PowerPoint is the poster child for the class of applications that AI totally obsoletes:
* A large application whose outputs are independent of the all (people still print slides; when presenting nobody knows or cares what app was used)
* Complicated and requires users to learn lots of skills unrelated to the work they’re doing (compare to Excel, where the model and calculations require and reflect domain knowledge about the data)
* Practically zero value add in document / info management (compare to word where large documents benefit from structure and organization)
We’re pretty close to presentations just being image files without layers and objects and smartart and all that.
AI will come for all productivity tools, but PowerPoint will be the canary that gets snuffed first, and soon.
Models are trained on human outputs. It’s not super surprising to me that inputs following encouraging patterns product better results outputs; much of the training material reflects that.
I think we need a way to verify the specs. A combo of formal logic and adversarial thinking (probably from LLMs) that will produce an exhaustive list of everything the program will do, and everything it won’t do, and everything that is underspecified.
Still not quite sure what it looks like, but if you stipulate that program generation will be provable, it pushes the correctness challenge up to the spec (and once we solve that, it’ll be pushed up to the requirements…)
I agree. It’s kind of like secure boot, in reverse: the high level stuff has to be complete and correct enough that the next level down has a chance to be complete and correct.
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a book about the American shift from “a hard day’s work for fair pay” to what I’m calling the lottery economy.
Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work. Hence, my theory goes, the rise of actual lotteries along with influencers, injury lawyers, and schemes like New Orleans.
Something is seriously wrong when family members hope an elderly relative will die on the hospital so they can get a payout, or when people are crashing into trucks or promoting BS snake oil on instagram.
It’s an indictment of the people involved for sure, but our social and economic systems have created the perverse incentives that these people are betting on. And it seems to be accelerating.
I do not buy this. There is plenty of money in “traditional” work, and immigrants from all over the world find it and do it. If uneducated people, who may speak English as a second language at best, can move around the US and find their footing, then surely almost all who grew up here with access to the language and public schools can.
And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming.
Edit: and of course, there were literal lawyers ordering up these collisions and litigating the fraud. This is just organized crime dangling a lottery payout to poorer people.
America might have been booming, but wages were dropping in real terms throughout that period.
And the heroes are the people who buck the system and made a fortune quickly. Not the people who toil away consistently at a job and incrementally build a modest living over decades. So of course everyone wants to be a hero.
Add in Crypto, and Day Trading, and more recently the prediction markets. All of whom specifically target "normal" folks with promises of huge riches won from a few hours work and a bit of luck. Of course, very, very, very few people actually make any money at all from any of this, but survivor bias occludes that and all they see is the easy money.
The lottery works exactly the same way. The odds of me, specifically, winning the lottery is effectively nil. But every week there's some lucky person who wins. If you have any kind of education then this becomes an obvious no-win proposition, and buying a ticket is just throwing away money. But even with such an education, and understanding of probability, I've been desperate enough to buy a ticket in the past.
In Australia we've seen the rise (and rise) of gambling as an industry. For exactly the same reasons. Making a quick fortune is the goal. Working a normal job is for suckers and losers. And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit. Might as well gamble those savings in the hope of getting a win big enough to actually afford the deposit.
The system is broken. We need to fix it or tear it down.
Yes, which proves the point, no? In Q1 of 1979 the real median wages were 335. In Q3 of 2014 they were 336. Which means that from 1979 to 2014 workers did not see any increase in their salary. In that same period, GDP per capita (and thus the economic output of the country and thus the economic output of its workers) almost doubled. The country became richer, workers became more efficient, but they did not get any part of the gains.
The point was > but wages were dropping in real terms throughout that period
> And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming
There are economic cycles but the trend is clearly up. Funny enough, the 80's and the 90's which I think many people recall as great times were maybe more flat overall and the last 15 years feel worse. To be honest we also need to look at unemployment and perhaps other metrics. But the story that real wages were dropping is not supported by the data.
>And the heroes are the people who buck the system and made a fortune quickly. Not the people who toil away consistently at a job and incrementally build a modest living over decades. So of course everyone wants to be a hero.
I don't see what this has to do with anything. For all of human history, it has been easier to steal than to earn.
>And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit.
Maybe in Australia, but it was attainable in the US with home ownership in the 60%+ range.
Part of what you’re alluding to, I think, is the important influence of culture. It is difficult to talk about without being accused of racism. I think it’s fair to say that not all cultures are equally effective as far as upward mobility. How to change culture would be a helpful thing to understand.
Exactly how many investors do you think are investing in New Orleans East? I drive around and I see signs on telephone poles for people promoting renting cars so you can rent it to other people for income like Uber or something.
I follow local politics in my own city of similar means.
The juice isn't worth the squeeze for bigco corporate developers (though they're not above doing something if perfect circumstances pop up) and the long tail of mom and pop investors, slumlord and "maybe you can rent my cousin's vacant storefront for your shop" type investment activity that would normally make those investments and over time uplift a community have been kicked out of the game by the regulation that municipalities have been forced by the states (who themselves are often forced by the feds) to adopt as a pre-requisite to qualifying for federal grant funding for the projects they need that funding to afford because without it they can't do so in a manner compliant with applicable law.
In the 1970s the East was a lot of couples working in the booming oil industry so a lot of the housing stock dates from then. When the oil bust happened they decamped to the Northshore or Houston.
"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
It's basically all about people in systems, and as I recall one of the points made is the broken social contract, which was once "you don't have to be the smartest, but if you show up and work hard, there's a place for you to earn a living" -- now it feels like trying to outswim a rising tide of required education and expertise and hollowed-out career paths
Thats bs...it says right in the article that the payout for a trailer truck accident can be a million usd. Pretty sure that is a major attraction to the 25% of NO that lives in poverty.
So, how about the dozens of lawyers and doctors in the story? You know, the ones who made 90% of the money and never got charged? The ones who set the whole thing up because they knew they could convince desperate & uneducated people? The ones who orchestrated a murder (the thing that finally got two of them caught)?
What're their "traits?" Did you even read the article?
We must be talking at odds here. I'm neither claiming that being ethical is a sufficient condition to getting rich, nor that the ethics of the poor people described in the article played a significant part in their being and remaining poor. The article seems replete with unethical behavior at every level of wealth.
> the American shift from “a hard day’s work for fair pay” to what I’m calling the lottery economy
My point is that people with high time preference and low impulse control, who naturally will tend to be poorer than people without those traits, will also naturally be more drawn to the "lottery economy", whether or not bad actors exist who will take advantage of that. Just look at who buys literal lottery tickets!
The people who are behind this scam chose the east side of N.O. because poor people are desperate, not cause they have bad judgement. They could have found other people but why bother?
None of these cases destroyed any of the defendants' monopoly status, so while there have been some "actions", there certainly haven't been any effective ones.
can you explain how someone being incorrect about something weakens their position? i assume the position in question is that their should be more trust busting. "there have been these antitrust actions" isn't actually a counter argument to "there should be more antitrust actions", so it doesn't weaken the position, unless i'm not understanding what you mean by that.
you know what my favorite fallacy is? the fallacy fallacy, the mistaken assumption that by showing an argument is invalid you've shown its conclusion is false.
If someone says 'the level of X is 0, and the appropriate level should be higher than it currently is', and if it turns out that the current level of X is higher than the claimed 0, that does indeed raise doubts about their position.
The argument was they feel they are invincible in their [monopolist] position, and that argument is only made stronger by the cases you cited as none of the outcomes really moved the needle in that aspect.
I’m generally with you, but I am not prepared to say companies should be forced to host and distribute content they believe reflects badly on them.
That and I don’t see how Google and Apple can both be monopolies in mobile. Is this the “Ford has a monopoly on Mustangs” argument? Never found that persuasive.
Now, reframe as duopoly, and maybe layer in that a platform owner who curates their App Store must allow alternative app stores on equal footing, and I’d be with you.
I don't think companies should be forced to do that in general, but there are some circumstances where I think they should.
A local printing company should not be forced to print things they don't want. But an ISP should be required to transport everything, with exceptions for legal requirements and legitimate network health measures, or get out of the ISP business.
App stores feel more like the latter to me. Especially Apple's where there's no way around it for the average user.
Agreed on the free speech versus common carrier aspects.
But I lean the other way with app stores. The companies hire reviewers, the listings appear in the App Store trade dress, it feels more like a museum or magazine than an ISP. But I get how reasonable people can disagree.
Maybe we need some formal choices: is this a curated App Store that reflects editorial judgment (in which case it must be possible to ship alternatives on equal footing), or is it a common carrier (in which case you can be the only game in town).
The ambiguity doesn’t help, and of course megacorps love shifting the frames depending on context.
I think your proposed choice would be a good way to go. If you really want to screen out malware or whatever by maintaining exclusivity over the distribution channel, then you need to otherwise provide an equal footing for all apps. If you really want to exercise editorial control and put your name front and center and reject apps that don't fit your brand, then you need to let other distributors exist.
> I’m generally with you, but I am not prepared to say companies should be forced to host and distribute content they believe reflects badly on them.
If Apple and Google are hell-bent on killing sideloading, and they control 99% of the mobile market, I think they have an obligation to host things they don't like, as long as it is legal.
I feel like this is captures the point very well. Google removing this software, means that for 99% of the users on the platform, the choice to play this gets taken away from user.
Well they are big enough to be called infrastructure now. Similar to payment providers. Them removing things essentially removes them from existence for 99 percent.
My hypothesis is that people who have continuous sessions that keep the cache valid see the behavior you’re describing: at 95% cache hits (or thereabouts), the max plan goes a long way.
But people who go > 5 minutes between prompts and see no cache, usage is eaten up quickly. Especially passing in hundreds of thousands of tokens of conversation history.
I know my quote goes a lot further when I sit down and keep sessions active, and much less far when I’m distracted and let it sit for 10+ minutes between queries.
It’s a guess. But n=1 and possible confirmation bias noted, it’s what I’m seeing.
Why is it our job to micromanage all this when it used to work fine without? Something's clearly changed for the worse. Why are people insisting on pushing the responsibility on paying users?
To be clear they weren’t banned from Claude usage, they were required to use the API and API rates rather than Claude Max tokens.
Claude code uses a bunch if best practices to maximize cache hit rate. Third party harnesses are hit or miss, so often use a lot more tokens for the same task.
I'm watching a conference talk right now from 2 weeks ago: "I Hated Every Coding Agent So I Built My Own - Mario Zechner (Pi)", and in the middle he directly references this.
He demonstrates in the code that OpenCode aggressively trims context, by compacting on every turn, and pruning all tool calls from the context that occurred more than 40,000 tokens ago. Seems like it could be a good strategy to squeeze more out of the context window - but by editing the oldest context, it breaks the prompt cache for the entire conversation. There is effectively no caching happening at all.
They are working with the same tools and knowledge like Anthropic does as Caching practices are documented. And they have as much incentive as Anthropic does to not waste compute. Can we stop acting like people who build harnesses be it Opencode oder Mario Zechners Pi are dumbfucks who don't understand caching?
Yep, that's the reason for the new Extra Credit feature in Claude Code. Some people were wiring up "Claude -p" with OpenClaw, so now Anthropic detects if the system prompt contains the phrase OpenClaw, and bills from Extra Credit if that happens:
* A large application whose outputs are independent of the all (people still print slides; when presenting nobody knows or cares what app was used) * Complicated and requires users to learn lots of skills unrelated to the work they’re doing (compare to Excel, where the model and calculations require and reflect domain knowledge about the data) * Practically zero value add in document / info management (compare to word where large documents benefit from structure and organization)
We’re pretty close to presentations just being image files without layers and objects and smartart and all that.
AI will come for all productivity tools, but PowerPoint will be the canary that gets snuffed first, and soon.
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