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I think that that would have been Apple’s positioning for their car project, but that seems to have been axed.

Maybe they’ll bring it back someday, I hope they do, but it’s almost guaranteed that governments will rain down regulation on them for entering too many markets at once—and yes, for building operating systems to which Apple refuses to build a backdoor to the encryption.

First comment is explicitly directed at schools, and I expressed approval of the petitioning educators

Feel free to take further offense, but I’m not expecting any substantial replies

You’re making this about yourself

Costs the failing students money and mental health issues, which are bad, if you care about those things

I know, but your comment also in no way implies that you are taking into account the bigger picture here, where the criticism is directed at the admissions process, and wherein universities are honestly at fault.

If university-level classes have pre-requisites that should be taught in high school, then universities should screen for that and disqualify students who do not have the required competency. They should not be taking the students' money, admit them in the institution, and then let them enroll in classes that they are not prepared to succeed in. That's outright extortion. Many of those students have to take on debt to pay for their education, and besides the financial cost, it's a waste of time, and their failures would be mentally crushing and have lifelong repercussions.

I sympathize with educators in that they cannot slow the whole class down, but that's the point: universities shouldn't be putting educators in a position to compromise the teaching. Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing [students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough, because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a student develops an understanding of maths and sciences. For the student, that requires a focused (and in many cases, guided) study of those subject areas and before university, without the stress of catching up to university-level courses that are already being taken at the same time.

What isn’t fair is for schools to take students’ matriculation and set them up for years of debt, apparently without any intention of educating them properly as per your comment. Better for schools to just screen based on standardized test scores

> … why not keep your engineers and deliver 20x the value?

Probably because there isn’t actually an increase in demand for the capabilities of software, and engineers, product managers, and UI/UX designers are justifying the existence of their jobs by complicating software more than necessary.

Anyway, the essence of the article is that a “just say no” engineer is a person who knows how to use and enforce constraints so that complex systems remain manageable in the long-term; and that companies perceive such engineers to be irrelevant as AI coding tools become more mainstream.

I think that that has definitely happened, even with my own employer, but I think that companies of the same mindset just don’t have strong engineering cultures to begin with, and will be natural selected into oblivion during this wave of disruption, which already coincides with a prolonged period of economic uncertainty to begin with.

AI tools are great, but they are only as good as your people’s discernment. If you’re making AI adoption a KPI in your company, you’ve already lost sight of what your business is really about, and you’ll be bankrupt by your token spending before you can beat your competition.

I'm seeing that people have a big issue with the language, but "ultra" doesn't even necessarily mean "total"

Not really, no. That's not even the point. Say for example they're just the same level of security. Then what value does a human even offer to a company if AI can do the same quality of work faster? It's not as if the company benefits from something like "human discernment", because as predicated in this thread, developers exactly have none of that, since they don't care about the security aspect of the VSCode extensions that they use. Might as well lay off the human developers and just use AI for as long as the latter is cheaper. How many people does a company really need to update its VSCode to the version that blocks the malicious extension? Do you need more than one and does that person have to be full-time?

> solves real problems and nothing bad happens most of the time

Aaand this is why AI is taking our jobs and we all rightfully deserve to be laid off. This utter lack of risk awareness and care for quality is what created the need for autonomous agents to dig through and build upon man-made slop.

Honestly, I find it rich that we’re the ones who think that AI is the one that’s producing slop. Give any agent clear harnesses and it’ll produce better code than a human would close to 100% of the time. That’s still as indeterministic as the way you used “most of the time”, but the deviation tends to be smaller and the quality and rigor is much higher.

That’s one person’s opinion, yours, and not the market’s.

Is there room for people who are already in the acceptance phase? We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example.

I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.

Am I crazy, or are these differences between the best models so marginal that you’d get roughly the same performance if you use the same high-quality harness (ie preloaded instructions from md files, including custom skills)?

Show your code, or show you the door. There are so many native Mac and iOS apps out there right now perfectly capable of rendering Markdown and streaming text. You just gotta wonder what is this guy’s excuse.

Affordability of hardware that can run local LLMs is a real factor, too. Not sure when RAM prices are going down, but with everything that’s happening and can happen in the world right now, it doesn’t look like it’ll drop in the near or medium-term

I don’t have anything to add to your comment, but I have no means to bookmark it either other than by replying. You’ve put into words exactly what I think.

Dear god no, I actually want AI to write the code that integrates my unit-testable abstractions into the existing spaghetti. I don’t care how it does it, the thing just needs to work. The moron that wrote the mess didn’t care enough to begin with, why should I? But all work moving forward must only be made of the good stuff

Not silly

Nothing, they’re the same garbage for developers who can’t be bothered to mindfully use AI when writing code, and then complain about mass layoffs

Even just seeing it all in photos is humbling. We really should take better care of our home.

> at major universities and research centres

So not common outside of ivory towers, no?

As someone in this space, I think that devs haven’t realized yet that they can’t just use open source skills or agents out of the box. They likely have intricate rules and restrictions in their industry or company culture that they need to tailor-fit the agent to. They might take a few pointers from what’s out there, but they’d ultimately have to build their own.

An excellent metaphor for this is using third party libraries for a button. You look up what’s available in the open, but then your design or product team has insanely specific behaviors simply not provided by any open source library.

That’s not related to the subject at hand, which is regulation preventing anti-competitive practices in monopolies and market failures. I thought that was clearly established, or you need to be over-prompted

I don’t believe that the government should police what types of computers I can build. I occasionally tinker with hardware myself and have been thinking up ways to build a smartphone differently. If I want to make the device so that it only interoperates with a certain class of items, I would rather build nothing at all than be forced by the government to interop with everything, which is also a costly thing to develop.

I get it that people want more freedom from their iPhones but the thing about consumer devices is that they are an expression of a certain philosophy of how computers should work. Being a walled garden is one such approach. If you don’t agree with how a device operates on principle, you should not buy it—there’s Android or derivatives. You’re also likely to be a power user who’s in an incredible small minority because iPhone sales keep getting better every year and the walled garden approach has market (as in free market) validation.

Now, if your objective is to regulate monopolies, I think that the policing should happen in the supply chain and production side instead of the consumer software side. You don’t have more options than iPhone and Android because big players like Apple and Samsung have captured manufacturing facilities with long-term exclusivity contracts, making innovation in the space prohibitively expensive. But the law shouldn’t dictate what sort of computer innovators are allowed to build.

Lol SwiftUI/Jetpack/WPF aren’t design tools, they’re for writing native UI code. They’re simply not the right tool for building mockups.

I don’t see how design workflows matter in the conversation about cross-platform vs native and RAM efficiency since designers can always write their mockups in HTML/CSS/JS in isolation whenever they like and with any tool of their choice. You could even use purely GUI-based approaches like Figma or Sketch or any photo/vector editor, just tapping buttons and not writing a single line of web frontend code.

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

You’re talking about art, not design.

> someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar

That’s not necessarily what happened though. Apple innovated not out of sheer daring but because they also had the best metaphysical paradigm for GUIs that people could also just intuitively grasp. There was a structural correctness to their approach, underlying all the things that we find visually appealing. In the beginning, Google dared and deviated hard from Apple’s design language to establish their own unique identity, but anyone who’s working in the mobile space would Have noticed that Android coalesced into roughly the same patterns over time because of that structural correctness.

Yes but that’s why you ask it to teach you what it just did. And then you fact-check with external resources on the side. That’s how learning works.

You guys are completely missing the point. It's not about getting your details right. It's about what will be done with you when the AI's inferences are wrong.

The point isn't to get it right. It's about what people with more power and capital than you will do when the AI makes the wrong inferences about you.

That’s not the point being argued either, nor it being perfect. It’s just about Apple’s UI frameworks being more coherent and consistent across all their own platforms, unlike Microsoft. Even Android developers who’ve done a bit of work on iOS easily agree that Apple’s SDKs are far better designed and behave more predictably than Google’s.