alt Hacker NewsThe best general argument I've heard against the bitter lesson is. If the bitter lesson is true? How come we spend so many million man hours a year of tweaking and optimizing software systems all day long? Surely its easier and cheaper to just buy a rack of servers.
Maybe if you have infinite compute you don't worry about software design. Meanwhile in the real world...
Not only that but where did all these compute optimized solutions come from? Oh yeah millions of man hours of optimizing and testing algorithmic solutions. So unless you are some head in the clouds tenured professor just keep on doing your optimizations and job as usual.
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The solution to the puzzle is that "the bitter lesson" is about AI software systems, not arbitrary software systems. If you're writing a compiler, you're better off worrying about algorithms, etc. AI problems have an inherent vagueness to them that makes it hard to write explicit rules, and any explicit rules you write will end up being obsolete as soon as we have more compute.
This is all explained in the original essay: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
Because the Even Bitterer Lesson is that The Bitter Lesson is true but not actionable. You still have to build the inefficient ”clever” system today because The Bitter Lesson only tells you that your system will be obliterated, it doesn’t tell you when. Some systems built today will last for years, others will last for weeks, others will be obsoleted before release, and we don’t know which are which.
I’m hoping someday that dude releases an essay called The Cold Comfort. But it’s impossible to predict when or who it will help, so don’t wait for it.