ryandvm

Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work.

Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*.

Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.

It's a fair question, but it irritates me because it suggests that we should accept the self-destruction of vast swaths of the population in the name of perfect liberty.

The reality is that we have a lot of institutions that prey on consumers' biology in a way that is overpowering for the average individual. Social media, ragebait news, and junk food are good examples of legal products that hijack human tendencies for the purpose of commercial exploitation.

We do not allow unrestricted access to opiates because the average person does not have the fortitude required to resist addiction. It's becoming increasingly clear that some of these media products are able to induce drug-like dependency - and harm.

Fortunately, for the media products, I think the answer is fairly obvious. Sitting at the bottom of all this is advertising. Meta needs people looking at their screens 6 hours a day because they don't make money from subscriptions, they make their money per-view from the advertisers. FOX News or MSNBC are the same, if you're not holding your iPad with white knuckles wondering how democracy is going to end, they're not making money.

I dunno. Billionaires are wont to pick up a lot of fanciful special interests like rockets or climate change or ending world hunger, but Brian Johnson deciding that he's going to devote his fortune to his own immortality is like 7 red flags rolled into one - not to mention that it's like 50% of the comic book villain arcs.

Because I haven't been allowed to program for 6 months. Now I'm just an AI manager.

I think software "engineering" is far more susceptible to fads than other engineering disciplines. Best practices in engineering evolve with respect to advances in material sciences, whereas best practices in software engineering are mostly just vibes and reactions.

* Object oriented / functional * Thick client, thin client * Blockchain * NoSQL vs relational * Enterprise SOA * Framework churn

This industry is continually rediscovering ancient paradigms and revisiting them in a way that would drive normal engineers nuts. I suspect it's because software engineering doesn't actually have requirements around licensure and education that slow and stabilize the arrow of progress.

Nobody in this industry with a modicum of applicable expertise believes that orbital data centers make sense financially. Like colonizing Mars and most of Elon's pipe dreams, it's not the stated goal they believe in, it's getting fabulously wealthy from fat government contracts along the way.

Once you understand this about Musk, you realize that everything he is involved with works that way.

No joke. I go to the gym a couple times a week so that I'll maintain mobility and won't injure myself as I age - unfortunately 80% of my injuries come from the gym.

I dunno. I would be surprised if a 30 year old telecommunications network is going to be technically competitive with a SpaceX's LEO network that is still launching satellites as we speak.

How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?

because X is a dumb name

Nobody (with money to invest) actually believes that SpaceX or Tesla will ever catch up to their valuations. People investing in things like this only believe that somebody else believes it.

This will continue to work until they run out of morons willing to buy a stock with a PE of 300 at which point it will contract spectacularly.

Yeah. I love how the guy behind DOGE has benefited more from US federal largess than any other person on Earth.

You're right, but it's not just Microsoft.

I've been doing software engineering for 20+ years. I've been at a lot of different companies and at almost every single one I'm always kind of flabbergasted at how shabby the engineering is. I think maybe ONCE in my career did I work somewhere that I was proud of the engineering we were doing and it was a 18 month consulting gig at a startup with 3 engineers.

This isn't hubris, I am part of the problem. Too few engineers working with overly vague requirements with not enough time always results in the same thing. We are all churning out products we should be embarrassed about.

Microsoft might be the largest, most flagrant example, but code base entropy is a rampant force of nature. It is everywhere. Google Home gets steadily worse every week. How? They have like 100,000 engineers. Can they not spare a dozen of them to keep that product from being abject shit?

Is there a solution? I don't know, but maybe LLMs replacing 80% of us is exactly what we deserve.

It is now significantly harder to figure out who understands the systems and is using AI effectively and who doesn't know shit and is just slinging LLM copypasta around. Before 2025, the underperformers/coasters were at least relatively identifiable by the paucity of their contributions. Now all of the sudden every single engineer is filing PRs, code reviews, technical design documents, and every other artifact under the sun with perfect formatting and at least superficial plausibility. This is mostly due to incredible pressure from the C-level for every engineer to be using as much AI as possible, but it's also just a game theory respopnse because it's in every engineer's best interest to be as prolific as possible.

We are absolutely drowning in documentation and code that seems legit and the only recourse is to lean on AI to help process the sheer quantity of it. I have a feeling that the fallout from this phase of the industry is going to be an exotic form of technical debt that is remarkable mostly in its enormity.

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None of this would have happened if Anthropic had just bought a few million dollars worth of Trumpcoin :melting_face:

“It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?” -Norm MacDonald

Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.

Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.

I like how 15 years on, we're not even pretending that blockchain has practical uses besides buying drugs and gambling.

There's a certain refreshing clarity in this current kleptocratic moment - everyone is just openly engaged in fraud. Okay, I guess that's better than pretending they weren't.

Same recipe as the Mars colonization. There is absolutely zero chance of a self-sustaining colony on Mars in the next 50 years, but boy will he get rich if we try...

I dunno, data centers in space seems even more outlandish than P2P space travel. The math on the orbital data center idea indicates that these things would need hundreds of thousands of square meters of radiative cooling. Absolutely bonkers that anyone is falling for this shit.

I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex.

I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...

I'd say they are especially not safe. Nobody believes they can replace everyone with AI like the AI Kool-Aid drinking leadership.

Wild that the guy whose decisions are directly responsible for driving profitability into the ground is somehow the reason these companies have 300+ PE valuations.

I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and having it produce plans that you then have to refactor multiple times. It's impressive that LLMs can do this, but it's not particularly enjoyable. I guess I was a "writing code was the fun part" guy.

Semi-related, but I really want to see the long term maintenance outcomes of all code being produced by these software engineers that were apparently just closeted project managers. I feel like having 50% of the engineers in this industry just telling Claude Code, "yeah that looks good to me" 150 times a day is going to result in an incredible amount of software rewriting.

100%

LLMs didn't make me rewrite my understanding of intelligence. It made me wonder just how intelligent anybody is.

"It's not smart, it's just predicting the next most likely token."

It is not at all clear to me that perhaps that is exactly what I'm doing too. I have no idea where my sentences are going. Try to express one of your own thoughts backwards. It sure seems like we're all just predicting the next most likely token...

"Mind rape" is obviously an attention grabbing way of putting it, but I tend to agree that advertising is essentially theft.

It goes something like this:

   * You only have a finite amount of attention. You cannot obviously "pay attention" to everything around you.
   * When someone takes your attention, they are consuming some of your finite resource.
   * Taking something from someone else is the very definition of theft.

Now obviously we have social norms around attention that allow for a reasonable amount of this non-consensual attention consumption. Things like, make your signage inoffensive, unobtrusive, and generally placed in a way that it is a net positive (the hot dog prices should be near the hot dog vendor).

But what we don't have, at least in the US, are strong laws and norms that protect people from this. Why does an lawyer get to steal my attention on the beach with a plane dragging a banner? Why does a storefront get to blast an ad at me when I walk by? Does anybody really think these examples are a net societal benefit?

And like Google and Meta, these companies are going to morph into advertising giants. Advertising is an economic black hole and it eats everything that comes close.

I disagree. We are currently in a weird period where these frontier AI companies are losing tons of money even on the subscription-based AI models. It's just too compute intensive and there's no way most people are going to be buying the kind of hardware required to run $20 worth of inference every day.

Sadly - it's going to be ads. Advertising is going to get in there and enshittify the whole thing because as always, advertising income is too easy and too plentiful for any company to resist.

Right now the models are fairly agnostic, but we are a hair-breadth away from ChatGPT responding with, "the right tool for this job is a circular saw - something like the Milwaulkee M18, which happens to be on sale at Home Depot this weekend."

Especially when it comes to CEOs. I have worked at companies where the CEOs literally offered nothing but the skill of being friends with other CEOs.