It is important to note that this is not an isolated incident, and this story has only reached the news because the victims are European dignitaries. Those pogroms (there's no other word to describe those incidents) are happening on a daily basis, and the scale (multiple attacks per day) makes it apparent that this not just random violence, but a coordinated campaign to ethnically cleanse the rural Palestinian population of the West bank.

This is not only about the rising cost of living. The protests are lead by high school and university students demanding better school infrastructure, more teachers and shorter days (French high-schoolers regularly spend 10 hours per day at school, 4.5 days per week).

If they want better school infrastructure, why are they burning schools down?

To make room for the new schools, obviously. Tja.

Because other normal forms of protests have been ignored for years.

Not true, this is the appearance they give themselves but it is mostly the extreme left side, kind of Communists like, that are trying to create tensions in wake of next year elections in France.

Just so you have a clear image of what is going on, you have pseudo student demonstrating asking for better infrastructure that are burning down their schools. Even brand new support modern schools...

Not true. There aren't 800.000 "kind of Communists like" in France. That is such an obvious lie.

Also: whole schools went to the demonstrations. Pupils and teachers (because they don't like to work in marode buildings either). And we cannot claim that all the pupils and all of the teachers of a school are communist.

But yes, the communist party in France has about 43000 members. But we nation has 66.7 million people. So we shouldn't give this few radicals more influence than they deserve. If anything, the populist right is way more influential and numerous.

Somehow in France the demonstrations have a way higher likelihood to get violent than e.g. in Germany. Just think of the yellow vest demonstrations. Also, the french police is known to be violent, too. Perhaps they don't follow the de-escalation strategies the german police often (not always!) follow? In France, demonstrators lost a hand, teeth, an eye due to police force. That's certainly not as bad as the 9220 people killed by US police in 2024. But for Europe, it's a quite stark expression of government violence.

We must also understand that the majority of journalists are like the Demonstrators from the Harry Potter universe. They life of emotions. Often they artificially create them. I mean, why show a picture of 20000 people just holding up posters --- in a language you won't often be able to read --- if I can show a picture of 4 people torching down a car?

Can you send ~100k of your “kind of Communist” protestors to Belgium? We are probably not angry enough at what the neoliberal, nonsense of a government is doing to social democracy.

> communists

The 20th century called, they want their hammer and sickle back.

I'd say you're projecting. Reading the parent comment I understood it to simply mean "reactionaries", nothing more.

I find the accelerationist mindset utterly ridiculous. All that busywork and for what exactly? What effect has all this overproduction of LOC had on the physical world and on our existence (beyond the externality of erecting huge data centers in every corner of the globe and the consequent ecological impact)? Is software getting better (in terms of quality, security, efficiency)? Are we getting better government services? Are we getting better food? A better environment (silly question)? Are we working less, as tech titans keep promising us? Are we getting anything better? Not to mention all the negative aspects of this technology and the financial apparatus driving it.

I agree with the sentiment, and the answer to all these questions is usually ‘just wait 6 more months’. Like what is tangibly, actually better in the real world right now with AI? Whenever I ask this question people pipe up with a side project or a new SaaS, but that stuff is just not very important compared to the things you called out. Food, services, QOL.

It seems to me like the AI labs are just pushing the envelope with blind faith that”something” will happen if they just get enough development speed. Nobody seems to have a coherent idea of what that something is.

> Like what is tangibly, actually better in the real world right now with AI?

I took a photo of a tree with chatgpt recently and asked it what species it was. That was kinda neat I guess. Someone forked a ps4 emulator with a bunch of Bloodborne specific improvements so its more playable on my setup. It's kind of okay for medical stuff.

Seems to me the goal is to create a convoluted spaghetti mess in every code base so that humans no longer have a chance to understand how it works and thereby force all software development to go through LLM obfuscator-deobfuscator cycles.

It took a long time for the internet to result in things that improved life for in tangible ways.

But the old internet never had so much negative impact on the world with so little upside.

Facebook and its ilk sort were more or less the unravelling of western liberalism. The descent happened before generative ai.

That does not make the AI-part any better.

> All that busy work and for what exactly?

All that busy work was for going from zero revenue to $50B in revenue in about 3 years, and releasing AI systems that are getting better and better at a ridiculous rate. AI isn't solving all the world's problems but you can't deny that they are extremely successful with this method of operating.

I think their success is pretty debatable. This is a company that lost 8 billion dollars last year, is in an extremely expensive race with other companies, and is basically the premium version of something that's now becoming a commodity. They might be doing some impressive work but as a company their outlook seems questionable.

Since when have we expected companies scaling that fast to make a profit? The fact that they've had profitable quarters already is pretty insane.

There are definitely risks to their business long term from commoditization and a lack of a moat, but I don't think that detracts from my original point that they are building something highly desirable with this new version control system today. They are probably the fastest growing company of all time in terms of revenue and valuation? They're not just slopping out more and more LOC for no reason, which was the original point being discussed in this thread.

It's a fair question to ask. If literally all the economic growth (and then some?) is going to AI companies, then nothing else is improving, in the aggregate.

The broader question is definitely relevant, I was thinking more in context of the original post justifying their need to re-invent source control.

I definitely think that's an interesting question though. I know that in the physical product development world I'm seeing really odd asymmetric speed ups. Creating simulations is essentially automated at this point, stuff that would take days to code by hand can be done in an hour. Firmware debugging feels 3x faster than before. But the big slow stuff like manufacturing, assembly, and testing are completely unchanged. All of that little stuff probably adds up to maybe a 5% faster product development cycle than before if you're really leaning into AI. It's the type of thing that will compound over time especially if it's happening all over the economy, but won't blow your socks off.

I think part of the concern is around “could it be better”? Like if an elite athlete eats junk food all the time. Sure it’s working, but is it because of the candy? Anthropic is often criticized for their poor UI/UX. The models are undeniably powerful but the packaging is typically poor. This is not to drift into the conversation of profitability either, to be clear.

But the revenue is just because they’re selling at a huge loss and are being allowed to do so because lots of stupid investors are betting that one day they won’t be selling at a loss. That’s not economic growth. Anyone can have revenue selling diamonds for a penny

To play the devils advocate here (just for software), I would say principally this:

"A world where starting is incredibly easy and finishing is more complicated than ever"

LLM's do allow you to oneshot huge starting bits of work in record short time. The frontier of the amount of work they can oneshot is clearly getting larger and larger. But I am still not convinced that they allow you to maintain existing work at a cost that is below a human being.

But, if the frontier of what you can oneshot continues to grow unbounded, then it really will not matter. We will eventually oneshot all software and maintenance will be a thing of the past.

... But that is a very big bet.

The funny part is, no one is making any money off this either. Traditionally we’d say that profitability is not necessarily an indicator of real value for humanity, but with LLMs we don’t even have profitability! The only people making more money here are manufacturers like Nvidia and data centre companies

> Yeah I wish this whole energy was towards optimization and improving hardware.

Have you considered they are doing that, and also all the other things, too? That's where all these tokens go.

But I guess it's easier to believe they're all cultists who like to watch GPUs spin for no reason.

> “It just kind of hit me,” Bell said. “We’re the blue-collar guys cooking this food, hustling to make this work for these young kids making like six figures, and this entity that has a trillion dollars, can’t pay us?”

Welcome to tech bro utopia, where humanity in its entirety must grovel and worship and lick the boots of those who in their magnanimity allow us merit-less wretches to work for them for pennies, or, as in this case, for free. Oh what a wonderful future these guys have in store for us!

Misses 2024 in the title

> they aren't substantially more difficult than other Jazz changes

IMO it's not only the tempo. It's also the fact those changes kind of subvert any feeling of tonality, so you can't really rely on tonal formulas (i.e. cadences) when improvising, so you need to come up with other ways to structure your improv, while constantly shifting between modes/scales/patterns. Becoming fluent in this kind of context is a huge challenge, even in slow tempos.

The changes are actually easy and melodic because they are easily related to other changes that are very close, and you can train yourself to hear into that.

For instance consider that pitch class inversion of a major scale around its root results in precisely a major third key change. E.g. if we invert C major, we get C Phrygian, and C Phrygian is a mode of A♭ major: Coltrane change!

Try improvising around the two chord loop CM7, C♯M7 (or D♭M7), CM7, C#M7 by shifting between C major and its inversion C Phrygian; it is very melodic and intuitive.

You can feel/invoke similar mood changes when following the Coltrane changes.

C#M7/D♭M7 contains a Fm triad, so it evokes hint of the common parallel minor device. C Phrygian and C Aeolian/minor are in fact only one note off, Phrygian is Aeolian with the second degree flattened.

A Coltrane key change can be fibbed by the improviser by a parallel major/minor shift which is so ingrained into the pop music repertoire that it's easy to find familiar idioms that the listener will latch onto. You omit one note that doesn't work and are good to go.

Here is a cool thing about the Coltrane keys (related to the above semitone chord change). In each key you can pick a major triad such that their roots form a semitone progression. WE already identified C,C♯/D♭ from C and A♭. Then the third key, E, gives us the B triad.

The B triad in E major is at the root of the Mixolydian mode. The C triad in C is of course at the root of Ionian. The D♭ triad is at the root of Lydian. I.e. we have the I chord from one key, IV chord from another, and V chord from the third, and they end up chromatic. This can be exploited in improvisation. As the accompanist goes through changes you can just move by a semitone and then change one note in the scale at the same time. E.g. if we go from Mixolydian to Ionian, we sharpen the 7th. At the same time we go up a semitone, since the root is moving from B to C. Then for the next change, we do it again; root moves to D♭, scale shape changes one note to make Lydian. You can emphasize the chromaticism so the half note shift intent is clearly conveyed, while the changing note in the scale takes the sharp corners off it and makes it more interesting. The small chromatic movement helps the listener make sense of the weird chords that are going on (because the Coltrane chord progressions have a II-V-I in each of the three keys and whatnot).

Speaking of the II-V-I progressions in those keys: here is one more thing. It's possible to see a tritone movement there that evokes the tritone substitute.

Here is why. Consider the II-V-I in the key of C, where I is C. Now consider II-V-I in the key of E. What is the II note? It is G♭. That is exactly a tritone away from C.

So it's like we have a circle of fourths with tritones thrown in: D-G-C-G♭-E♭-A♭-... 4, 4, ♯4, 4, 4, ♯4, .. (if we do the key changes in that direction).

I use this as a trick to find the chords on the guitar fretboard.

The tritone has musical implications though, too. Suppose we alter the CM7 landing note to C7 and also change the G♭m7 II chord of E to G♭7. Then we have a note-sharing tritone root movement between two dominant chords.

I've been saying it for quite a while now: any sufficiently advanced AI technology is indistinguishable from bullshit.