change course and just stop using it, and maybe it will if the financial cost is too high, too soon. The problem is that once an inefficient tool is added to the software developer toolkit in the name of speed, it often becomes a permanent part of the stack, even when everyone agrees it took things in a bad direction in terms of efficiency.
So a very possible outcome is that everyone just keeps chasing this dragon. Software gets increasingly inefficient, but this time, hardware can't keep up. Smart phones, laptops, TVs, gaming consoles, cars, anything with silicon in it doubles and triples in price. The companies that make the software de-skill themselves in the process, losing the capacity to update and maintain their products without using insanely inefficient LLMs.
What does this look like for us, the users? Well, the apps we depend on for our digital lives just get worse. Buttons don't work, menus don't drop down, things hang, things crash, digital transactions don't happen, then happen twice, whole cloud computing networks become unavailable for hours at a time.
Maybe this doesn't happen. Maybe the industry pulls itself back from the brink. Or maybe we'll all just have to go outside.
MOVIE NIGHT: "The Odyssey"
I thought it was weird when the chuds started going after "The Odyssey." Other than maybe the Bible, no work of western literature is more potentially conservative-coded than a classic epic set in ancient Greece, much less a version directed by Christopher Nolan, one of the great "Dudes Rock" movie directors of our time.
Christopher Nolan is the same conservative guy who made the War on Terror Batman movies, with their understanding of terrorists as genius nihilists and its apologia for enhanced interrogation, mass surveillance, and tacticool vigilante violence. He makes movies about tough men fighting each other, either to rescue or to avenge the women.
On paper, "The Odyssey" should have been a slam dunk with the marble statue avatar guys on X. And yet they hated the trailer for all kinds of reasons. Some of their complaints were predictable. They were, of course, furious at the idea of a black woman existing, or a trans man swinging a sword. But they also whined about the armor, the colors, the accents, Matt Damon, age gaps, etc. Reddit's film communities became battle grounds of concern-trolling by guys worried Nolan's Aegean Sea didn't look enough like "Mama Mia!". Suddenly, everyone was an amateur classicist with Opinions.
I'm not saying it makes my opinion more valid than anyone else's, but for the record, I've read "The Odyssey" multiple times (in translation). I studied literature at a conservative college where people worshiped it, along with the rest of "Western Literature." Outside of some excerpts during a 101 class, I mostly read "The Odyssey" on my own because I loved it. As a boy from a working-class, conservative family, I grew up on this kind of thing. These were the books I read: Exciting tales of masculine violence, adventure, misfortune, loss, and—eventually—triumph.
So again, I found it genuinely mystifying that the chuds were mad about "The Odyssey." Is this not exactly what you want, if you're a chud? A quintessentially "western" tale as old as time, retold for a new audience? Your favorite book made into a movie by a world-renowned auteur, and you're not even going to give it a chance?
One explanation is that today's "conservatives" are just fascists, and fascists hate artistic expression. I still think this is basically true, and it was my take going into a screening of "The Odyssey" on opening night. I didn't know if I was going to like it, but I enjoy ambitious artistic expression even if it doesn't quite work, so sure, let's see what Mr. Nolan has cooked up. Fascists, on the other hand, wish to punish any artistic expression that surprises, inspires, or otherwise extends itself beyond the fascist prescriptions of what art "should" be.
Fuck those guys. I'm gonna watch this movie.
But as I watched, something else dawned on me. It's not that Christopher Nolan has gone "woke" and gotten less conservative; it's that certain conservative values have been abandoned by the people calling themselves conservatives. Things like order, honor, duty, family, loyalty, respect. Of course the chuds hate "The Odyssey"—they're the suitors. They are the ones tearing down civilized values, breaking up families, and eating food from another man's table.
They are the cowards murdering their enemies from a distance. They are the ones who eat a meal and then abduct the people who made it for them. They are the ones killing defenseless men on boats. They are the ones looting public goods, breaking the law, and violating the agreements on which our joint prosperity depend. Far from fighting for 20 years to return to their wives and families, the chuds are pornographers and rapists. They wouldn't cast out the suitors, they'd sit in the corner and watch.
I'm glad Nolan's "The Odyssey" is a huge hit. It means the chuds are losing. And it's a reminder that people still like the big, ambitious stories with values, even if we are not doing a great job of upholding those values right now.
Jimothy on my mind
Maybe you've heard of Jimothy. It seems like everyone has, and by "everyone," I mean a good portion of the hairless ape population in the North American continent who communicate via electromagnetic waves.
Someone in Seattle recorded a video of a local raccoon with short spine syndrome and now we all know about that one, specific raccoon. I'm writing about it now. You're reading about it. Here's a picture of Jimothy:
The funny thing to me is that Jimothy has no idea that he's famous. He's just out there doing his thing, picking through trash, chasing his dreams, while millions of hairless apes watch him, talk about him, and make art of him.
We do this pretty regularly, we humans, where we suddenly all start talking about a particular animal, millions of us all thinking about it at the same time. Not a species or an ecosystem, but a single animal, which has no idea it has become human-famous, or what "human-famous" even means.
A street cat ends up in the right place at the right time and gets a government job. The whole human world goes crazy for a tiny baby hippo. In 1979, an ambitious rabbit made national news when it tried to attack President Jimmy Carter. In 2020, a single octopus living off the coast of South Africa won our hearts after a documentary filmmaker befriended her.
It's easier for an animal to become human-famous now, in the age of algorithmic virality, but the phenomenon predates the internet, and electronic communication in general. For example, in the early 1800s, an albino sperm whale got really good at wrecking whaling ships. They called him Mocha Dick.
I think we assume this kind of fame only goes in one direction. We are the observers, other animals are the observed. But do we know that? How many of us are crow-famous, for example? They can recognize faces, and tell others about it. So can bees. Do they tell their sisters about the Giant Entity that gave them water? Do whales gossip, in low frequencies over thousands of miles, about the guy who fell out of his boat that one time? Do the mycelium telegraph between the trees about the forest ranger with the particular boots? Which of us have gone dolphin-viral? How many of us are redwood-famous?
Unfortunately, the human-famous often come to a sad end. People throw things at Moo Deng now to try to get her to do something cute. Mocha Dick was eventually turned into 100 barrels of oil. So I worry about Jimothy. I imagine all the "Dumbo"-type things people could do to him to monetize his fame. I hope the kind people of Seattle are looking out for him.
As for us, I don't know how dangerous it is to become famous in the animal kingdom. I suppose it depends on the animal. I hope I would be famous for something nice. All I know for sure is that the orcas are sinking sailboats again in the Atlantic, so if you think you might be orca-famous, maybe stay out of a boat for awhile. They are looking for you.
Links
- The executive class is experiencing a kind of mass AI psychosis. This is one of the best blog posts I've read on the subject. Written by an insider.
- New York became the first state to place a blanket moratorium on data center construction.
- Google has dismantled the team responsible for its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold project.
- Amazon is also gutting its AI division.
- Oh, and Meta is reportedly throwing in the towel on making money from AI and will pivot to renting out its GPUs to Anthropic. Hm, something of a trend here.
