In short
Better Offline Podcast Episode Summary
Episode Title
Vibe Coding is BS w/ Charlie Meyer
Hosts
Ed Zitron and Charlie Meyer
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Introduction
- Podcast Overview: Better Offline explores the tech industry's influence on society, focusing on manipulation and the implications of a growth-at-all-costs mindset.
- In this episode, Ed Zitron interviews Charlie Meyer about the absurdities of "vibe coding," the concept of scaling laws in technology, and the realities of AI coding.
Key Themes and Discussions
- Vibe Coding
- Definition: Vibe coding refers to the practice of creating software that appears functional for short demos but lacks reliability in real-world applications.
- Critique of AI Tutors: Charlie expresses skepticism about AI tutors, suggesting that students may prefer human interaction over AI-based learning aids.
- The Importance of Code
- Coding Reality: Charlie emphasizes that "code doesn’t happen to you" – effective programming requires understanding and active engagement, rather than relying on AI-generated solutions.
- Demo Ware: AI tools often serve as demo ware, offering impressive functionality during presentations but failing in practical use.
- Replit and Its Evolution
- Background: Originally a popular online IDE for teaching coding, Replit has shifted to incorporating AI functionalities.
- Impact on Education: The introduction of AI features created challenges for teachers and students, undermining traditional learning methods.
- Scaling Laws in AI
- Scaling Laws Overview: The concept that increasing the size of AI models will yield proportional improvements in performance.
- GPT-3 vs. GPT-4: The transition from GPT-3 to GPT-4 showcased significant advancements, while subsequent models have failed to maintain the same trajectory of improvement.
- Disappointment with AI Promises
- Expectations vs. Reality: The hype surrounding advanced AI capabilities often clashes with the actual outcomes and user experiences.
- Product-Market Fit: Questioning whether AI tools truly meet the needs of users. If these tools disappeared, would users miss them significantly?
Key Takeaways
- Skepticism of AI Tools: Many AI tools, including those marketed for coding or tutoring, may not deliver practical value and can mislead users into thinking they are capable of achieving complex tasks without significant knowledge.
- AI's Promises Are Questionable: The reality of AI capabilities often falls short of the marketing hype, emphasizing the need for critical evaluation of technology claims.
- Importance of Understanding Code: True understanding of coding involves more than just using tools; it requires engagement with the underlying principles and logic of programming.
Conclusion
- Final Thoughts by Ed Zitron: The episode encapsulates the contradictions and challenges of modern technology, particularly in the educational space. Encouraging listeners to critically assess the tools they use is essential as the tech landscape evolves.
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Links and Resources
- Charlie Meyer’s Blog: [Charlie Meyer Blog](https://blog.charliemeyer.co/)
- Newsletter: [CS Meyer Substack](https://csmeyer.substack.com/)
- Better Offline Merchandise: [Shop Here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline)
- Podcast Links: [Better Offline Links](https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks)
- Discord Community: [Join Here](https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv)
Contact Information
- Email Ed: [ez@betteroffline.com](mailto:ez@betteroffline.com)
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This summary provides a concise overview of the podcast episode, highlighting important discussions on vibe coding, AI's limitations, the challenges in education technology, and the implications of scaling laws in the tech industry.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Wells Fargo announced a new$20 million program in 2025, teaming up with nonprofits to support small business owners. That's how Wells Fargo is helping strengthen small businesses and communities. Wells Fargo, the bank of doing. Learn more at wellsfargo.com slash say do. At Lowe's, this Veterans Day and every day, verified military members, veterans, and their spouses get automatic silver status in MyLowes Rewards with free standard shipping, plus 10 % off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do.
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2:05Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.
2:20And we're here in the beautiful iHeartRadio studios in New York City, and I've got a guest, of course, Charlie Meyer, the esteemed blogger and CEO of Picode. Charlie, thank you for joining me. Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. So, yeah, you've gained some, I would say, notoriety recently by making blogs that go against the oinking of the hogs of the valley. And I think your scaling laws piece was the one that really got me going. Yeah. So my blog gets some love and mostly hate on Hacker News. That's my distribution channel. And so I'm trying to get off of that. We're going to try and build a newsletter type thing.
2:56But yeah, I'll post on Hacker News. And every once in a while, I'll get something that blows up. And I'll get my haters in there. So what is it that's pissing them off? So like I had a post a few weeks back that was on, I called it LLMs or the ultimate demo wear. Right. And so I defined demo wear as software that you make the software and it works well in the 30 minutes that you're showing it out to executives or whoever's going to buy it. Right. And then it doesn't do the thing. Right. It doesn't do the thing day to day. And so I listed some examples and my startup's in edtech, right? Right. So we do, you know, and so like there's always something that I pick on is I really hate AI tutors and we can get into that and how that all works.
3:33But, so I said, oh, I listed out a few things that I thought were demo-ware. So it's like, oh, vibe coding that makes dashboards. Right. You know, that's an easy thing to pick on. And then I said, you know, AI tutors. And I said, well, maybe the kid won't want to talk to an AI tutor. Yeah. That was the critique I made, right? It's like, maybe they just don't want to talk to him. Yeah, but won't talk to a person. Maybe they want to have like a teacher who is like in the classroom. Crazy idea. Maybe. Yeah. But did people not like that? Well, yeah. So some people, you know, we can name names if we need to, but I actually don't know how to pronounce them.
4:06But anyway, so people are in there and they're like, you have no idea. Like if you think that AI can't tutor calculus, like you have never even tried. It's like it's a classic like you're missing out. Like you somehow are completely missing the point. And you know something's really good and innovative when the only defense of it is you're a moron. You ape. Well, you have never tried it. And it's like, well, what if I have? What if this is actually the thing I spend my time on is thinking about this? Because you're a non-AI IDE, right? So a coding environment. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, we got lots of that.
4:44But the software that I make, bouncing around a little bit here, but Replit is a company. And so Replit was a very loved by teachers IDE online. and their whole thing was like, we help you teach coding online because it's a way for you to run Python and Java and all your code online and you can do it and you can do it on Chromebooks and you can collaborate. And they had like teacher tools and they sold the software to schools. I was a teacher for a couple of years. So that's kind of like my background as an engineer and then a teacher. And I used Replit and it was awesome. And was this before they used AI?
5:18This was before they used AI. So Replit, just for the listeners right now, Now, Reblit is an AI-powered coding environment that claims to be able to vibe code software, but doesn't really. But what did it used to be? So it used to be an excellent tool. Just an absolutely fantastic tool. It was just you go on, you log on, like Google Docs for coding. Right. So you think, okay, well, back in the day, you'd have to download Microsoft Word and whatever, and that sucks. And it's great to bring that online into the cloud. And they did that. And they were very innovative. They were kind of first to market of having like a very fully featured online IDE.
5:54And that is useful for exactly one thing. And that is useful for teaching in schools. Right. Because like you have kids and they have$200 Chromebooks that the school bought them. And so you get Replit and like, boom, I have a great way to teach computer science now. That is fantastic. And that's what it used to be before the AI. Yeah. And now it's just... And now it's, yeah. So listeners, you probably heard me mention Replit in the past. It's one of my least favorite, most favorite companies. If you go on the Replet Reddit, it's just the wallet inspector. And so now that's kind of like, I've gotten rid of most of my like doom scrolling places.
6:28But like, this is not, I don't know what type of scrolling it is, but like I go on our Replet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's just so funny. It's just guy being like, yeah, spend$1 ,500. It doesn't really work. Yeah. But I think if I spend$5 ,000 more dollars, it might. Well, I mean, people are like, okay, well, should I spend$5 ,000? I mean, we can be reasonable, Ed. We can bring the numbers down to reality. Okay, yeah. It's, I spent$50, which for a person who has got a bad software idea, that's a big waste of money. And they're like, okay, well, it seems like I might need to spend$250 more or should I go on Fiverr?
7:05Yeah. And then it's just people in Reddit. I mean, it's Reddit, so they're just like skill issue. Well, that and also the people who are like, I too am running into this problem. And then a lot of that, yeah. Yeah, where it's like, but Replit, just for anyone on there, on Replit right now, what do they do to teachers? So teachers, they had a product for teachers that worked. That was great. That was well-off. What happened to the teachers? And on November something, 2023, this is a big day for my business because this is the only reason I have my business is to replace Replit. Oh. Because they turned on AI autocomplete for kids.
7:41No way to shut it off. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of learning? Yeah. So I have a small YouTube channel with not a million subscribers, but I talked to teachers on there and we had a customer of mine on there and they were like, yeah, that year it just seemed like the guy, he missed the fact that the AI got turned on. No one sent him an announcement or an email or a warning. So all of his students were just amazing. He was like, yeah, everybody got an A that semester. I wonder. So did students actually end up getting great scores because no one noticed the AI going? Yeah, I mean, it took, depending on who you, if you're wandering around the classroom looking at students and you see them all tab completing, like, because AI.
8:22And just for the listeners as well, because Scott's spelled out. So with these AI platforms, you hit tab complete because it's basically like autocorrect. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, AI, for what it's worth, you know, we can be really balanced podcast. Sure. But AI can really well, it can solve intro to computer science for ninth grader problems. with the incredible accuracy. Well, that's Carl Brown from the Internet of Bugs. He said it makes the easy things easier and the harder things harder. Yes. And so, yeah. So if you need to, if you're in ninth grade and you're writing your first program, yeah, you can tab complete the whole thing in one go.
8:57It'll one shot it, Ed. That's incredible. It'll one shot your ninth grade program. It's this term, that term just, listeners, is like, it means that you just give it a problem and it solves it correctly. Yeah. So it's like count to 10. And the AI can count to 10. Which is incredible. That's revolutionary. But fun fact, if you try and make chat GPT count to a million, it freaks out. If you do the voice mode, Adam Conover told me this one. If you go like count to a million, it stops around nine or 10 and then says, should I continue? And it just won't do it. It's very funny. I love living in the future.
9:32Yeah. So they, though, they turn on the AI and then they were like, we're not doing education. And companies have deprecated things. Yeah. Yeah. It happens. They deprecate things. It's usually not their main product. Yeah. Whatever. So, I mean, I'll tell you, you know, I'm an indie developer or whatever. Like, our software does not make a ton of money because there isn't that much money selling an online IDE to schools. There's money, but it's not a billion-dollar business. It's fine. Neither is Replit. Well, yeah, but... You can't raise on billions of valuations. No, no. Saying, hey, you know, kids have Chromebooks and we're going to, you know, charge$10 a student or whatever.
10:05Like, you can't... Of course, you're not going to raise... That's not a billion-dollar business. No. But the AI thing seems magical. And then, you know, the vibe coding thing happened. And, you know, as soon as the vibe coding stuff started happening, they were like, we're all in on this. And they deleted. They deleted it. They deleted it? So not just deprecated, right? So it's one thing to deprecate software. And deprecate is when you stop supporting it, right? You say it's no longer supported. And you put up a big red scary banner on the top saying your work is read only. You cannot create anymore.
10:33Right. That is a really mean thing to do. But it happens. And software changes, you know, replet for what it's worth to be nice and fair to them. Like they have investors and they're under the gun to provide some returns. And so whatever, the teacher thing isn't going to make them a ton of money, but they deleted the stuff. Which is why. And when you say the stuff, was this like projects that schools had been working on? It was. So a teacher says, I'm going to spend two, three years putting in all my curriculum, all these markdown files, all this stuff, all these tests. I'm going to configure all this stuff.
11:03No. Deleted. Gone. Monsters. Deleted. actual monsters and now but they sent the warning email ed wow in july when are teachers online looking at their work email in july yeah classic classic big month for teachers well for american teachers yeah it's not a huge month so uh yeah in july we say we're going to delete all your stuff and then it's gone and was there any way to back it up well there was until they deleted it all that's so cool it's awesome so they're an awesome like if you're a replet developer you know when when the next big thing comes up and Replit may decide to delete all your stuff.
11:39Well, Replit, they launched Agent 3. Oh, yeah. That was my favorite launcher of product I've ever seen because I've mentioned this on the show before, but it's like, oh, it's an autonomous coding thing. And it's just the digital Mr. Bean. It's just like, why don't you go off and build me a software thing? And it just fucking spends$100 and goes, I don't know, you like this? I don't fucking care. And then they had to release a thing where you could make it think less. They had to like add tweaks to it because it was so bad. It's in, I actually feel like, and I'm not putting words in your mouth here.
12:10I feel like vibe coding may be just fraud. I think it's a fraud. I don't, it should not be legal to lie like because it is a fucking lie. So, so I will, I'll defend the vibe coder platforms out here. But, but, but, but, so the defense, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's fraudulent, right? I mean, like if you say, hey, you don't know how to code at all. and yeah, just sign on to this website. And I mean, look at their marketing page. That's exactly what I'm loading. Okay, perfect. I'm loading it. With a nice blue iPhone Air. Oh yeah, beautiful blue. I have the space black. Hell yeah, the iPhone Air rise up.
12:47It's a great phone. It's a great phone. I'm not, Apple made me pay for it. Yeah, turn your ideas into apps. What will you create? The possibilities are endless. And then it's a fake prompt that says, make me a business tool for marketing teams that helps generate professional business proposals. and then add automated backup and recovery. I think if you asked Replit to do that, it would cost$300 and nothing would happen. I think it would just punk out a barely functional code. So I wrote a post on this and I was excited to end the post saying there has never been a successful thing ever. Unfortunately, Replit has added a set of case studies.
13:25And I think that they use it. And so the case studies are we sold to enterprises and we're going to do prototypes of internal dev tools. Not dev tools, internal management software for inside your back office software. So they haven't had a case study since what looks like August. And one of them is how Zynos saves$140 ,000 with Replit, but it also cuts development time by 50%. them but so then the question is did the person typing stuff into replit did they know how to code exactly see that's because if they know how to code whatever it's not vibe coding it's just you could have used cursing you could have used windsurf you could have used any vs code or what is it what's the free one amazon's doing now kiro maybe kiro and then there's the i like the the one that came out from china and everyone was like that's gonna send information to the chinese it's like, will it?
14:22I don't know. But I don't think your clone of Flappy Bird has got to be taken up by a Yishin P. The way that the word vibe coding has, the meaning that it has today, I believe, is you do not know how to code. You type prompt and you get app out. And I'm not going to dox this person because they were nice to me once. But there's a person online. They just do like, oh, here's 100 days of AI. And I'm going to make a fully functional software as a service company fully and I don't know how to code. And then you look at this person and they're typing in the prompts and it's like, they clearly have like a pretty strong technical background.
14:58And then the thing still doesn't work, by the way. That's so cool. Like they know how things work and it's still broken. Yeah. So, I mean, whatever. This person was like a product manager or something. So, like they know what an API is and they know what a web server is and they know the names of the different technologies. And like that's going to get them part of the way there. But the idea that you can end-to-end create a software product that has some value. Yeah. It's crazy. We would have heard about it. No, that's kind of, and your demo web post was really good about this because it was kind of like, look, you can do the proof of concept.
15:27You can do this, but we've never seen the next stage. And someone else did a really good one. It was like shovelware. They said, where's the shovelware? Where's the crap software? Where's the, I remember the first times I was on the internet, the amount of weird shareware shit there was, just like different forms of IRC clients and shit. There were people making weird software. Why isn't that happening? Yeah. I mean, so you'll see, okay, I made flappy bird i made a weird thing i made like i you can make little small pieces of software for yourself that maybe have a little bit of value it is fun it is a novelty yes if you know like but then it then it doesn't work like it's so i i do not know i'm a web developer yeah so i know how to do web apps i can't code for shit so whatever but like it's that that's what i know that's that's what i've been doing i've been coding for whatever and i know how to do that i do not know how to make iphone apps yeah so i was like okay you know what i'm gonna do they just announced quad whatever because i'm interested in this stuff i'm an early adopter i don't and also if it did what it however i may feel about ai if it actually did what if vibe coding was real that would actually be a huge deal that would be a huge fucking deal well i wouldn't i would have all my ethical concerns if i could actually build software without knowing anything wow that would be great never been the case but you tried though well so i tried so so my idea was like okay i use my phone too much I'm going to make an app called AppSnooze.
16:47It takes, so you say, I want Gmail. I want it snoozed for a half hour. Got it. So that when I open up the Gmail app, it uses a screen time thing and it says blocked. And then 30 minutes is up. I get it back. Right. That is impossible to make using iOS, essentially, without like a substantial amount of work. It's based on like the limitations of how Apple does their stuff with screen time. It just cannot be done. So I type this stuff in. Claude is like sitting there. It's like, oh, yeah, you're awesome. You are killing me, dude. This is a great idea. You got this. You got this. Yeah, which it actually does say.
17:20And one of their, I've been watching like the World Series or whatever and a lot of NFL and like the ChachiBT ads. We can hopefully talk about that. Those are so funny. Oh, I haven't caught any of those. Okay, well. No, no, I love to hear about this because I'm a Raiders fan. Yeah. And I try not to watch. If I needed to watch a poorly conceived product, I could just use my season tickets, but I sold them. So wait, but keep going though. Okay. So it's like, you got this. But then it's, this is the, whatever. So they have Haiku and they have Sonnet and they have Opus. Yes. So whatever, awesome names.
17:56But so they have Sonnet, which is the really good one. You know, just hacking these posts. It's very well respected. Cloud's supposed to be the good one for coding. And so I was like, I'm going to pay$20. I'm just going to see what happens. If I can get this thing on the App Store, that'll be great. I'm going to charge 99 cents. Let's see if I make a hundred bucks. Sure. see if I make my Apple developer account back. Yeah. Dump the$100 into the Apple developer account. I also want Apple, by the way. You can't actually do half the app coding that you need to without paying them$100. So good. That's a business.
18:23That's Apple, baby. But anyways, so I do that. I want to make my$100 back, but it cannot be done. Well, you couldn't build the app, though. Because of literal limitations in how iOS works in terms of you can't have a timer that goes off and messes with screen time. That's just not a thing that Apple should do. thing called brick where there's a physical device as well but that feels like a bluetooth something's going on with brick i don't know but here's here's the thing as well with all of this you just made me think it is weird that the app doesn't just go yeah i can't build that mate it would be nice if it did say that and it was this was weird i had never observed this behavior before and again i i've posted online like okay you know this you know three bees in blueberry that thing oh yeah yeah yeah whatever and people I posted that on LinkedIn and someone was like you are lying and I post my link hell yeah I post the link to the chat and they were like you had a secret prompt that told it to be stupid yeah it's prompt injection yeah yeah like you have a system prompt that says like and it's like dude be stupid as shit be a piece of shit oh dude I messed up I put be stupid in my system prompt I should have put I should have put be smart if I put smart it would have worked
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22:09So on this, you just reminded me of when I was dicking around with Claude Coates. So I did the story a few months ago about how, you know, I don't know if you've seen like Vibrank, where it's got like people on Claude Coates spend like$50 ,000. I love those people. I think they're awesome. Well, to try this myself, I went on. I was like, what is the most token intensive software you could build me? It's like, oh, yeah, an autonomous car in a metaverse. I'm like, cool, build all of that. And I just sat there for hours. Just build. And I don't even know what spat out at the end. Well, I mean, it's certainly, well, you could have a trillion dollar startup on your hands.
22:38But it's just like. You should check out that code. It's so sick that these things don't even go like, yeah, we can't do that. Like, I can't do an autonomous car startup. I don't have any training data. Very basic. But if that thing was smart or useful, right, it has the ability to look things up online. Yeah. It should have looked through the documentation and sort of said, well, what can we do with timers? What can we do with screen time? Can you hook up a timer to screen time? Exactly. We'll let you do this in the background and get the half hour timing correctly. And it's like, it's demo-ware.
23:05And it allows you to build demo-ware. But it didn't even build a demo of this. Well, so it built me something I was kind of excited about because it let me pick the app. So I picked Gmail and I picked 30 minutes. And then it worked. Gmail is turned off. Right. 30 minutes elapsed. Right. Gmail is not back on. Oh, so you just cut Gmail. Well, no, so I mean - You have not been in your email since. Well, not, yeah, exactly. Sorry, customers. If you have been emailing me, it is because my app is messed up. No, but it was like, it just lied, right? And so imagine being someone, I'm a software developer.
23:38So I'm like, okay, whatever. I'm going to, I don't know iOS, but I'm going to go on the Apple pages and see what's up. And I'm going to add some meaningful follow-ups and determine that this didn't work. okay, I lost my hundred bucks in the developer account. But if you don't know how to code, you're going to be like, what are you going to do? Well, there's nothing you can do. Because the reason I read the Replic pages and the cursor pages, and the cursor one, it's people that can code a little. Yeah. At least. Or, yeah. A little bit. But Replic is just, it's 50 % and same with Lovable's Reddit as well.
Read the full transcript
24:07Lovable is another, for listeners, it's another AI coding platform, sold to survive coding thing. and it's all it's 50 people being like i've spent 300 and then like 10 people just lying people like i just reached 12 000 mri monthly recurring revenue uh it's all good for me and everyone being like can i see it and they never respond and then there's the there's the people who are like looking for a replet developer yeah and it's like so you're looking for someone that can write software because right and build software interesting like a software developer one I don't know where to find one. It's almost like there are like hundreds of thousands, millions of people trying to do that.
24:46But yeah, we don't need them. We can just talk into the thing and turn your app into reality. Except it's just, it is really crazy how much Vibe Coding has proliferated considering how fucking, it's nothing. Well, so if you need a prototype, so if this whole thing boils down to If the expectations were real, if it was like, turn your sentence into a prototype of an application in minutes. Okay. Yeah, like an MVP. Not even a while MVP needs to work. Well, okay. Sorry, I thought you were saying hypothetical world where it works. Sorry. Well, no. In a hypothetical world and where it does what it does today, you can get like a mock-up.
25:32if it said build a semi-functional wireframe mock-up of your application that you could show to kind of validate your idea to your friends in minutes for$30 or however much your credits end up being that's fine but does that happen doesn't it you could kind of do that if you're lucky if you roll the dice that's the thing it's always if you're lucky there's enough asterisks on this it's just insane that it's got this far because i've read a lot of vibe coding articles and if you read like kevin roos of course and the times and people like that you read these articles and you think wow you can just do this you can just go and do this this is the future is today but it's not really not really the case at all but i think that the the thing that's so like pernicious about it is that it's so easy to just say skill issue yeah you just you just two words you're prompting it wrong you're prompting it wrong david gerard david gerard thing but no it's yeah Yeah, you're prompting it wrong.
26:27You're prompting it wrong. And there's no real way to disprove that because can we go back in time? And like, because it's all this probabilistic stuff. And so I have a post that I've put up and it's code doesn't happen to you. That's my thing. Go on. So it's my, because I taught programming for a while. And so if you're teaching a new programmer, sometimes if they've kind of gotten unlucky and they have a bad attitude, and it's not their fault, but they might think like coding is really mysterious and it's really weird. Right. And I type code in and I press run and it doesn't always do what I want.
27:01And so I'm just going to like mess around. Right. And like vibe coding is like a productionized version of code happens to you. It's like you press button, code pops out, it does mysterious thing. And then like, you know, so it's like that idea which was the wrong way to program. But like that's the way we're doing it. Like and we're going to sell it to you. And what is the right way though? The right way would be a computer is like you operate a computer, you turn it on, you open the coding software that you're going to use, whether it's an online software, like my wonderful software, or something like VS Code, like something for professionals, whatever.
27:34And you type in code and you run it. And then the computer executes it, runs the code according to the programming language. The code is instructions. The code is instructions. And the code happens deterministically. And maybe if you're developing a game, maybe there's some random elements to the software that you're developing. But there's no randomness. The randomness is under your control. Yeah. So it's true. It's the difference between treating it as this mystic force that you pull together versus instructions. It's instructions. And so, like, if you're a really good programmer, and maybe you're, whatever, maybe you use AI to save you some typing and you still have that good attitude.
28:08Whatever. Like, you can use it to save typing. That's fine. I mean, that's the only real, like, that feels like the only consistent thing is just filling in blanks that you know you could yourself. Like, it feels in, it's autocorrect. And I'm not going to. Which may be useful. I'm not going to lie. Like, I use it. Yeah. But I used to have a paid GPT account, but I don't trust it to do – like the models – and this is one of the things that I brought up in my post is that the models aren't better now, right? They're not better? Well, GPT-3 was okay, and GPT-4 was much better. And then GPT-5 is trash.
28:42I mean, relatively speaking. Maybe it's a little bit better, and maybe it costs OpenAI more, which is a big development, which is great for them, and whatever. It's bad to cost them less, but it costs more. It costs more. So stop getting better. So there was a time where I was like, I'm going to buy into this. I'm an early adopter. I'm kind of a booster. Like I was cured by going to wheresyoured.at.com. Yes, there we are. Is it.com? It's just wheresyoured.at. Oh, wheresyoured.at.com. Okay. Well, wheresyoured.at cured me a little bit of this because I'm like, and I've just had some situations where it's just failed me so poorly.
29:16Like there was a confluence of events this summer where I was just like, no. What happened? I'm done with this. uh first of all i got a strong recommendation from uh gpt to buy a software called descript which is like uh editing cost editing so because i i have i have a youtube channel and i want to like i'd say a lot of ums and ahs and maybe i'm saying some ums and ahs right now whatever who cares yeah and but i i'm like okay i'm gonna make this youtube channel i want the production quality to be decent if there's a shortcut for me seems like ai might be able to do this so So I'm like, to GPT, I'm like, what is good AI, get rid of ums and ahs software?
29:53Sure. It's just Descript. Kind of like a Google search. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, you know, whatever. It's an okay Google search. Yeah, yeah. Whatever. And so it said, you got to use Descript. And I was like, cool. And so I put in my credit card, 20 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever it was. Just, I put it in a recording and just completely mangled it. Yep. And it's just like, the audio was unusable. Yeah. It was off by an eighth of a second off my voice. And it's just like, there's no way, I have no recourse. Yeah. And I'm not an audio engineer. And so I just, okay. Like I vibe edited my video and it just ruined it.
30:23It's almost like every promise they make is it's going to automate everything. It's like, ah, not really. As long as you know what you're doing. But this was like a meta level thing where the AI recommended me other AI that also screwed me over. And so I'm like, okay, this is like, because I was using it a search, right? Yeah. And so, but it failed me a search because it's just emphatically. and then you look because then i was like well what's wrong am i is it a skill issue am i stupid and so i look and reddit is just filled with like this is the worst software this is the worst i use the script very briefly and all i wanted to do was take a bit of audio and turn it into a video with the text happening that's the way you read their marketing material you would look at it and think it would take two seconds took me about 45 minutes and it was just by the end I'm like, I don't even want to fucking die.
31:12I'm so angry because it's like, this should be a button press. The whole point of AI bullshit is meant it should be a button press. And it never is. But wait, well, there are other events though. Well, so there's that. And so there's that. And then it's like, so I'm also, so I'm a web developer. Right. And so I'm not very good. I can't program mobile apps. That's a thing that I can't do. Don't know how. I'm also not a very good like infrastructure systems programmer, whatever. That's, you know, cloud stuff, whatever. I'm not great at that. But that is an aspect of my job that I have to do. Our website requires some infrastructure, difficult stuff.
31:46Over the years, I've actually gotten quite a bit better at that. And so that used to be a use case for me for GPT was like, oh, I'll ask it some infrastructure related questions. I'm like, I know how to code. I can put the puzzle together. And this is actually going to save me a little bit of time. But I have outpaced GPT's ability in infrastructure development. So it's like, OK, well, I'm doing this project and it's not helping. It's just wasting my time. OK, no need for that. The descript thing is BS. And then I learned from EdZitron that this stuff is horrendously expensive. So it's like, if this was just regular software as a service and it cost pennies to operate and, you know, it was like kind of helpful, whatever.
32:22Yeah, be inoffensive. It would be like, it's fine, whatever. There's a company. They offered me this thing and it didn't work. And, you know, it happens. Yeah. But it's like in the context of a world in which this is the future, this is magic, in a click of a button, you get perfect audio out. If that's the promise, in the midst of all of this, and AI is recommending to it, this is like meta-leveled, like, idiot situation. And then it's disastrously expensive. Yeah. Like, what is the point of all of this? The point is we need to sell GPUs every day. And literally in the car here, they announced a seven-year,$38 billion deal between OpenAI and Amazon Web Services.
33:06It's just like, why? So that they can do Sora 2 more, so they can generate more copyright infringement? But have you in the past used these coding models a lot, or is it just kind of like on the side? I have. So even, like I will say, even like two weeks ago, I had a very discrete task where it was like, in this one situation, I want to do this one little thing. And I knew exactly what it was, and I was lazy. And so I said, write the code. And so I put in, and this is a joke comment, and people should do this more often. I put in, I pasted in the code, and I said, this code comes courtesy of ChatGPT.
33:44If you have any issues with this software, please contact OpenAI. That's what I wrote in my code. Nice, nice. And I showed it. And it worked. Great. Whatever. Okay. That's cool. It saved me 20 minutes. Then that's the thing. That's the whole AI bubble. But I'm not a paying subscriber anymore. Oh, that's even worse for them. Yeah, I know. No, I just, you know, because it's the stupidest model of theirs could have come up with that code because it was so easy. You know, it was finicky. It was annoying. There have been situations where I'm saying, you know, I say, oh, there's a bug in this code. I paste it in and it looks it over.
34:17And it saved me in aggregate tens of hours in the last three years. That's fine. It's like if it was regular SaaS, I'd be like, cool. Yeah. I think that's kind of part of why I canceled the subscription. Because if it was, you know, whatever, you need to value your time. If it was$20 a month and it saved me an hour a month, hey, you know. Yeah, it's like TripIt or Flighty. Like a little bit of software we pay for and it does a thingy. And it wasn't stealing from everyone and burning down. It's just, it only makes sense if it was cheap. And it's the literal opposite. it if this was like cheap like cheap cpu driven shit then fine sure but it's like i one day i think we're going to find out how expensive this is and it's going to scare the shit out of people but you know what that that actually makes me want to move to a specific post you made your scaling laws post let's talk about this so you were a booster at one point you read the stuff sure but you wrote a very eloquent piece about the scaling laws about how and i've tried to work this into my work, but it's, we can have, I don't know if I'd call it empathy, but some understanding of how we got here with the AI bubble.
35:24Because when GPT-4 came out, it does seem like tech people had a reason to be excited. I was so excited. What was exciting? It was awesome. You talked to it and it was just like this, I would ask it coding problems that I found. So I was still a teacher at the time. And I was like, oh man, like I have the AP computer science exam coming up and I need to like come up with practice problems. And I was like, generate a set of 30 practice problems. And I obviously read them over and I did my due diligence and I, you know, I tried to, I did a good job putting them together, but it's like, these are decent.
35:56These are decent practice problems. And like, this is useful software. I did not understand how expensive it was, but there was, there's a, the number of things that would have to happen. I will also give you, so the listeners don't get mad. To be clear, GPT-4 was 2023. Yeah. We were very early in understanding. I mean, the environmental damage was there early. Sure. But they were also promising their fix. But it took a full year until June 2024 when it came out that OpenAI would burn$5 billion. So, like, early on, we didn't really know the costs either. And I'm sure someone will find a fucking link.
36:31Anyway, keep going. Well, so I was pumped up because I saw GPT-3 was... You know, I'm a tech person. And so I remember seeing early demos of GPT-3. and it was like interesting novelty. It would say stupid things and it was kind of cool. It could even generate sentences. That was awesome. 3.5 came out and GPT, whatever, chat GPT, it's like, oh, this is pretty cool. I can use it as a search thing and it says that I'm good, which I like when people say I'm good. Do you like when people say you're good, Ed? It doesn't happen very much, but I think, you know what? I'll be honest. There's something, I think, mentally about me where all of the anthropomorphization pisses me, not even pisses me off.
37:10I'm just like, okay, shut up, shut up, shut up. I think I was bullied too much as a kid that like compliments don't work on me anymore. I do want to write a thing at some point about how if it wasn't chat GPT, if it was like box, get text. Yeah. And there was no anthropomorphization. If it was just like, this is a thing that can generate usable or interesting or like code for you, but there's no chat element to it. That would actually make it a lot better to me. Like by the anthropomorphization of like, oh, you're talking to a person that really makes me mad. Yes. And also I find every time it goes, you got it.
37:42You got it. Shut up, shut up. So in one of these NFL ads, literally, I don't know if they're like doing a nod to the haters or what, but they'd like take, we're going, we're going a couple levels. I'll make sure the link is in the. Yeah. No, there's like four of them. Hopefully there aren't. But it's like a guy doing, he's, he's trying to do a pull-ups and it's like, here's your pull-up plan. Like you need to do one pull-up and then you should do two pull-ups and then you should do four or five pull-ups. and like eventually you will be able to do several pull-ups and then at the end it's like you got this okay if so the plan is you do more pull-ups over time you could probably just work that out by doing doing pull-ups or texting a mate i see but nobody said you got this but yeah exactly actually no my my friend mac when i text him about pull-ups he he says much he's like you got this i think he may have literally it's just that's the commercial that's the commercial that's commercial but it's yeah commercial people watching the nfo and they're like oh shit why should i use chat gpt oh it's going to tell me a pull-up plan where i increase from one to several one to several you got this you got this i mean i didn't pause i mean maybe i did not pause the commercial but i it could it could have said some really interesting stuff in the middle i don't know but the bullet because it has to have a bullet to the list i i am pretty sure and i might be lying and so whatever you know send me some hate mail but like i'm pretty sure it said like do a couple wait a week you know drink a protein shake and like you know do a couple more it's just google search except it makes up the results that's all there's three fucking years so i have a i have a new idea which is that it's yahoo answers but the person has a lobotomy and was like it just did cocaine that's yahoo answers yahoo answers that's just yahoo or quora but it's like but it's like light speed Yeah, like the fastest.
39:30Well, Quora now is GPT. Okay. Because Adam D 'Angelo is on the board of OpenAI. Sweet. So it's just got GPT answers and GPT questions now. So cool.
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41:12Take financial possession of your apartment by December 31, 2025 and save. Discover more at brightviewseniorliving.com. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. check out odoo at odoo.com that's odoo.com but early on it was exciting and there were these scaling laws walk me through through the listeners who might not understand sure so yeah so the the post that i wrote which very nicely called eloquent so if i could pay you 20 a month to kind of just send me stuff like you got this yeah sure yeah i'll just i'll email those you got this yeah okay that's great i'll put it on to schedule it.
42:16Yeah. If you could just do that, I'll pay you 20 bucks a month. Um, no, but so, so there was an idea that if you increase the size of the models, I'm not an AI, I'm not an AI scientist. And so in this post, I said, I'm not an AI expert or an economist, but like you look at this chart, this chart that they had, and you can like the thing, and I actually think I cited my sources, the original like paper basically about the scaling laws, they have this chart that is incredible it is like make model 10 times bigger get the nice jump in performance make model 10 times bigger get nice jump in performance and then the idea is like okay well if we just keep making it 10 times bigger we will get like who knows how good they can get yeah and it kind of and it did work like and it was working for a minute that's how they went to the best of my knowledge that's how they went from 3.5 to 4 i mean there's a number of they have smart people over there yeah like i mean we can be honest that like they're doing clever stuff smart is also a very subjective.
43:11These are people who are experts in mathematics. Yeah, they're doing hard, real math and they're getting results. The fact that it can do what it does is incredible. Yeah, it's kind of crazy that they can do it if that was all they were saying. If that was all they were saying, if they were just like, we did research and we've created this incredible piece of technology that feels almost alien at this point. I mean, or at the point when we discovered it. Now it feels like, you know, just we take it for granted that it's kind of this trash thing. But like at the moment when it was released, it was like, oh my gosh like this is actually crazy yeah um and and the idea was we make it 10 times bigger and we will get a similar jump in performance and that is gpt 4.5 which is like a footnote in history oh that was that that was released and and sam altman was just like uh yeah well he made big model it was the best announcement ever i'm actually gonna put but from what i remember miss miss clammy sammy was like yeah you know it's i'm just gonna do it from memory i remember it's it was like yeah good news it's really good to for writing bad news it's really compute intensive and everyone's like yay and and in the announcement i i did quote this in the post because i i don't want to make stuff up and like whatever but they literally said with each 10x with each order of magnitude you know 10x increase in model size we will get an improvement in performance yes but like where's the like where's the big improvement right it's gone i don't i think that was them i think that was the moment i don't know what day they announced 4.5 but like i think every some in 20 yeah that was the that was game over yeah and then they did the reasoning stuff and the reasoning stuff was the reasoning thing was september 2024 and i my favorite thing about that was reading all the tech press writing about it and being like can any of you tell me what this does can any of you tell me why this matters to this day and i'm by the way i'm not actually it took a minute for me to work out what the fuck and it's just a hat on a hat thing it's like instead of spitting out an output, it goes, what would the output be?
45:07Oh, I will go through it and choose these steps, which is, it's test time compute and it's math. And I could have had a moment of reflection when the reasoning models came out. Because I was like, okay. It was still the height of the fever, though. I know. So I asked it a hard question. So I did a math degree and a computer science degree. So I was like, take this topic from sophomore year abstract algebra and do this visualization. visualization of the thing. Right. And I took one of the early reasoning models, whichever one it was. Like 01, I think. 01, sure. Because it's like, you have a PhD level thing in the pocket.
45:41Okay. So PhD level thing should be able to take a sophomore math, sophomore and college math concept and visualize it. Yeah. You should be able to do that. And then it didn't. Oh. And then I kind of just didn't, I was kind of just like, oh, I guess I, hmm. And then I just didn't think about it. And then I just kept on kind of hoping that something exciting would happen. Yeah. And I can, a bit of empathy here. I get if you're, and at that time, so it was September, 2024, a month later, they'd raised $6.6 billion to get a credit facility of$4 billion. Like they, it looked like open AI was going places unless you're like me and you've read every single possible financial thing you can get hand on and you've obsessed over the numbers.
46:25but i can get why someone who was stick within the booster ring might not immediately be like fuck because yeah i don't know people hadn't built things of reasoning and it did actually take a few months for people to work out products with reasoning yeah i mean and whatever i mean i don't know what the improvements were and they improved on the benchmarks that's fine it's kind of like and and i'm sure that the coding results are marginally better and that's the thing though marginally yeah it's always margin but now it's marginally but that's the thing three to four was sick. Huge jump. That was sick.
46:57That was not marginal. If you had, if you had, if your lights were on, if you were paying attention and you typed a thing into three and you typed a thing into four, you should be impressed. Oh, I, I remember the jump. I wasn't doing better off alone at the time. Didn't do that until February, 2024, but I remember being like, oh, that's good. But I remember just being like, okay, now what? I was, I was, it was like, wow, we made a computer do this and this cool. Okay. Now what? Yeah. And so like, I was vaguely aware of the, of the line chart that i mentioned in that post and so i was like oh like all they have to do it was like it is a freight train towards like actual really cool thing because it's like just make it bigger and therefore if we just need to make it bigger then we do need more compute and the reasoning models were you finally got another way to throw compute because it's the training compute and more compute to generate an answer test time compute wow yeah so like that's that's where the the freight train is over.
47:48And I just, 4.5 came out, didn't really think about it that hard. They start doing the reasoning stuff and it's like, okay, well, they have marginal improvements and they say it did really good on a math Olympiad or whatever. And like, that's interesting. But then it's like another whole year goes by. And then GPT-5 comes out and like, what was that? It was nothing. It was so strange. And so that was the final. So when I'm talking about my confluence of events that cured me of my boosterism. Like I started reading your stuff about it being expensive. Yeah. But then I was like, this is interesting.
48:20I've started reading this guy Ed's posts. GPT-5 is coming out next week. I wonder if this guy is going to have an extraordinary amount of egg on his face. Yeah. Because this, like you might've been scared. I wasn't because I have the stone will of the Buddha, but it's, I was also just like, when it, when reasoning was coming up, going back to 2023, they did some real shit. The rumors around that qstar yeah it was like the reason sam altman got fired was they found a terrifying new ai they kind of like drummed up there were leaks about it there were leaks about levels of intelligence there was all of these big leaks there was really no leaking around gpt5 other than a wall street journal story towards the end of 2024 where it was like yeah it's costing a shit ton of money it isn't working very well like the leaks the reason i because the thing is i mean this this day if i am wrong about all this i don't think i am i will admit it i will explain why but gpt5 i wasn't particularly worried about because it did i could not fucking tell you what the what it was going to be like no one really if you go back to 2023 and you look up gpt5 stuff the shit that people are saying is insane there was someone saying it would be completely autonomous it would turn weapons systems against people there's bonkers shit but getting up to it yeah it was kind of a proving point but it was just another fucking model well and so and so that i you and i started exchanging emails because i whatever i i saw your podcast and i sent all my posts over and it was it was it was interesting talking to you and then i i when that when the announcement was going on i emailed you and you got a lot of emails coming through but i said ed ed ed ed ed ed ed they announced paywalled chat colors yes i go through it no no i remember this but go through this in And the enhancement of GPT-5.
50:03The biggest thing ever. They're like, for our paid subscribers, you can turn your chat yellow. Yeah. They still haven't released. They still haven't released that? I don't. Well, I'm not a paying subscriber. I've never seen a yellow. I'm paying for chat GPT+. See if you can turn it yellow. I'm going to see if I can do this live on air. Yellow or pink. Green might be an option. Can I change my window color? Well, the model's not going to. On GPT. Are you Googling? gpt no i'm gonna ask it because it's fucking insane if this does searching the web yes you can change they did well they did well can you though um on some platforms you can change the accent color god this fucking stinks the fact that you can't ask a product what it does well if you if you can't ask like i don't know what's a good but i mean if you can't ask if you can't type into a google doc in 2007 what does google docs do that's unsurprising but that's because Google Docs is a place to write words.
51:01This is meant to answer things. Well, I know. That's what I'm saying. But it's like they claim that it's this all-knowing, omniscient thing, and it cannot tell you how to turn. Shouldn't it have just done it for you? Yeah. Or like, give me the button. It should have said, Ed, great question. Would you like it to be blue, yellow, pink, or Charizard orange? But where was the button? That's what it should have done. And also, the idea that that was one of the announcements is very cool. I love the idea that it's the biggest moment ever and you can now make Chad GPT brown. It's insane. It's insane.
51:35I don't know if brown is one of the supportive colors. Probably not. You might need to wait for next year. Yeah. That relies on the compute, actually. The Oracle deal. Yeah. Unlocks brown. Unlocks brown. Oh, my God. It's so cool that we've built our entire economy on top of this as well. But the GPT-5 thing, it was such a weird moment because watching everyone try and be excited about it was really good. there was the whole theo white wait not theo wait and that's isn't the information theo um there's this guy now i'm gonna i really shouldn't have blanked i've mentioned him he did a whole thing about gpt5 i'm gonna look this up live on air this professional show um where he did a whole thing saying gpt5 was the most amazing thing ever and then oh and then walked it back and then had to be like yeah actually yes theo theo brown there we go theo brown he did the thing saying i'm scared of how good gpt5 is then a week later it's like actually it's not the same as when i used it which is craziest that that should have been a scandal like why was that the case but everyone just kind of moved on but i i don't know what we're meant to be excited about next okay gpt6 well yeah it's just but also what's that meant to the because gpt5 was this weird kind of like myth in the future it's like when we reach this everything will get better but now it's like we're going to get Claude Sonnet 5, I guess.
52:57Yeah, whatever. I mean, you're going to get the next one. But that's the thing is like, if it's just continued marginal improvement, what am I? Yeah. What are we doing? It doesn't make me, that does not make me excited. And yes, it can save software engineers typing time and whatever. I mean, if you know what you're doing, you can get a lot done, I guess. That's fine. If that's the way you like to work, if you like to type stuff in and wait on loading screens and get your code out and review it, that's a way to do programming. that's fine yeah and it's it's literally fine i'm actually like i sound super sarcastic but like that's literally fine no but that's literally fine would be if this was a 10 billion dollar industry if they were selling it as like the equivalent of virtualization or like some side thing to the greater cloud compute infrastructure not the entire future revenue engine because it isn't yeah that no i mean i and and so i you know i run a business and And I think that, so a thing that startup people say is they say like, you have product market fit, which is like, oh, your product is good.
53:56Yeah. If like one of the criteria is if it went away today, would your users like throw a fit? Yeah. Would you throw a fit if ChatGPT got uninstalled from your phone? You would not. But like, you know, would the general person be that upset? And I don't think they would. I think that there would be a contingent of people who'd be very upset. If you have a like parasocial, I don't know if that's the right word. If you're like in love with your GPT, then that would be like a death in your family. And that's very sad for you. Which would be horrible. And indeed they, but it's like, I've been saying this for a while.
54:27It's like, and I say it to boosters a lot. It's like, if this disappeared, would your life change? Would it really change that much? And like, well, I used it for baby names. I've used it for, it's like. You named your baby after that? No, I didn't. I'm just saying like, if you. If you got a baby name from chat GPT, that's. That's tough. Yeah. That's really bad. that the more that was said to me by a booster the more i think about it i'm like brother one day your child is gonna hear this because all they do is they sell a book called like the baby name book and it has like a list of names in it i don't fucking know read some books like just think about it yeah i'm gonna one of the most important choices the identity of a future human i'm gonna send it to incorrect google search yeah it's it's depressing but it's also quite funny because i I feel like this era has really revealed who just doesn't know anything about fucking it.
55:18The people who are just like will believe anything or will just believe that they are smart at something because a machine told them they are. Yeah. That they got this. You got this. You got this. So someone online posted, I can't wait for the day when there's an AI agent that'll tell me when my friend's birthdays are. Fuck. There's no other way to do that. There's no way to do that. I don't have. Like some kind of calendar? No. Oh, no, it's got to be a reminder. And so that's like, that's what's happening now is that in the like startup space or just people building technology, it's like, well, we're going to get or if you like watch the ads on the NFL or whatever, it's like you are going to agent is going to do the thing that software is supposed to do.
56:00Like software. So like I got sold at one point accounting software. Right. That was AI. Right. The AI is going to categorize your transactions. Sure. Can't do it. I bought I was at a conference and it was you know whatever May 20th May 21st May 22nd I go to Starbucks I go to pizza I go to thing they're all travel related expenses one is travel and then the Starbucks is client conversation that's what I decided client conversation and so I I had a meeting with this the founder of the thing and I was like dude like what are you what is it what is this what did they say well they were just like oh you know sometimes it makes mistakes we should get on that Fuck yeah.
56:40Thank you. That's my accountant. Yeah. My whole thing is, I know, I think with all of this AI coding stuff in the big tech realm, something's going to break. Something really, but someone's going to do something stupid. Yeah. Well, so back to Replit. I mean, I think that they, I kind of hope that they're, I don't know if I hope that they're first to go. I mean, whatever. They're nice people working there. So that's the unfortunate thing is there are nice people working at these companies. People with jobs, like it will involve people. Like I don't, I wouldn't want to ask for people to get laid off who are hardworking people.
57:15And some of them are like cool scientists who have studied hard and they're like nice people. And it's the grim part of all this is like, people are going to lose fucking jobs. I mean, it's the executives who, you know, obviously pissed me off for just lying through their teeth, right? I mean, those people deserve to, but you know, they're never actually going to have a bad outcome happen to them. Which is why we need to write things to put their name, because at some point there needs to be a record of this. Of course, yeah. So I'm going to wrap it there. Charlie, where can people find you? So I have a blog, blog.charliemeyer.co, which is like where kind of my writings go, but I'm also trying to set up a newsletter.
57:51So that's csmeyer.substack.com, and my name is spelled M-E-Y-E-R. Hell yeah. And I, of course, am Ed Zitron. You can find me on the internet at google.com. That's where I live. I will put all the links to Charlie's stuff, of course, in the episode notes, but it's good for you to hear it now. and yeah, should have a monologue coming up this week. I know I did an announcement where I said I was going to have a big story. That is on hold, not because anything went wrong, but because the scale of the information I got has changed dramatically. When I eventually talk about this, it'll be a lot of fun.
58:23Otherwise, catch you soon.
58:33Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit.
59:31Thank you so much for listening.
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From the publisher
Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York City. Ed is joined in-studio by founder and writer Charlie Meyer to talk about the BS of vibe coding, why the valley went so crazy about scaling laws, and the realities of AI coding.
https://blog.charliemeyer.co/
https://csmeyer.substack.com/
Code Doesn’t Happen To You - https://csmeyer.substack.com/p/code-doesnt-happen-to-you
The Trillion Dollar Chart (scaling laws piece) - https://blog.charliemeyer.co/the-trillion-dollar-chart/
Replit’s Existential Problem - https://blog.charliemeyer.co/replits-existential-problem/
Want to support me? Get $10 off a year’s subscription to my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/w08jbm4jwg it would mean a lot!
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