916 karma · joined February 22, 2016
all three major remaining players in the mem sector have already tried in the past to collude for memory price fixing.
this is the first time I'm rooting for chinese chip tech to reach more or less parity.
The fact that there are tentatives to identify what it might be does not ammegliorate the fact that at it's core (pun intented) Dark matter is something to make equations fit without any other thought behind it or whether there might be several things behind it or god forbid that we juddge the equations themselves. I mean we got relativity because of a minor discord with newtonian Laws. (the orbit of Mercury). just a tiny percentage of obeservable behaviour at that time but it was a different time. a time where you could bring down the existing science of the day for a tiny percentage and now we accept 90% observation disaccordance (dark energy+dark matter) with what the equation require.
it costs you nothing to install/adopt an AI chat bot and it's being force fed to everyone at head turning loss in order to justify the push.
The only one that is really investing is SoftBank who is pushing for a faster IPO so they hope to make a profit on that and again Google does not offer that opportunity
With LLMs this phase becomes worse. we speedup 10x the poc time, we slow down almost as much in the next phases, because now you have a poc of 10k lines that you are not familiar with at all, that have to pay way more attention at code review, that have to bolt on security as an afterthought (a major slowdown now, so much so that there are dedicated companies whose business model has become fixing Security problems caused by LLM POCs). Next phase, POCs are almost always 99% happy path. Bolt on edge case as another after thought and because you did not write any of those 10k lines how do you even know what edge cases might be neccesary to cover? maybe you guessed it rigth, spend even more time studing the unfamiliar code.
We use LLM extensivly now in our day to day, development has become somewhat more enjoyable but there is, at least as of now, no real increase in final delivry times, we have just redestributed where effort and time goes.
So Tomorrow when this "startup" will need to come out of their money burning phase, like every startup has to sooner or later, that cost will increase, because there is no other monetising avenue, at least not for anthropic that "wilL never use ads".
at 20k this "might" be a reasonable cost for "the project", at 200k it might not.
in the current scenario of contract works, the employee is getting all the negative effects of changing a job without any upside.
of course I am not talking about complete US style firing, but something in the middle. The option to fire with adequate notice let's say 3 months and adequate compensation, let's say 3 months of compensation after finishing your time. This way, the employee has 6 months of job Hunting, (I think that is a sweet spot to make it reasonable for both the company and the employee)
There are plenty of workers that would not mind carring a little more risk in those companies for better pay, and those companies could offer better pay if not made to jump through loops.
Classic Example is the "Consultant" contracts.
Companies are paying through their nose to hire "consultants" because it's the easiest way they can try a new idea that might not work.
Company A pays Company B 1k/day for that "consultant", Company B does not have enough capacity so gets that "Consultant" from Company C for 700/day. Company C does the same and gets the consultant from Company D for 500/Day. Company D actually employs the consultant and pays him 200/Day. In this whole useless chain build to avoid the "can not fire even if your projects doesn't work" Both Company A and the actual Employee are losing big, Both would be much better having a direct contract for 500/day with the understading that this might not work after all.
Notice that for that Employee, stability is not there even now. yes he continues to be employed by Company D When Company A stops the contract but he is effectivly moved to another Contract with Company X. he is effectivly changing Jobs, new reposnsabilities, new collegues, new rules etc. only in the eyes of the state he is not changing jobs.
Right now, most enterprises are experimenting with different LLMs and once they chose they will be locked for a long time. If they cant can't chose because their coding agent doesn't let them they be locked to that.
The value of a good engineer is his current-context judgment. Something that LLMs can not do Well.
Second point, something that is being mentioned occasionally but not discussed seriously enough, is that the Dead Internet Theory is becoming a reality. The amount of good, professionally written training materials is by now exhausted and LLMs will start to feed on their own slop. See How little the LLM's core competency increased in the last year even with the big expansion of their parameters.
Babysitting LLM's output will be the big thing in the next two years.
The difference is that there is an engineer in the middle who can judge if the important information is provided or not as input.
1. for a LLM "the button must be blue" has the same level of importance as "the formula to calculate X is..."
2. failing faster and iterating is good thing if the parameters of failing are clear which is not always the case with vibecoding, especially when done by people with no prior experience in developing. plenty of POCs build with vibecoding have been presented with no aparent failure in their happy path but with disastrous results in edge cases or with disastrous Security etc.
3. where previously, familairity with the codebase and especially the "history of changes" gave you context about why some workarounds were put into place, these are things that are lost to a LLM. Vibecoding a change to an existing system risks removing those "special workarounds" that keep in mind much more than the current context of the specifications or prompt.
Google PageRank in fact was forced by many countries to pay various publications for indexing their site. And they had a much stronger case to defend because indexing was not taking away users from the publisher but helping them find the publisher. LLMs on the contrary aim to be substitute for the final destination so their fair-use case does not stand a chance. In Fact just last week Anthropic Settled for 1.5B for books it has scrapped.
go buy some servers, put any github lookalike service in there and you are completely free to run with Node v1 if you really want.