I recently bought the DVD of Trainspotting, after finding no legitimate way to watch it online. The DVD cost less than an online rental would have. A lost world of owning your own things, and we only lost it yesterday.
That's absolutely what's happening already: write for me for the writer, summarise this for me for the reader. At some point it will become clear how absurdly wasteful we're being (right now, we're being paid to ignore that waste).
That's rather the point: the UK has been great at educating a very narrow sliver of its population, decided at 18 years old. Pointing to Oxbridge as a success story is very much like pointing to London as a world city. Yes, it's world class -- now look at the rest of the country.
The UK has been chronically bad at providing jobs and training for its young people. I saw that 20 years ago when I was there. That is a key reason, perhaps the primary reason, for its long term productivity malaise. And the response is to lean into a technology that will make this situation profoundly worse? It's another lazy quick fix that is neither quick nor a real fix. The UK needs to invest in its people, not funnel yet more money to big tech.
The etiquette, even at the bigtech place I work, has changed so quickly. The idea that it would be _embarrassing_ to send a code review with obvious or even subtle errors is disappearing. More work is being put on the reviewer. Which might even be fine if we made the further change that _credit goes to the reviewer_. But if anything we're heading in the opposite direction, lines of code pumped out as the criterion of success. It's like a car company that touts how _much_ gas its cars use, not how little.
The executive class are out to get as much as they can as quickly as they can while the music plays, then retire to whatever luxury boltholt they can prepare. It's FIRE with private islands, and without even a figleaf of noblesse oblige any more.
A stat that shocked me recently is one third of people in the UK use chat bots for emotional support: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6xl3ql3v0o. That's an enormous society-wide change in just a couple of years.
I recall chatting with an older friend recently. She's in her 80s, and loves chatgpt. It agrees with me! She said. It used to be that you had to be rich and famous before you got into that sort of a bubble.
And here perhaps was the greatest mistake the software profession made! Not making ourselves into a real profession, with actual accountability. It was terribly convenient for so long not to have consequences when things went wrong. It's less convenient now.
Time will tell! Certainly AI is unlocking a lot of stuff, a huge number of people who did not have the time or the special skills before to create games will do so. I can think back to my own start in making computer games, using Amos on the Amiga (vastly easier than C or assembly).
It's a separate question whether anything actually good will come out of it. It's incredibly unfair to look at any particular project and say: what, another clone of this or that done idea? Very few things are original in any time. Certainly I didn't make anything particularly original all those years ago. But, soon, there should be really something, if there's really something there. If it's not just burning tokens to copy older ideas. And we'll know it when we see it, this amazing thing that would not have existed otherwise.
"Talk to me about Loom!" That was my introduction to it.
I believe it was reasonably popular back in the day, made money at least. Now it would be almost avant guarde in its slowness I guess. You can't even double click to run. The popular art of yesteryear becomes the high art of today...
I don't think I was ever happier as a programmer than I was in the early 90s, well before university, with no thought of the internet, writing games on my Amiga.
Incidentally, I recently replayed Loom, from a bit before that era. It's still a lovely, wonderful game! Such a shame the fan-made sequel (Forge) seems to have died.
I went to school at what I realise was an unusual interregnum between computerisation. Too young for the BBC micro (there was one, in the library, at my secondary school, that was never turned on), too old for PCs or Archimedes or whatever came later in the 90s. In retrospect, not a bad thing.
> investors are simultaneously punishing hyperscaler stocks because AI capex might generate weak returns, while destroying software stocks because AI adoption will be so pervasive it renders all existing software obsolete. Both cannot hold simultaneously.
I don't understand this point. Can't it be possible that the ultimate effect is to devalue, hugely, software? As in it can totally both be true that AI capex has weak returns and at the same time most SaaS companies go bankrupt. To take an analogy: if ever we manage to successfully mine asteroids, and find some vast quantity of platinum, it could both be true that every existing platinum miner loses their shirt, and also that the value of platinum sinks so far that the asteroid mining company cannot cover its costs.
Not to be that curmudgeon (who am I kidding), but it's made reviewing code very much less enjoyable, and I review more changes than I write. Engineers merrily sending fixes they barely understand (or, worse, don't think they need to understand) for the rest of us to handle, and somehow lines-of-code has become a positive metric again. How convenient!
Love it! My personal sites tend to start hand-written, evolve into a bash script, occasionally advance into python, but mostly just stay in bash, because it's convenient, doesn't need to please anyone else (nor would it!), and is already built for text processing into files. (I write a lot of scrappy shell scripts for my job too. I guess I should start asking an AI to generate whatever I want directly instead. Cobbling together a script is more fun though...)
> If a lawyer wants 500€ per half hour of advice, whereas some AI tool is almost zero-cost, even if the advice may only be up to 80% of the quality of a good lawyer, then there is no contest here. AI wins, even if it may arguably be worse
Interesting example, because when I look at it I think of course I'm going to pay for the advice I can trust, when it really matters that I get advice I can trust. 20% confidently wrong legal advice is worse than no advice at all. Where it gets difficult is when that lawyer is offloading their work to an AI...
And yet, imagine it's 100 million jobs, at 100K per job. That's 10 trillion dollars a year, well worth the investment! Except that it won't be 100K per job that AI companies will capture, it'll be 2K. So that's not 10 trillion dollars a year, it's 200 billion. Which is about what a big tech company makes in advertising already.
Takes me back! I always wanted to live in a 30s mansion block when I lived in London, and did once look around a flat in the building pictured in Belsize park, the one which recalls the sort of ocean liner a Wodehouse character would use to travel to New York. And it was beautiful and the rent not too dear. (This was around 2010.) And it also smelled strongly of mildew.
It was, in retrospect, a weird time. Because absolutely yes, everyone knew it was unsustainable and could not logically last forever, yet I think it lasted long enough that we forgot that part, and got used to it, and here we are. Very similar (intimately connected in fact) to the low interest rate world we also started to think was normal.
Small Gods will always be my favourite (not least because I got mine signed by the man himself, many years ago in Dorchester. Though isn't the joke that he signed so many books that it's the unsigned ones that are more valuable?). For starters though, I'd pitch Wyrd Sisters or Guards! Guards! Both are wonderfully constructed, early, but late enough that he's stopped satirising fantasy novels and has started satirising the world.
Lots of interesting replies here. I'd question the premise though. At least where I grew up, programming was a niche interest. Plenty of people I knew had Amigas and Atari STs; very few had any interest in programming them. It wouldn't surprise me that just as a small proportion of people back then did learn to write their own programs (or tried to), a similar proportion today are delving into XCode and Android Studio - and Unity and all the rest, and doing so for free, with a wealth of tutorials.
I had to read the email I got about this several times because it didn't seem to make sense. Hang on, my New York Times subscription is going to end in September and then... that's it? The Kindle is wonderful for reading newspapers on, and now - what? And why? I'm sure that someone has a very good reason for the change. I'm also sure that I've never seen a deprecation so poorly communicated.
I'm returning to my childhood home in a couple of days after many years away, and now I'm wondering about searching the attic for my A1200, and whether any of the games I wrote for myself way back when, in Amos and then Amiga E, are still recoverable. Probably not; if the disks exist they're almost thirty years old, and probably best kept running in some corner of my memory. I'll try though.