New Ed! Not much particularly new info, just a general lament and summary of the state of tech and how much has been pinned on magical thinking. Has some wonderfully quotable sections.
What if what we’re seeing today isn’t a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn’t actually capable of doing much more than what we’re seeing today, and what if there’s no clear timeline when it’ll be able to do more? What if this entire hype cycle has been built, goosed by a compliant media ready and willing to take career-embellishers at their word?
Please forgive my addition to the title, as it’s meant to be a play on “Waiting for Godot”, not a comment on the Godot game engine. Wanted to make that more clear than the title alone would.
It’s a poorly chosen title, especially in tech, where godot is overwhelmingly understood to be a game engine.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives.
Ed is presuming a high school education from his readers, where kids get hammered with the play whether or not they have any idea what it is
out in the world, ~nobody has heard of the game engine
in my texas high school we read atlash shrugged1 and the davinci code
1: don’t tell my teacher but i sparknotes’d this one
Throwback Thursday: Atlas Shrugged: The Cobra Commander Dialogues
(Based on blog posts now available here.)
I assumed it was an AI company I hadn’t heard of. But the play was my next guess. I have not seen or read the play. I do know that Gandalf and Picard were in a production.
“In popular culture” section coming in clutch per usual:
The two Argentine developers, Jaun Linietsky & Ariel Manzur, were repeatedly tasked with updating the engine from a period of time from 2001 to 2014, and chose the name “Godot” due to its relation to the play, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but would never actually be completed.
