Iterative

Software development is killer app for generative AI. Maybe it’s the only one?. Nope, the other killer app is charging a premium to not train on customers data.

It seems, though, that, using the robots well is causing problems for the model providers: using them effectively is costing too much.

Last week Microsoft stopped accepting signups for personal plans, added usage limits, and basically telegraphed that their “premium request” model was on its way out. Not surprising when a good developer can dump a sophisticated prompt into the Copilot CLI, burn hundreds of thousands of tokens, and only use a handful of premium requests.

Anthropic also seemed to be thinking about changing their model, A/B testing a pricing page that excluded their most popular plan.

Meanwhile people are experimenting with ways to reduce token usage. Prompting like a caveman shows promise. Learning Chinese doesn’t seem to be worth it. The most 5D chess suggestion: hire junior developers to do the menial tasks. Honestly, it’s enough to get on board with Milton’s plan at this point.

Let’s talk about something that’s actually cool: two people broke the two hour mark for the marathon in London today. Two people! Sabastian Sawe finished in 1:59:30 ahead of Yomif Kejelcha who finished in 1:59:41. Two hours has only been broken in carefully created conditions so to see it smashed by two people in the same race is unexpected to say the least.

If you want to read more about the two-hour marathon mark and the science that goes into pushing human athletic endeavours, Alex Hutchinson’s Endure is a great source.

The Tools That Built Doom is a lovely short doco about the technologies and techniques id Software employed to make everybody’s favourite 3D-ish shooter. DOS-based compilers, NEXT workstations, clay models - a lot of stuff went into the making of DOOM in a very short time.

Last week Brendan Leonard published a lovely essay titled Is It Just Music? about how foundational the music we listened to as teenagers was, about listening outside of the mainstream, about how we collect, discover, and listen to music has changed, and about dropping a very large amount of cash for the raddest boombox on the planet. I loved the essay and it got me browsing TradeMe, where I found someone is selling a slightly dinged raddest boombox ever for a very large amount of cash less than 10km from me! The Promax Super Jumbo may well be the Seneca of tape decks but I kindof really want one.

Here’s a YouTube clip of the Super Jumbo in action

Here’s the boombox battle from Do The Right Thing that made the system famous.

Of course there’s a wiki devoted to boomboxes. Super Jumbo entry.

I rewatched Bret Victor’s 2013 talk The Future of Programming (from 1973).

Victor frames the talk as a presentation in 1973 discussing all the different approaches to computing that were being explored at the time and the kinds of tools and languages that came out of them, almost all abandoned or left as curiosities: concepts like spatial representations, constraint-based systems, concurrent programming models, and direct manipulation and software like Smalltalk, Sketchpad and Planner.

It’s interesting to consider all the paths that computing didn’t go down - possibly for good reasons. But what did we lose along the path? What are we re-discovering now?

This retrospective on the making of the original Fallout is worth watching even just for the part about the hoop jumping required to get Windows 95 certification