ryandvm

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.

There's something to be said for the fact that the current crop of plutocrats just show their whole asses.

wat

Tech company leadership gleefully replacing engineers with AI is going to be an incredibly short-lived era. I'll admit I was a little shocked at just how susceptible software engineering was to the brute force of LLMs, but man, wait until they find out just how easy it is for an LLM to do their jobs.

This isn't stopping until it gets all the way up to the asset holders.

Yup. To succeed materially in this world, you need two of the following three: skill, luck, ruthlessness.

I dunno, man. I've been doing this for 20+ years and I think we're at a really important fork in the road where there are two possibilities.

The first is that AI is achieving human-level expertise and capability, but since they're now being increasingly trained on their own output they are fighting an uphill battle against model collapse. In that case, perhaps AI is going to just sort of max out at "knowing everything" and maybe agentic coding is just another massive paradigm shift in a long line of technological paradigm shifts and the tooling has changed but total job market collapse is unlikely.

The other possibility is that we're going to continue to see escalating AI capability with regard to context, information retrieval, and most importantly "cognition" (whatever that means). Maybe we overcome the challenges of model collapse. Maybe we figure out better methodologies for training that don't end up just producing a chatbot version of Stack Overflow + Wikipedia + Reddit. Maybe we actually start seeing AI create and not just recreate.

If it's the latter, then I think engineers who think they are going to stay ahead of AI sound an awful lot like saddle makers who said "pffft, these new cars can only go 5 miles per hour."

With all due respect, nobody deserves this more than the individuals involved.

Unproductive tangent: Why do we call it "hallucinationing" instead of "bullshitting" when that is so clearly what it is?

If I'm talking to a guy that says, "I have a really fast metabolism, that's why I can eat whatever I want", he's not hallucinating - he's full of shit.

Pffft - they didn't need to store the whole UUID, just a hash. Dummies.

I'll just point out that this is exactly the point in the corporate character arc where every company before turns evil.

I never liked the idea of every web site in the world using CloudFlare, but I like it even less now that they're struggling.

Y'all remember COVID?

Everything shut down for 6 months and somehow miraculously the economy just sort of chugged along without much shock until about 2 years later when all the consequences of the COVID aid/stimulus came home to roost.

That is exactly how this will play out.

>> They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.

>As a consumer I just can't possibly be made to care about this.

Not caring that you are not able to effectively use your *telecommunications device* with people that buy a different brand of telecommunications device is wild. Kool Aid is a helluva drug.

I don't know. I suppose it depends on what we're optimizing for, but from what I've observed, the most underrated skill is bullshitting.

I have seen countless engineers just while away the years modestly building and documenting incredible systems. Systems that "just work" for years on end. They never get fired because they're recognized for their value, but they also never get to the top.

Bullshitters, on the other hand, have no ceiling. They are never out of their depth because they transcend skill or accountability. They'll tell you they know everything, they'll tell you nothing is impossible, they'll gossip and disparage everyone else. The best bullshitters are full-on psychopaths and these are the guys that run the world.

Indeed. So much so that the richest CEO of all is spread across so many companies that there's no way he's actually doing any real "work".

I don't know. For as long as I can remember, game dev has had the reputation of being the most sweat-shoppish of all the software engineering disciplines. I have a hard time believing that game devs aren't also going to find themselves being crushed under the CTO imperative to "use AI or else" like the rest of us.

I feel like legislation that resulted in every taxpayer getting an itemized receipt like this would be hugely popular and a massive PR win for the representatives that sponsored it.

I can only conclude that the reason it hasn't been done is because they don't actually want you to know.

Yup. Agile definitely suffers from the "nobody ever tried Communism correctly" argument. As far as I'm concerned Agile is: A) nearly impossible to get right, and B) not particularly helpful at unfucking poorly run projects.

It's definitely not a magic bullet and I suppose the only reason it's had the staying power it has had is because unlike other project management philosophies, it has an extremely profitable "Agile Seminary" ecosystem.

Or at least think you've uncovered deception. It's not clear to me yet that any of these "AI detectors" are reliable, and if they are, it's just an arms race.

Indeed. And with the frontier AI models it's worse than that. You can literally just have them write test cases for the product you want to clone, then set it loose reverse engineering the code base.

That said, all these models are trained on the open source code bases presumably, so it would be interesting to see if AI-blackbox reverse engineering actually holds up in court.

Devastating news - expect the stock to jump 10%.

Free markets don't exist when the political system is engineered for regulatory capture. Look at corporate political spending over the last 30 years. We don't have free markets.

Yup. I'm all for letting people get wealthy.

What I'm not for is letting them rig the rules of the game through unlimited political spending and not having functional social safety nets because we don't want to offend the all the future billionaires-to-be.

Basically, money makes money and at some level you get into infinite money glitch dynasties. I am no longer convinced that allowing that to happen is a good idea.

48 years old and I am 100% feeling this.

Yes, I am much more productive having Claude Code bang out boilerplate back-end code, but honestly I always kind of enjoyed doing it. Now I'm just a micro-manager for an AI.

And honestly, how long will that last? Given that LLMs came out of nowhere to radically redefine my role from software engineer to prompt writer in just a couple years, I have every reason to believe that they're coming for my role as prompt engineer next. (As my CEO surely hopes.)

I'm just glad the timing of the great AI replacement began right when I was nearing burnout anyway.

Yeah, the current Chromecast on an HDMI port is far superior than anything the TV vendors offer. I think you pretty much get access to every service you might want except Apple TV (no surprise, Apple gonna Apple).

There should be a law to require the ability to disable algorithmic customization of content. If these apps are so compelling it shouldn't take a Spark cluster riffing on my private viewing habits to come up with content for me.

I don't recall a lot of complaints about Facebook or Instagram when it was actually your friends' content. But now it's force-feeding everybody their own "guilty pleasure" viewing material 24 hours a day. It's fucking sick.

Indeed. Every time someone complains that LLMs can't come up with anything new, I'm assaulted with the depressing remembrance that neither do I.

Perhaps, but damn, fixing shitty code is not the "craft" that I signed up for twenty years ago.