The new software distribution

First, open this page, the con­fig­u­rator for var­ious fla­vors of PyTorch — a grid that will be VERY familiar to some of you, as it is to me!

Then, scroll down to the bottom of this page, a pre­sen­ta­tion of a new AI-ready UI library. Click “copy prompt”, and notice with appre­ci­a­tion the little matrix of options that appears, to tailor the block of text you will immi­nently paste into a thread with an AI agent.

There you have it: the old soft­ware distribution, and the new.

It’s all just eye-wateringly weird, beyond (or off to the side of) any pre­dic­tion made by ANYONE as recently as five years ago. Yet this fluid, organic capa­bility was always there, latent in language, in Piles of Text. Well — maybe not always … but cer­tainly since the year 2000. We had enough of a Pile by then to get started.

I think it’s great. The installer, the .tar, the .msi, the .dmg, has been superceded by, essentially, the post­card.

(Hey, that sounds like a fun way to sell soft­ware, doesn’t it? Pay $10 dollars, and within the week you’ll receive a post­card in the mail con­taining instal­la­tion instruc­tions along with a unique key. Take a pic­ture and show it to your AI agent. Then put it in a drawer for easy reinstal­la­tion.)