blindhippo

I have a feeling the same sentiment will ring true across most of the software industry in the next couple years. LLMs are cool, but they don't perform better than purpose built solutions at scale.

The Supreme Intelligence has entered the chat... My brain has been stuck on that same thought for decades - wouldn't it be great to have a wholly objective, impartial, and independent governing mechanism to limit the influence of power hungry monkeys and their lackeys.

A fantastic low to the ground example of the fundamental problems with human politics is seen in American HOA structures and proliferation. It's utterly amazing to me how insanely corrupt a bog standard HOA can get months into it's inception simply do to base human behavior.

I'll remain bearish on this as well. "Democracy" and collective government has been our species best attempt at this and well...

Dunno about you but I work for a "business" (large company, you've heard of it) and the concept of "High Performer" is synonymous with "best politician". Sure, a lot of theater goes into things, especially dances around "data points", but at the end of the day the top tier goes to the fortunate sons.

In many cases - yes, they have gotten that bad. It's pure fantasy that we live in a free market - there are a handful of companies that own nearly everything, there is very little customer choice or power to "speak with your money".

I do agree though - if one doesn't like the way a company does business, do whatever you can to avoid giving them yours.

I've been using these tools for nearly a year and half on a daily basis. They've become an integral part of my tool box for solving problems.

But writing code was never much more than 35-40% of my job while working for companies/others. Most my time has always gone towards communication, design, and validation. All three of those are not particularly vulnerable to mass AI automation except for the most trivial of scenarios and I have not seen evidence that has changed in over 2 years of so called "improvements".

My "exit plan" ultimately is to be one of the engineers capable of using these tools to scale my impact accordingly so I can focus on higher order problem solving, which ultimately is what is most valuable. I would be more concerned if I was in marketing/sales or frankly middle management.

Maybe this is just "copium" on my part, who knows, this sector is moving fast.

Might work for you, but if I multi task too much, the quality of my output drops significantly. Where I work, that does not fly. I cannot trust any agent to handle anything without babysitting them to avoid going off the rails - but perhaps the tools I have access to just aren't good (underlying model is claude 4.5, so it the model isn't the cause).

I've said this in the past and I'll continue to say it - until the tools get far better at managing context, they will be hard locked for value in most use cases. The moment I see "summarizing conversation" I know I'm about to waste 20 minutes fixing code.

If anything, the AI bubble is reinforcing to me (and hopefully many more people) that the "markets" are anything but rational. None of the investments going on have followed any semblance of fundamentals - it's all pure instinct and chasing hype. I just hope it doesn't tear down the world for the 99% of us unable to actually reap any benefits from it.

AI is basically a toy for 99% of us. It's a long long ways away from the productivity boost people love to claim to justify the sky high valuations. It will fade to being a background tech employed strategically I suspect - similar to other machine learning applications and this is exactly where it belongs.

I'm forced to use it (literally, AI usage is now used as a talent review metric...) and frankly, it's maybe helped speed me up... 5-10%? I spend more time trying to get the tools to be useful than I would just doing the task myself. The only true benefit I've gotten has been unit test generation. Ask it to do any meaningful work on a mature code base and you're in for a wild ride. So there's my anecdotal "sentiment".

Thing is, context management is NOT obvious to most users of these tools. I use agentic coding tools on a daily basis now and still struggle with keeping context focused and useful, usually relying on patterns such as memory banks and task tracking documents to try to keep a log of things as I pop in and out of different agent contexts. Yet still, one false move and I've blown the window leading to a "compression" which is utterly useless.

The tools need to figure out how to manage context for us. This isn't something we have to deal with when working with other humans - we reliably trust that other humans (for the most part) retain what they are told. Agentic use now is like training a team mate to do one thing, then taking it out back to shoot it in the head before starting to train another one. It's inefficient and taxing on the user.

I don't care what kind or style of job - if the balance of power in any labour relationship is overwhelmingly on the employer side, collective action is the only way labour can regain a modicum of negotiating power. To think that the style of job has any bearing on this relationship is naive.

The reports of time saved are so cooked it's not funny. Just part of the overall AI grift going on - the actual productivity gains will shake out in the next couple years, just gotta live through the current "game changer" and "paradigm shifting event" nonsense the upper management types and VC's are pushing.

When I see stuff like "Amazon saved 4500 dev years of effort by using AI", I know it's on stuff that we would use automation for anyways so it's not really THAT big of a difference over what we've done in the past. But it sounds better if we just pretend like we can compare AI solutions to literally having thousands of developers write Java SDK upgrades manually.

Humans (accountants) are non-deterministic, so unsure if an LLM would be better or worse if we threw more effort at the problem.

But in general, I tend to side with the "lets leave the math to purpose built models/applications" instead of generalized LLMS. LLMs are great if you are just aiming for "good enough to get through next quarter" type results. If you need 100% accuracy, an LLM isn't going to cut it.

"Let's knock down social media's walled gardens..."

Links to pay wall trying to get me to pay for some subscription service I've never heard of and would never want to sign up for sight unseen.

mmmhmmm

It could be argued that the emergence of the web and search engines in particular has established this as a common pattern long before AI was around. I'm not convinced that AI represents a dramatic change to this behavior, though the point about anthropomorphizing AI likely acts as a magnifier.

Same things I use it for as well - crap like "update this class to use JDK21" or "re-implement this client to use AWS SDKv2" or whatever.

And it works maybe... 80% of the way and I spend all my time fixing the remaining 20%. Anecdotally I don't "feel" like this really accelerates me or reduces the time it would take me to do the change if I just implemented the translation manually.

I'd suggest this is a sign that most "education" or "work" is basically pointless busy work with no recognizable value.

Perpetuating a broken system isn't an argument about the threat of AI. It's just highlighting a system that needs revitalization (and AI/LLMs is not that tool).

I think this is overestimating the impact of LLMs.

Fact is, even if they are capable of fully replicating and even replacing actual human thought, at best they regurgitate what has come before. They are, effectively, a tutor (as another commentator pointed out).

A human still needs to consume their output and act on it intelligently. We already do this, except with other tools/mechanisms (i.e. other humans). Nothing really changes here...

I personally still don't see the actual value of LLMs being realized vs their cost to build anytime soon. I'll be shocked if any of this AI investment pays off beyond some minor curiosities - in ten years we're going to look back at this period in the same way we look at cryptocurrency now - a waste of resources.

Lazy management, ones that focus on "metrics" and "numbers" rather than actual engagement with their teams/business lines.

I'm only 20% joking here...

Same here - seen it happen most strongly once the company switched from a growth (OrderProductSales optimization) approach to one that maximizes cashflow. Basically a switch from explore to exploit mindset - which cynically can be directly connected to "enshitification" as a philosophy. It's done a number on me since I originally joined the company due to it's "peculiar" culture - something that has long since died.

I do appreciate the other major theme of the announcement today: removal of bureaucracy and pointless layers of management. I'm hoping this will lead to a collapse of some of these silly little empires/kingdoms that L7-L8s have built up for themselves in the past 6 years.

Honestly, it's just easier to block/drop Facebook entirely and actually talk to the people I want to talk to directly.

Sure I miss out on some things, but I still have friends and family and I still talk to them. I won't make any broad moralistic/judgemental statements here, but for me at least I've found this to be a return to a healthier relationship with a number of people.

If that's the root reason, then there is zero reason that footage is open to consumption by the manufacturer (and made generally available to Tesla employees). That is owner data, not company data and it should be stored in a cryptographically secure manner accessible only to the owner themselves. This is entirely possible to implement but it just isn't because it would be forfeiting part of their information asymmetry that Telsa enjoys over it's customers/market.

It's already there, except the ads are baked into most content as "sponsored videos". They make it easy to skip over the ads (seriously, just fast forward 20-60 seconds depending on the video).

For better or worse, the vast majority of my media consumption is youtube these days and of all the subs I pay for, it's the one I get the most value out of. I don't get the cynicism.

What's the alternative here? Just offer the service with minimal ads and just hope people decide to sign up for the ad-free version - a value proposition that makes little sense since the ads are minimal?

They aren't bullying anyone. They are trying to make a business model work as efficiently as possible. Anything that relies on ad revenue is going to be predatory like this.

I gave up trying to use a mouse on OSX years ago (the acceleration curve causes physical pain for me) and leaned into what Apple did right: trackpads. I got an apple trackpad for my desk setup, and otherwise use the built in trackpad on the macbook.

Doesn't help for those who need a mouse device (cad/design/photo-editing, etc), but for what I use it for (software dev/ops work), it's great. Trackpads in a windows ecosystem feel absolutely horrendous to me, so I just use mice there lol.

I think this is a problem with any highly specialized or technical topic. I vaguely recollected what wayland was, but I didn't know why I would care about it and ended up doing similar googling before realizing this news will not matter to me outside of a general technical curiosity.

I encounter the same thing when dealing with code reviews as well - people love to document the WHAT or HOW of things, but rarely if ever consider talking about WHY it matters, or WHO it matters too.

To borrow from a favourite corpo speak: answer the "so what" for the reader to make something actually useful to more people.

Sorry, was mostly just agreeing with you and adding that gender based nonsense is endemic everywhere. It's alienating me across the whole media spectrum.

But when you meet that person who is totally into it, they are gonna be iced out the wazoo in custom made bling.

While I personally would agree with your distinction, I do thing your example demonstrates a relative bias. For most of us, yeah, there is a difference between adding chocolate syrup to ice cream and a buying a 10kUSD piece of jewelry just because.

Yet for many other people, there is little to no practical difference in the value of those two choices. Are rich people some how less pragmatic/objective because 10k is effectively pocket change to them?

My point here is that there is no objective sense of rationality here - it's all relative to the point of the observer, and casting judgement on others from your own particular viewpoint is largely meaningless (and presumptuous).

Try any other bit of social media. Some how my instagram feed (whenever I actually go to use it) is now full of silly "haha my husband is stupid he can't find anything without me" nonsense, or "lol, my wife can't drive or deal with any sort of complex social engagement like getting a car repaired".

Bland judgement based on arbitrary buckets like gender/sex seem to be the norm vs actual, thoughtful discourse.

Yikes, that's quite the binary distinction... Surely there is room between those subjective descriptions of people for "hey, I like this thing even though it's irrational, ok?"

Let people live their lives and you do you. People aren't a "provider mannequin" just because they like to make their partner happy.

And yet these countries still focus on taxing income only, meanwhile a massive mountain of growing untouchable wealth is sitting there, owned by the older generation who supposedly need to be supported with the income generated by the young.

Tax and wealth distribution needs a fundamental rethink going into the next few decades - I really don't have high hopes that the current approaches will work. As you say, they are predicated on high growth scenarios which western nations are no longer experiencing at a macro level.