GianFabien

We have to remember that VCs are investing other people's money. So an AI startup could be hyped up to $1T level, just for the bragging rights.

I vaguely recollect that in Unix v5 as distributed to universities by Western Electric in 1976, there was a chdir command. Which if only the first 3 chars were compared would have been like chd. But that's almost a half a century ago ... memories do get corrupted, e.g. by CP/M.

Eliza was there in 1966.

For those are late to the party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Musk's comments reflect upon what is wrong with our education system. Exams are about assessing students' ability to regurgitate what they have had to read / study. When you look at the typical exam, you'll notice that creativity and synthesis from first principles is rarely tested.

Musk claiming AI being at a PhD level reveals that he has absolutely no idea as to what gaining a PhD entails. In summary: A significant contribution to the body of knowledge. The antithesis of what can be determined by regurgitating what has already been written about any topic.

>In each of the three companies that survived, it was the founders, not hired CEOs that drove the transition.

This is how VCs destroy businesses by bring in adult supervision. CEOs are not incentivized to play the long game.

The difference between the mobility & transportation industry, whether it by carriage and horse, or motor car, was that it was in demand by 99% of the population. AI, on the other hand, is only demanded by say 5%-10% of the population. How many people truly want an AI fridge or dishwasher? They just want fresh food and clean dishes.

The article is rather misleading considering how often CBT is being offered even by professionals as an avenue of treatment for depression. Are we supposed to consider CBT good, but ChatGPT bad ?

Not that I know of. It would have to be the LinkedIn before it became just another avenue for self-promotion and advertising for courses, seminars, etc.

Anecdotally, it doesn't appear to be any good for job searching. Lots of un-directed random messages from recruiters, but no real job sourcing.

It seems to be the fate of all socially oriented networking sites. They devolve into yet another advertising, spam delivery mechanism.

>letting the AI just generate it while I prompt

But isn't prompting and iterating another way of instructing the computer to do what you want? Perhaps we could view it as a step up in the level of abstraction we work at.

We had similar arguments when high-level languages were introduced. Experienced programmers of that era maintained that they could write better programs in assembly language than in COBOL/FORTRAN/PL-I/Pascal etc. Yet even today we still need core portions of code written in assembler, but not much.

The way I see it: Painters (as in artists) paint with brushes not spray guns.

The industrial scale painting robots work well for painting cars coming off an assembly line, but not for landscapes nor portraits.

Automation (not just AI, but in general) works well for highly structured, repetitious work but not for creative expression.

AFAIK when it comes to using the features of recent CPU architectures, Intel's compilers produce more performant / efficient code than GCC or Clang.

A sufficiently smart compiler requires ever more clever compiler writers who are deeply knowledgeable about the many quirks of the numerous architectures.

"mispelt" is a somewhat archaic British spelling. "mispelled" is more modern.

Unfortunately NO. Consultants own management's thought processes.

If you look at IT history, it goes something like:

    $ -> COBOL & mainframes -> RPG & minicomputers -> RDBMS (DB2, Oracle, Ingress, etc)
    -> ERP (SAP, PeopleSoft, etc) -> CRM (Salesforce, etc) -> ... AI/LLM/ML -> $$$$ -> ?

You don't. But the management has been sold by the smooth fast talking salespeople. Then come the consultants to do the bespoke customization.

Unlike software product development, even when using a foundries chip manufacture requires 7-8 figure (USD) development budgets. That is per iteration. Unlike JS development there isn't massive volumes of internet resources to train LLMs on to produce usable RTL, etc code.

When you study the lives of successful entrepreneurs, you might notice that most didn't set out to build a business. They identified an opportunity in the guise of a problem that could be solved with technology of the day. The produced a solution and lots of other people had the same problem and were willing to pay for the solution.

Folks who just want to make a lot of money become stock brokers, merchant bankers or venture capitalists and "invest" other people's money in the efforts of the problem solvers.

The foregoing brings to mind an article I read a long time ago about JPL using Lisp and "patching" some probe when it was a very long way away.

On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt.

I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.

AI is a new addition to the technological toolkit used to solve problems.

B2B sales has always been the problem solving business. Define the problem, demonstrate how your solution makes more money or saves money. Price your solution at some viable fraction of the value you deliver.

So AI is part of your magic sauce. It might make some solutions feasible that require that capability.

Another suggestion: pick up the phone and talk to your prospects. eMails get lost in the volumes being received. The spam filters might be rejecting everything that has AI/ML/LLM etc in it.

Seems to me that CloudFlare are a bit slow changing their policies. AI bots have been scraping the interwebs for a long time. Perhaps my understanding is naive, but I would think that only new content (hopefully not AI generated) is now being scraped.

OK, I'm not in the cohort you are addressing. After 20+ years in industry, I went back to academia and got my PhD in SE at one of Australia's top unis.

Nothing really changed. Ageism is still a hurdle. While I was in academia my industry contacts have gone stale. Agencies that used to source excellent contracts fail to connect with requirements which are overly specific, e.g. Java, or SAP, or whatever. Having a higher level of knowledge together with decades of experience is not competitive in face of outsourced resources from the big international consulting firms.

I have friends who work/worked for top law firms, consulting firms, some are medical doctors. Most are overworked, burnt out, frustrated with increasingly bureaucratic managements, facing relationship issues, nursing a variety of addictions.

My only piece of advice is: optimize your life for quality not income. Prioritize your health, happiness and relationships.

I would like to add one tip that works well for me.

First time is always very difficult. Identify recurring or comparable events. Over time you will meet some people you already know. Remembering some details from earlier encounters will build rapport. Likewise people will remember you from previous encounters. But, beware of the trap of only talking with those whom you already know. For every event, target to form at least a couple of new connections.

The ginormous computer companies don't target programmers, they want ever more users aka consumers. Apple is a good example, their products are increasingly difficult to program yet increasingly polished to appeal to the under-informed buying public.

We only need to look at how BASIC (MS) and HyperCard (Apple) were eliminated in order to remove easily accessible end-user programming. wrt spreadsheets, only a tiny minority of operators use the macro or language binding features.

I shudder at new motor vehicles being ever more software based. On this basis of any recognized bug to lines of code metric, hundreds of faults are lurking therein.

>In the strict sense, ambition [0] is an inordinate love of honor.

I wasn't familiar with that connotation of "ambition", yet it immediately rings the bell when thinking of many folks who loudly and frequently talk about their "ambition"; all talk, no walk.

All of the above +

Start looking for a new role that is better aligned with your expectations. You may find it harder than you expect. In which case, you might be glad you didn't burn your bridges in a pique over AI mandates by the CEO & CTO.

The word "ambition" comes with a variety of connotations.

>There are doers and there are talkers.

There are those who use their ambition to define a goal and then work tirelessly to achieve it. Think of the mountaineer who plans and trains for decades to eventually ascend Mt Everest.

Then there are those who share their ambition by talking about it. Seeking recognition, etc for "being ambitious". Staying with the mountaineer theme, those who refuse to climb a lesser mountain as not being important enough to expend their precious talents upon. It is these folks that if they somehow make enough money in some form, end up chartering a helicopter and sherpas to climb Mt Everest.

I've worked on installation of several SAP systems, most multi $M. Based on this limited subset I offer the following:

  * You need to have experienced SAP *technicians* on board. It is far too big and complex to learn as required.

  * In every case one of the Big 5 consulting firms were involved. Learn to work effectively with them. Be mindful of the fact that they might see you as a competitor that cuts into *their* billable hours.

  * SAP documentation is horrendous. It is massive. Often misleading. Version and configuration details can easily lead you astray.

  * Customization to client's requirements is the norm. These in turn are typically even worse documented (if at all).

  * As much as you might wish to avoid it, you need to work with Oracle, DB2, etc database vendors too.

  * The hardware configurations are often bizarre.  Especially when deployed in clusters with fall-back, etc.

I hope you have a VC with deep pockets and lots of patience. Your first paying client could easily become a huge time and effort sink.

The problem with the Windows home computer vision was that it comprised of a bulky beige box with numerous power and data leads snaking out of it and a monstrous CRT based monitor (usually on top) and a huge clacky keyboard. Typically taking 6+ sq ft of table/bench space.

Today's tablets are far more convenient to locate where they are needed and portable as well.

It appears to me that the vision has transmuted into small Linux boxen running HomeAssistant and other services being accessible by any laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc around the home.

Tip note: instead of chucking old (Android) smartphones in a drawer to be forgotten, update Chrome on them, configure WiFi and use them as general purpose thin-clients.

In the world of mainframes and minicomputers there were several 36bit machines. They were chosen because you could pack 6x6bit char codes into one word. Yes, back then ASCII was entirely just the uppercase subset. Off hand I can't recall exactly how EBCDIC and 80 col card codes were mapped.

There are literally 100s of text editors, so it really is more a matter of taste and preferences. However, to the best of my knowledge, emacs with eLisp is unlikely to be eclipsed on any of your points.