atleta

I never had any issue where the task queue would go down but not the rest of our infrastructure. If it's a large system (which is definitely relative) then it can become a job on it's own to keep this part of the system running. But by then, I guess, you'll have the resources too.

Also, you don't know the team size behind this service, as I mentioned in my original comment.

Because it's unusable. And it's awesome only because pretty few people hack their own portfolio into an unusable format. If more people did it, even if the format was different for each (which is hard to imagine), the cool factor would be overshadowed by the frustration and impatience these elicit.

Now since very few people do it (or at least it's definitely new for me), it does look cool. But I'm also happy that I didn't have to read through the whole thing and I could stop after a few minutes of scrolling.

Because it's one more service that you have very little control over and one more service that you have to manage over a web interface or (maybe) their own command line tool.

It's on a separate network so they may go down and cause outage in your own app, go out of business, etc. (Yes, your IaaS service provider can go down as well, but that's a much larger operation and something that's very-very likely to have a much better uptime than what you could do on-site. And whatever the case is with that, it's still on top of that.)

Abstractions aren't free. (BTW, I don't see it as an abstraction, it's simply outsourcing. You'd use some kind of API anyway even if you hosted the job queue yourself.)

> The question is how will AI replace what I have?

I think you answered your own question:

> Sure the AI systems of the future could theoretically do all that, but it’s still the same work/services.

That's it. At the moment, you had to wire together 4 APIs and, as you said, this wouldn't do the job without using (someone else's) AI. So this works as a business/service as long as the AI is not able to handle those 4 APIs by itself (or 3, if the AI is one of them). And it doesn't even have to figure out using these APIs, some company (I'd expect the owner of the AI) can create interfaces.

Not that ChatGPT doesn't know how to use APIs itself. I started a quick experiment, that I didn't have the time to finish yet, making it create a simple GUI app that is connected to a specific SaaS API. Nothing fancy.

At first it would reject my request when I told it to create an app that uses that API saying that it can't create apps. Then I told it to generate code for the main window with the most important details. And it did. Then I told it to create an API wrapper for the API. Then I told it to connect the API wrapper with the gui. Honestly, nothing that it couldn't do if it didn't reject my original request with "I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I'm not able to generate code for you."

So I don't see how the current state of affairs is too far from me being able to say to a similar AI agent to send a letter to a congress person regarding this and that cause where my opinion is X.

It's absolutely not the same ball park of risk. First of all, once you have a reasonable business, you'll have a number of employees (and multiple teams). And teams are unlikely to stand up at once, not to mention all your employees leaving at once. I mean unless something is seriously wrong with the company, of course.

That's one thing. The other thing is that employees who leave only hamper future development not the current business/operation. (Again, unless a large number of employees leave in a short time, which means you have screwed up something.) Once you have a stable organization, you can replace individual employees at a reasonable rate without serious issues. (You actually have to prepare for this as employees will leave, no matter what.)

The big difference with cloud providers is that they really offer something that's complementary and not something that can easily be turned into your product. (I mean except for the SaaS companies that really just repackage the cloud offer into an easier to use product. They are definitely at risk all the time.)

People using AI to generate crap faster is definitely a (short term) risk. And, BTW, not only with code. I read an article stating that in a few years (2-3, can't remember) 80% of content only will be generated by AI. Which would be a disaster. We're already swimming in low quality information and this will only make it worse.

OTOH, so much for the idea that people will guide the hand of AI to create better code. As this will unfold, there will be ever more incentives to remove (most) humans from the loop. And if past can be used to predict the future, what we have seen so far is that when AI gets reasonably competent at something it will gain superhuman capabilities very quickly. I still keep bringing up how people thought that after alpha go beat Fan Hui (European go champion) it would have taken a huge leap for it to beat Lee Sedol. Because Lee Sedol was so much better than Fan Hui. At least in human terms. It only took a few months of training and tinkering for DeepMind.

Speaking of loops: since AIs are taught from the internet (simple language models or coding specialists), we're creating an unwanted feedback loop here. More AI generated content will likely make teaching future AIs harder. At least with information harvested from the internet after ~2022-ish.

Sure, most software developers prefer to automate as much of our work as possible. Starting with compilers, build systems, reusable software (libraries, frameworks), etc.

But these are fundamentally different from AI. As I mentioned above, Fred Brooks in his essay (The Mythical Man-month) would argue that all these just decrease the accidental complexity. The incidental complexity still remains. I.e. taking a vague description, an idea, something embedded in the heads of the stakeholders and turning it into some kind of actual computer code, finding and removing inconsistencies and with a minimal number of bugs. Now AI will be able to do it one day. And it seems that day is not that far away in the future.

The hard move is going from a vague set of incomplete requirements (which is always the case) to specific, executable code. We never had a tool that can do this transformation. Until now(ish).

No/low-code not working this time either is not a surprise. All these attempts have been made several times throughout the history. Also, as Fred Brooks famously said there is no silver bullet: no/low-code promised to be a silver bullet while only removing the accidental complexities (again, Brooks' terminology).

AI changes this, however. The scenario you are describing assumes that AI will get stuck, as I said. Otherwise I don't see why we would still need humans to supervise it. But if it can write good enough software without expensive human beings making corrections left and right, it will be able to do a lot of the jobs that we're trying to make more efficient (or even possible) with all this software we're writing. E.g. you don't really need GitHub (Jira, etc.) if you don't have a lot of developers cooperating. And this is true for a lot of white collar professions that we're creating these heaps of web apps for, that generate all that demand that you are mentioning.

If we get stuck (and, BTW, have some time to figure out how to live with AI) then sure, we'll have programmers (and non-programmers with good analytical skills) command and supervise AI coders. Everyone and their colleague will turn into a tech-lead/product manager. If.

While I have been expecting AI to replace programmers for a while, the thing I was never sure about whether this will manifest itself as a business for some companies or whether it means the end of people creating apps altogether.

Another risk for building businesses on AI in general is that unlike with software that anyone can build (e.g. for a niche), AI solutions seem to be costly because they require a lot of data and a lot of processing power (at least to train) so you'll end up using someone else's AI. And the real magic is the AI not whatever you build around it so it can be pulled from under you while the AI itself keeps developing and obviously it can make the thin layer built around it irrelevant. I know that AI companies, at least OpenAI will sell the vision that they will be like AWS (amazon) and other similar cloud providers, but I just don't see this as a realistic scenario. It can only happen if AI gets stuck near the level where it is now for a substantial period. Say, at least a decade. Where it's good enough to be included in SaaS (and maybe other) software products but it's not good enough yet to do away with all software products or at least the need for companies building software products.

Yep, some people seem to have a proclivity towards thinking that whatever is (or seems) disadvantageous to them (or a group they identify with) is somehow done on purpose by someone/a group that will profit from the said thing.

But if you think about it, it doesn't even work here. First of all, no one can tell you that your battery has a poor capacity, because you test it daily. And people are pretty sensitive to this issue, because we have tricked the manufacturers to create phones that have just enough capacity. (By requiring faster phones, larger, better screens and thinner phones. And not requiring a battery that lasts much more than a day.)

Actually that 'narrative' has the opposite effect: there are a lot of articles online that tell you how to enhance the life of the batteries. (Whether it's really needed or not doesn't make a difference.)

Regarding charging it from 50%: this is not something that hurts Li batteries. Actually it's better than allowing it to drain (or go into some unspecified low percentages, probably below 20 or 10). Charging to 100% is said to have a negative effect. I mean it probably wears faster than if you charge to just 85%.

Yeah, and Linux will probably have an even longer support period. But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market.

The mobile phone business is very different. (But you may argue that that's the problem.) The HW manufacturers sell the SW bundled with the HW. As soon as they have sold the HW, the software is just a liability (while for MS it's a recurrent revenue!). Not only that, but the longer and the better the SW works, the less likely you are to buy new HW from them. (And since that's the only thing they are selling, it means the less likely they will see a revenue from you.) Now this may imply that the business model is flawed and maybe it will change as the market matures and people will stop buying newer and newer phones every year. Just like it happened to desktops and then laptops. (I'm typing this on a 7+ year old Thinkpad and the only thing I miss is +16GB RAM.)

That's a fair point, but indeed a lot of people will kill their phone in less than 3 years. Either breaking the screen (which, IIUC, will be also replaceable/self servicable) or killing the battery. Most sources say that the battery will keep an acceptable capacity for around 500 cycles, i.e. 1.5 years if fully charged daily. (Now I don't know, because I'm very cautious not to fully charge and to discharge below 25-30%, so mine is pretty good after 1.5 years and the previous phone that I've used for 5+ years started draining the battery after a software update when it was less than 6 mo old...)

Speaking about batteries, what would be nice if they added a setting that allows defining charging limits, e.g. like what we have on Lenovo Thinkpads. (You can specify both the upper threshold and also the lower one, so that charging doesn't start if the battery is above that level even if you connect the device. Which you may do to a phone even without wanting to charge, e.g. if you use it as a modem.)

Unless the price of the upgrades cover the support. Yes, of course, it would be a gamble, because nobody can predict what the demand would be in 3-4-5 years. But I wonder whether they could reduce the cost with smart software engineering (i.e whether they could compel themselves to do smarter software engineering by promising paid upgrades) or whether they could make a promise to make paid upgrades OR open sourcing the code for the components that will be different from the newer versions. (I.e. mainly the hardware drivers.) Yes, I know licensing issues may indeed pose problems for third party components.

Ah, this was pretty tiring. Couldn't read the whole thing, but the book she was quoting from was probably the worst part. E.g. this quote is especially upsetting and dumb:

> Men have not been compelled to use sexuality as a leverage to receive social and economic resources and thus have no reason to implicate their whole self in sexuality

What if these people would care to read a bit of biology (like etology, evolution) and also evolutionary psychology? The claim in the quote is kind of 100% upside down. The reality is something like: "Men have been compelled to use their economic and social resources as a leverage to receive sex and thus have a very strong reason to implicate their whole self in work (or any other way available to acquire these)"

Because this is how it works. But even if we disregard the evolutionary dynamic the base claim is false: women aren't compelled to use sexuality to receive social or economic resources in modern Western societies. They can, you know work. And actually most of them do. This was (is) one of the most fundamental goals of feminism. While you could argue that the author simply depicts women as helpless prostitutes.

Now it's true that most women/women on average will chose men who are financially and (or?) socially are at least on par with them, preferably having a higher status/salary/earning potential. (And this is has been observed in a wide range of societies according e.g. to David Buss [1].) And that preference is what makes men 'compelled' to compete hard for the economic and social resources. (BTW, this is, I think, at least one of the reasons behind men having higher salaries and roles.)

So again, the reality seems to be the exact opposite of what the quote from book says. (And no, I'm not blaming women at all.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sndW9hzX-wA

I don't think dating apps are designed to make women picky per se but they definitely end up distorting their perception and turn them into overly picky for sure.

This has always been the case with all dating apps from the start (except for maybe a few that tried to actively designed around it). This phenomenon emerges automatically from how dating platforms and people work: 1. men are expected to do the approach/first move (this is socially and evolutionary encoded in both sexes) 2. men initially put the bar somewhat lower and mostly care about looks at first (I'd say it makes a lot of sense, especially in online dating, but only if you disregard that the photos end up manipulated) 3. women (and also men) will start manipulating their photos. Even just selecting your best photos is manipulation. (I'm not saying it's wrong or unreasonable.) 4. men will do more approaches than IRL because it's cheap and safe and also can be done in parallel 5. women will receive a lot more approaches than IRL because men do more apporoaches

and this turns on the cycle: 6. women will feel that they have a lot higher desirability than what they were used to IRL/before starting to date online. They'll become picky, will feel higher status and start to be mean with some of the men who approach. Actually they don't have to be actively and explicitly mean, not being nice with the rejection is bad enough for men (see 7.). And being nice to all the unwanted approachers is hard. I mean it can be hard work so it's frustrating. 7. men will start to see that their efforts don't pay off. I mean it will pay off for the top say 5-20% but not for the others. So they get frustrated and try to further minimize the investment in each approach 8. this makes women feel even worse about all the unwanted approaches and they'll be even less considerate about those who they don't want (while porbably increasing the bar). They'll start complaining and putting stupid requirements (messages, really) on their profile, like the usual "those who do X and are Y need not bother to swipe right", etc. 9. this further frustrates men

etc. The cycle is on. Online dating, at least the naive approches, don't work because it makes the wrong thing easy and efficient. (And yes, due to the business models of these platforms they are not motivated to solve the issue. After all, the more users they have the better it is for them. They are getting paid for keeping people on the platform and not getting them off i.e. hook them up.)

Interesting. But it seems that MINIX does not run on the (same) processor as we're running Linux on (which would have been pretty surprising) but there is a separate low power CPU on the mother board that runs the management software under MINIX.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

I clicked "just code" on the landing page and it took me to a page where the left pane showed an empty (black) terminal and the right one a python shell. Looking at the developer tools I saw a message in reponse to my hello world input saying that I should type 1+2. But it was never displayed.

Then based on this hint, clicking around I managed to reveal the tutorial (showing up on the right). So it seems that there is a bug in the navigation or maybe the "just code" link on the landing points to the wrong place.

I didn't downvote you but I think equating the Russian attack on Ukraine with the American war on Iraq is probably what earned you the downvotes. Especially because you seem to equate the too based on the extent and number of war crimes. Committing war crimes seems to be the norm, even an expectation in the Russian army. These also seem being denied and never investigated while they are pretty well documented. This doesn't seem to be the case with the US army. (Yes, they did happen, but they seem to happen at a much lower rate, more isolated cases and some of them actually get investigated officially and the perpetrators get sentenced.)

And then let's not forget that the American war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) has been ironically labelled as "democracy export" for a reason. Yes, it didn't work, yes it was probably a bad idea from the start, but at least it wasn't "autocracy export". Which the war on Ukraine is. The goal of the Russian leadership (read: Putin) has been to remove the democratically elected Ukrainian leadership and install a puppet government. This is a bit harder to support than the US narrative of toppling a dictatorship and help the people to start a democracy. (Again, even if the latter was doomed to fail.)

Sure, the Russian soldiers and society were also sold a nice (horror) story about the Ukrainian leadership (or maybe Ukrainians in general) being 'nazi'. You can hear in some captured phone calls from the early days of the war that the soldiers try to explain to their relatives that there are no 'nazis' there just normal people.

On I side note, I would use a product built by a Russian soldier who participated in the war if he made it clear that he didn't want to participate and didn't commit (or maybe even opposed/prevented committing) war crimes.

This has been the case for over a decade. I've launched my first startup 11 years ago. I've used Linode and we've spent something like $20/month on hosting. (This has increased to around $80-$160 IIRC when we got funded, mostly due to the increased storage needs. We were a music startup and while S3 was pretty cheap back then too, it was easier to have everything on Linode at first. I.e. with enough funding, time was more expensive than storage.)

A bit more than a year later it went bust but I hoped I could still keep it alive, make it financially viable. I scaled back the infrastructure so costs would be below $30/mo again.

They mentioned not having social media accounts to show that AirBnB couldn't have any information about them or them being related to the host. (OTOH, their namesake may have a social media account and that may be linked to the host. In theory.)

Yeah and I'm pretty sure that those people who can't get a short enough mating partner will just abstain from doing so... So much stupidity in this piece that it's hard to address all of them.

Now this is what I call tall-shaming... Just kidding. It's just stupid and probably self-affirmation. Maybe, just maybe, if you want to save on food, especially talking about the US (or the EU), then it would be easier to stop overeating as the US is a pretty obese society. Obesity mostly comes from all the calories people don't need, so could easily not eat. Without shrinking themselves along the vertical axes. BTW, maybe being tall means a shorter lifespan on average, but so does being obese.

And then we haven't talked about all the food that gets discarded.

After all this the usual mumbo-jumbo about tallness being somehow magically a capitalist sin is not that surprising. Though, of course, it has nothing to do with it. Being tall has been seen as favourable/attractive by women for a long-long time. It's evolutionary. Maybe it doesn't make sense, but boobs don't make sense either. Neither does love, for that matter. I mean in our current day and age.

If capitalism favours the tall, that's because people do favour them - to some extent. (Yes, men also associate positive traits with tall people.) Maybe we can try to do away with some of the illogical associations (like tall people being seen as more competent AND more competent people being seen as taller), because these may cause problems. Just like we do with other evolutionary coded prejudices. But coming up with nonsense/non-actionable fantasies about how we could make the population shorter is stupid.

And not helping your children if there is a safe and efficient treatment is evil. I'm 6'3". I know that it doesn't automatically make you attractive. But I also do know that women are mostly attracted to guys who are taller than them and who are taller than the average guy. Now everybody can't be taller than the average but handicapping your children is pretty nasty. (Unless, there is an inherent risk to the treatment, which I don't know, but it seems that the author doesn't care about it either.)

And in 2022 you know that it doesn't work because you don't see any examples. Despite quite a few people trying to make a living from their fan base on various social media platforms. (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) While if it did work, we should see a lot of these. But instead of the 1000 fans they need tens or hundreds of thousands usually. And even those don't pay.

Maybe it works on OnlyFans as someone mentioned. But that's a special market for a very a specific type of product/producers...

Oh, and we also have patreon to support fans paying the creators. But it doesn't look like the $100/patron/year model is a thing there. Or that too many people make $100k/year at all. https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators

If you're aiming at 10 clients, you won't get VC funding. If you are aiming at $100k/yr (or even $1M), you won't get VC funding.

It's not all or nothing. At least it doesn't make sense to talk about it as if it was. It doesn't have to do away with all programming jobs to make it to the list. (Especially, since the list itself defines differing levels of dangers.)

And, of course, it doesn't have to be at the level of producing a perfect solution for the input "Write a program that automates driving trucks". Programmers can't do that either. It's enough if it can produce usable and testable code based on user input and then it can refine the solution based on the feedback and then get to a complete solution with this method. If it can start asking questions, all the better.

BTW, ChatGPT can already do some of this without being tailored to do so. You can tell it to create a todo app (I know, that's just copypasta), defining the language and the framework to use. (I went with TS and Vue.) And then tell it to create a backend and to connect the two. Then you can tell to add persistance to the backend (because it does not, by default) and it will update the backend code. Before ChatGPT, I thought that back references like these would be the tricky thing. Sure, in my experiment I didn't talk like a non-tech person wanting an app, so you might say I was programming, but I really wasn't. And that's where things are now.

> it doesn't matter that programming was the first of the jobs automated in the last 48 hours of the age of man.

Now that's the thing I have always been unsure about. Whether automating programming is far enough from (super strong) AGI for programmers to feel bad about their job :)

That's what people have been telling themselves for over a decade, I think. At least articles on news sites about who should be wary of AI and how much had been quite fashionable back then. And then people would respond with "yeah, it will probably automate away those other jobs and it will be able to do the simple and boring part of my work that unskilled/low-end people in my field do, but experienced/knowledgable dudes like me will always be in demand. It's just that our work will be more interesting." And you would hear lawyers and graphic designers and accountants respond with this same theme. (For some reason, software developers were always thought to be untouchable anyway.)

And then AI came a long way, improved to levels hard to imagine back then, it's already threatening programmers, but people just keep telling the same story. That somehow it will run out of steam below their level. If it can talk to a professional it can just as much talk to whoever talks to the professional now. (I mean, unless it gets stuck at a lower level.)

However, when people talk about the future dangers, they still keep looking at the current status quo and not at how fast it evolves. Of course, it's hard to predict, but it seems like some people don't even try and just judge based on what we have today. While what we have been seeing so far is that it's evolving faster than what most experts have expected.

Replacing doctors is probably further away, because being a doctor is like being an airline pilot: it's about trust big time. And everybody likes to think their doctor (or pilot) is especially good. Oh, and also doctors do have to interact with the real world, like examine the patient. (Programmers don't ;) )

I miss programmers from the list. For some reason we tend to think we'll be among the last ones to be automated away, while programming is probably the best documented job on the internet, the job with the largest training set. We also see that the machine is coming for us, we just keep telling that nonsense story that it only does the boring/low level stuff and imply that it will be like this for a long-long time which in my interpretation would be several decades at least. (Otherwise I don't get the dismissive tone/remarks.)

OTOH recognizing songs can still make you look cool. Like being good at chess, poker or being able to lift heavy weights are still cool even though machines are better than people (or just most people, in case of poker). The only downside is that now you can be caught being wrong ;)

Discarding just the half of the poison solution and doing it 6 times just dilutes it down to 1/64th of the original concentration. I guess the video you mention wants to debunk homeopathy, but the maths as you describe it doesn't work. (Homeopathy uses 1:100 dilutions, so that would be a different game. Indeed, I think I've heard that they don't even bother with diluting 1:100, they just discard the whole contents and use what's left inside accidentally.)

It gets better very quickly and we have no idea where its limitations are. In other words, we have no idea when the development will slow down significantly and how much of the bottom will it have chopped down by then. Whether it's 10% or maybe a 100.

> Basic income or revolution. That's going to be our choice.

I'm definitely pro basic income, but I've heard an interesting remark a few weeks ago. And that's that COVID was kind of a UBI experiment (in the US), albeit very limited, and it turned out that if people don't have to worry about making a living and don't have a job to work in then they'll start do stupid things on the internet. Like make up stupid conspiracy theories about vaccines. I can't remember who said this, it was one of the guests on Lex Fridman's podcast. I'm also not sure if it's a valid analogy but reminds me of Vonnegut's Player Piano.

I hear this a lot (in relation to various jobs) and I still don't get it. Yes, it is a tool. Yes, if it can, it will replace humans. That's the whole point.

For some reason people tend to think that these tools/AI/ML systems will never be good enough to do their job (or a specific job). This argument can take different forms, sometimes stating that it will just do the boring part of the work (e.g. with programming) or that it will still need human creativity (maybe, but not necessarily and that's not the point) or that it will just replace low level, unskilled or mediocre professionals. And somehow everyone thinks they are not mediocre (i.e. average). But even these assumptions are unfounded. Why would anyone think that these systems will top out below their skill levels? Why would anyone think that they can't become superhuman?

They did in chess, go, I think poker too. Not to mention protein folding. And without much of a hitch between mediocre/good enough and superhuman. Because that difference is just interesting for us, but doesn't necessarily mean that there is huge step, that the system needs to undergo serious development and that it would take a long time. (Like decades or so.) People thought that was the case when AlphaGo beat Fan Hui saying that Lee Sedol was a completely different level. Which, of course, he is. Still, it just took DeepMind half a year to improve alphago to that level.

So yeah, you can be pretty sure that if this track (no pun intended), if this solution is good enough then it will quickly evolve into something that will replace some music creators.