Unreliable Systems

Imagine the compiler randomly removing
10% of your code, and you dont know
which 10%. What kind of programs are you
going to write? Or each row from your
database has 10% random values in it.
How would you use your data?

How do you build good products with
those building blocks? OpenAI's API is
down 3% of the time, sometimes it's down
for hours, sometimes a request takes 1
minute, sometimes 10 minutes,
GPT/Gemini1.5 hallucinate like crazy,
one extra word in the prompt might make
it produce fundamentally different
results, there are new models and
released every 2 days and everyone
claims they are better than the rest.

We have to rethink everything from the
ground up, from the atoms of those new
systems to the user experience. What
kind of atoms could we use so that we
can exploit the exponential development
and not betray our users by showing them
hallucinated garbage?

Be ready to throw away everything you
know, challenge yourself and think
deeply how get the maximum of the 90%.
Spend quality time learning from first
principles, and most importantly be
curious and humble, it does not matter
where you are in your career, we are all
new to this. 

What an exciting time! For the first
time in 70 years we actually have
computers that can do something for us.