The Swyx Mixtape

Listen to the Great Fail: https://overcast.fm/+l2GyND71I/12:00

Listen to Build for Tomorrow: https://www.jasonfeifer.com/episode/the-best-ways-to-use-a-crisis/ (40ish mins in)
Today's twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1599890745200377857

Transcript

So turn to the century, the phonograph, brand

new innovation, the very first record player, consider how completely insanely

revolutionary this was, for all of human history, before the phonograph. If you wanted

to listen to music, there was only one way to do it. And that was to be in front of a

human being who was playing an instrument. There's no other way. How are you going

to listen to music? And then this machine comes along and can do it for you, can play

music. Unbelievable. Consumers didn't believe it at first. Like they literally, they had to

be shown like, no, there is not a person behind the wall playing music. Like they had to

be shown. And then once they believed it, they loved it. They brought it home. You

 know who hated this?

[00:43:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I don't know. Musicians?

[00:43:46] Jason Feifer: Yeah. Musicians hated it.

[00:43:48] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:43:49] Jason Feifer: Hated it because they saw themselves being replaced here.

That, you know, they see this new technology doing the thing that they do and they see

change and they equate change with loss and they say, "We got to stop this," right?

They pull a margarine. And the leader of the resistance was this guy named John Philip

Sousa. John Philip Sousa, you may not know his name, but you know his music because

it's still around today. All the military marches, [Dah-dah-dah-dah] John Philip Sousa.

[00:44:12] Jordan Harbinger: You know why we know who he is? Because we have

recordings of the music.

[00:44:15] Jason Feifer: Bingo! That's exactly right. So John Philip Sousa, he at the

time was the leader of the resistance against recorded music. He wrote this amazing

piece, like Google it because it is hilarious. It's called The Menace of Mechanical Music.

It ran in Appleton's Magazine in 1906 and it contains all of these wonderful arguments

against recorded music. And my favorite goes like this. He says, "When you bring

recorded music into the home, it will be the end of all forms of live performance in the

home because why would anybody perform music in the home when now there's a

machine that can do it for them." So now, because we're going to extrapolate loss,

remember I talked about that earlier, right? Like you see changes loss and you

extrapolate the loss. So what's next? Well, he says, "Because people are no longer

performing music at home, mothers will no longer sing to their children."

[00:45:00] Jordan Harbinger: It's quite the jump.

[00:45:01] Jason Feifer: Yeah. Quite the jump. Why would they do that? When a

machine could do it. Here's another jump, "Because children grow up imitating their

mothers, the children will grow up to imitate the machines, and thus, we'll raise a

generation of machine babies." That was his argument, like a real thing that—

[00:45:16] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:45:16] Jason Feifer: —people took it seriously. I feel like it's fun to like laugh at

John Philip Sousa for this, but also—

[00:45:20] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:45:20] Jason Feifer: —I feel like what he's doing is pretty relatable.

[00:45:23] Jordan Harbinger: It is relatable. It's very human.

[00:45:24] Jason Feifer: It's very human. You have something and it works for you.

And then you see some change come along and you feel like this change is existential.

It is going to outmode you. So he tried to stop it.

[00:45:36] And it's worth asking ourselves in this moment, three simple questions.

 Number one, what is this new thing that's happening? Number two, what new habit or

skill are we learning as a result? And then number three, how can that be put to good

use? Because if you do that, it just helps you reframe any moment of change as let's

focus on the gain. Is there some kind of gain that we can extrapolate? Maybe it's not as

easy to see as the loss, but is it there and what would it look like?

[00:46:06] Because if you ran that scenario with John Philip Sousa, what you would see

is, well, okay, what new thing are people doing? Well, what they're doing is they're now

listening to music on these machines whenever they want. What new habit or skill are

we learning as a result? We're learning that we have control or consumers have a lot

more control over the music that they listen to. And therefore, also have access to a lot

more music because before the only music that they could get was whoever happened

to be able to travel to their town and perform for them. How could that be put to good

use? Well, come on guys. Come on, John Philip Sousa. Like this means that you could

record something yourself. And you could sell it and now people can listen to and enjoy

your music. And you can monetize that in ways that are much more scalable than what

you're doing now. Because you're coming from a world in which the only thing that you

do is perform for people that you can get in front of. And that means that you have a

limited number of people that you can get in front of. But if you can change that

dynamic, then man, oh man, suddenly your economic ability skyrockets.

[00:47:02] As it turns out, John Philip Sousa was protecting a system that limited his

own economic ability. And the reason he was doing that was because he was panicking

because of change. And once he figured it out, he changed his tune. That is not meant

to be a pun, but there it is.

[00:47:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I see what you did there. You are a dad, indeed.

[00:47:17] Jason Feifer: There it is. I'm nailing it. I got all the dad jokes. And he started

to record himself and he started to perform on radio and he changed. And this is

something that we all need to be mindful of. There is gain in change and we need to run

ourselves through these things that can just help us focus on it.

Listen to the InfoQ podcast: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-channel/interview-shawn-swyx-wang
Blogpost: https://dx.tips/the-end-of-localhost

In this episode, Shawn Wang (swyx), head of developer experience at Airbyte, sat down with InfoQ podcast co-host Daniel Bryant and discussed the rise of remote development environments. Topics covered included, whether remote development experiences are good enough to see the death of local(host) development, what a wishlist might look like for the ultimate developer experience, and how cloud native organizations are currently developing software.

Read a transcript of this interview: bit.ly/3R3OEcD

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DX

SWYX

LocalHost

Remote

development

• Make you feel my love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxsd7rhhFYw
• Ain't No Mountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB5ITxz9CK0
• Easy on me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb4f5IPvwXU

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQkeRxeh34I

Transcript

eric schmidt is a business leader and

software engineer that served as

google's chief executive officer from

2001 to 2011.

under his leadership google grew from an

early silicon valley startup to arguably

the most important technology company on

the planet

schmidt is currently co-founder of

schmidt futures and sits on the board of

many public and private institutions

he is still involved with technology

consults with the us department of

defense

also talks about ai in his latest book

the age of ai and our human future

written alongside former u.s secretary

of state henry kissinger and computer

scientist daniel huddenlocker

schmidt was a guest at the milken global

conference and here he anticipates some

of the ai innovations that we will

certainly see in five years

he also predicts what we might see in 20

years

here are the details

recently in the last couple of years

there have been

extraordinary gains so for example a

team at google and at the baker lab

separately

figured out a way to actually understand

if you take dna what proteins are

generated and what their structure is

that's an extraordinary achievement in

my opinion worth a nobel prize

there are drugs being designed now that

could not be possibly

designed by humans

in any way because of their complexity

there's evidence that ai can be used in

biology ai is mapped to biology the way

math is to physics in other words

biology is so complicated that ai will

be used to interpret biology and predict

its outcome

over and over again ai will arrive in

your life

another example is the hottest area in

my industry right now are large language

models uh recently a set of startups

have been funded between 100 and a

billion 100 million and a billion

dollars

they have no current product or revenue

plans um

the the belief of the power of this

technology these large language models

are interesting because you suck all the

information in

like you read all the web which

computers can do but we can't and then

they discover things they appear to

discover a structure of language and an

example of recent google product last

week can actually translate from one

computer language to another and we

didn't give it any examples of one to

translate to the other it discovered a

structure and it can predict it

these are the beginning of general

intelligence

the the current um excitement stems from

a technology called transformers that

was invented three or four years ago and

what transformers do is it can predict

the next word after a set of words so if

you give it a sentence it can predict

what the word will be and it's done

using a complicated mathematical

technique it turns out predicting the

next word is mathematically the same

thing as predicting the next sound the

next video the next image

all of that and so you have a

unification a multi multi-modal

unification of video text and speech so

these systems sound and look like

they're intelligent

a good example is gpt3 which came out

last year

which kicked the current revolution off

you asked it

do you think like a human and it says no

i do not

because i am a large language model and

you are a i think a human who has been

taught to think in this way

now is that

it thinking about you or is it pattern

matching we can't tell and the truth is

and i'm as part of philanthropic work

i'm funding projects to try to

understand this we don't actually

understand why this works we don't

mathematically understand why it works

and we also don't understand its failure

modes

so you wouldn't want to use this as a

replacement for something that's live

critical because we can't say when it

fails when does it just crash

the current large language models for

example have trouble with the notion of

gravity so if you say to them i moved it

i moved the object from here to here and

then i put it up here and i put it down

there and so forth now everyone just

followed what i did the large language

model gets confused because it doesn't

understand gravity so the computer

scientists say we're going to now add

concepts

right

so with concepts and then with planning

maybe you get to the point where it

looks like a human-like intelligence

which has all sorts of issues

if i were 24 today this is exactly what

i'd be working on this is where the

hardest and most challenging computer

science systems problems are with the

greatest payoff

now remember that the system can predict

patterns

and if you can predict a pattern you can

also generate an artifact there's a

duality in these systems where they can

generate things

so part of the issues that we face now

is that these systems can generate

speech i'll give you an example

within five years

the following will be true

you'll be able to take a system

um take one of these language models

which would be infinitely expensive to

make but you didn't pay for it

it shows up in your doorstep and it fine

tunes the technical term is literally

fine-tuning it you fine-tune it to you

who are you what do you care about it

sort of watches you and learns from you

it learns your voice

right all of a sudden it can generate

videos with you in it

now you could think of this as a second

ai right

now the interesting thing is imagine

five years from now i install this thing

and i use it for a few years and

eventually we all die unfortunately well

it lives on

right

as a pretty good impersonation of me

and what happens when i'm dead and it's

still learning is that me

is that an artifact of me or is it just

a stupid artifact of history that you'll

keep in a box and some future will say

oh eric was so stupid back then but it's

entertaining to watch him right because

he didn't keep learning we don't know we

have no way of discussing these things

this stuff is incredibly powerful it

will be the basis of enormous gains in

human health

language translation communication

summary and education

all the things that milken represents

will be affected in an almost always

positive way having said that there's

terrifying consequences as well so the

first question has to do with jobs

does this fundamentally mean there are

more jobs or less jobs i spent my whole

life people saying computers will

replace humans humans won't have

anything to do so far that narrative has

been false notice that there's a huge

surplus of jobs and not people to fill

it certainly in the united states the

second one has to do with national

security something i've worked on for

almost a decade now

and in our in the kissinger book we talk

a lot about this

what happens when the...

Listen to Cautionary Tales: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/cautionary-tales/cautionary-conversation-the-FW0bxClD_ij/

Listen to Ted Talks Daily: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/ted-talks-daily/the-marvels-and-mysteries-JkbNAa9DMYl/ (or video: https://www.ted.com/talks/heidi_hammel_and_nadia_drake_the_marvels_and_mysteries_revealed_by_the_james_webb_space_telescope?language=en)

more with Heidi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMbeCKh-9v4

Listen to Revisionist History and Inside Voice: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/revisionist-history/from-inside-voice-lake-bell-8XVyoz7eT5A/

LIsten on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1puRnV6gwE

Listen to the Chopping Block:

• Nov 9 https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/unchained/the-chopping-block-ftx-the-3ki-p42chnb/
• Nov 16 https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/unchained/the-chopping-block-why-rlhFySZAtMB/