jayw_lead's comments

> The walled gardens are imo getting worse

But isn't Apple (the most egregious example IMO) losing a slew of cases in many jurisdictions (not just EU)? I think the consensus is very much that they've overplayed their hand and the bill is coming due

The market for something like a ModRetro or Analogue 3D surely can't be entirely about everything being an investment?

Same playbook for AWS. When they admitted that Dynamo was inaccessible, they failed to provide context that their internal services are heavily dependent on Dynamo

It's only after the fact they are transparent about the impact

You're right, I should have tied that back to the opening.

The acceleration we've experienced has allowed us to "outrun" our problems. In earlier generations, that meant famine or disease. Today, it might be climate change. Tomorrow, it'll be something else entirely.

Technological progress has generally been the reason humanity should be optimistic against challenges: it gives us ever improving tools to solve our hardest problems faster than we succumb to them. Without it, that optimism becomes much harder to justify.

Even if there is a plateau we can't cross, if we believe we drive more benefit from technology than the problems it creates, it makes sense to extract as much progress as we can from the physics we have.

Yes, both software improvements and tailored hardware will continue to pay dividends (huge gains from TPUs, chips built specifically for inference, etc, even if the underlying process node is unchanged).

Slowing transistor scaling just gives us one less domain through which to depend on for improvements - the others are all still valid, and will probably be something we come to invest more effort into.

I tend to dislike the term AGI/ASI, since it's become a marketing label more than a coherent concept (which everyone will define differently)

In this case I use "singularity", by which I mean it more abstractly: a hypothetical point where technological progress begins to accelerate recursively, with heavily reduced human intervention.

My point isn't theological or utopian, just that the physical limits of computation, energy, and scale make that kind of runaway acceleration far less likely IMO than many assume.

> "massive upfront investment and large and complex" and therefore predict progress stopping ages ago?

Regulatory and economic barriers are probably the easiest to overcome. But they are an obstacle. All it takes is for public sentiment to turn a bit more hostile towards technology, and progress can stall indefinitely.

> Opening with the recursively improving AGI and then having a section of "areas of promise for step-function improvements" and not mentioning any chance of an AGI breakthrough?

The premise of the article is that the hardware that AGI (or really ASI) would depend on may itself reach diminishing returns. What if progress is severely hampered by the need for one or two more process improvements that we simply can’t eke out?

Even if the algorithms exist, the underlying compute and energy requirements might hit hard ceilings before we reach "recursive improvement."

> How many autoimmune diseases have been cured, ever? Where does this “Probably” come from — the burden of proof very much lies with that probably.

The point isn't that we're there now, or even close. It’s that we likely don’t need a step-function technological breakthrough to get there.

With incremental improvements in CAR-T therapies — particularly those targeting B cells — Lupus is probably a prime candidate for an autoimmune disease that could feasibly be functionally "cured" within the next decade or so (using extensions of existing technology, not new physics).

In fact, one of the strongest counterpoints to the article's thesis is molecular biology, which has a remarkable amount of momentum and a lot of room left to run.

> We might not be that far away from a plausible space elevator.

I haven't seen convincing arguments that current materials can get us there, at least not on Earth. But the moon seems a lot more plausible due to lower gravity and virtually no atmosphere.

But I'd be very happy to be wrong about this.

> Based on what we know today, there isn’t “a” plateau — there are many, and they give way to newer things.

True. But the point is that when a plateau is governed by physical limits (for example, transistor size), further progress depends on a step-function improvement — and there's no guarantee that such an improvement exists.

Steam and coal weren't limited by physics. Which is the same reason why I didn't mention lithium batteries in the article (surely we can move beyond lithium to other chemistries, so the ceiling on what lithium can deliver isn't relevant). But for fields bounded by fundamental constants or quantum effects, there may not necessarily be a successor.

I think there is still a lot we can do within the current paradigm - most software, especially for enterprise, is still quite bad. And that will continue to drive employment and growth.

But w may one day have to contend with expecting fewer "new" paradigms and the ultra rapid industry growth that accompanies them (dotcom, SaaS, ML, etc). Will "software eating the world" be enough to counteract this long term? Hard to say

Most of modern history has been defined by our ability to outpace our problems through technological acceleration. This essay argues that, rather than an uncontrollable AI takeoff, we may be approaching physical, economic, and regulatory limits — a long plateau where progress slows.

In this post I describe an incident with a Petlibro smart feeder: the production iOS app momentarily showed developer overlays, a request inspector, and terminal UI — all tied to what looks like their private staging API backend.

I dig into what might have gone wrong (misconfiguration, build error, environment switch), what risks it may have posed (exposed endpoints, potential data leaks, no user alerts or invalidations), and broader lessons about the caution we should exercise when granting consumer IoT devices access to our networks, when security is not their concern.