marcus_holmes

This. I've experienced the same. And I haven't met anyone who just sits around doing nothing, given the opportunity.

It sounds amazing if you're being forced to work for a living. But actually experiencing it, it gets really boring and you start looking around for something to do.

Fair questions.

But we answer those at the moment with equally inadequate answers: your parents owned the nice mansion, so you get it (though that also includes "so your older brother gets it" just to be really unfair). Also on the other end of the spectrum: your parents messed up your education and traumatised you, so no mansion for you.

It would be good to work out some system that could answer these questions on a better basis than that.

So you spend time fitting the cartwheel you had handy to their 18-wheel truck?

We have different wheels for different use cases. You can't use the same wheel for all of them.

Everyone always ends up fighting the framework. Work on a project long enough and it happens every time. It's understandable because the framework wasn't designed with your project in mind.

But developers tell the company to use it because they need it on their resume for the next gig.

I've seen sssoooo many startups use tech stacks that are completely unsuitable for their use case, but the developers are keen to use that stack because it's the latest hotness and it looks good on their resume.

The average software product is worse. Lots worse.

And half the software products are worse than that.

Any organisation that said "let's move fast and break things" is now busy finding out what's actually broken.

maybe it's more like banning smoking - stopping a smoker for 8 hours a day would definitely positively impact their health, even if they find it incredibly annoying.

yeah, that makes sense. Be interesting to see how that study goes.

And ofc AI is busy messing all of this up.

I think the point is all the "kids are getting damaged by phone use" talking points. It's using the school bans as a useful study; we can see what happens to kids if they're not allowed to use phones here.

iirc a similar study on the Aussie age ban is finding similar results; basically no difference. Some kids benefit, others suffer.

Agree that a study on grades would be useful too

I've seen no evidence that they favour making the right things at all ;)

Lots of evidence that they favour making the thing that the executive wants made, regardless of what the nerds pushing the nerd-buttons think is the right thing.

So can we conclude that if the AIs break out of their sandboxes and take over the internet, they'll probably sit in little committees working out which one of them should allocate IP addresses and generally be extremely bureaucratic and ineffective?

Google's UI is always bafflingly overcomplicated and opaque. I never understand why such a large bunch of very intelligent people cannot create a useful UI

Isn't this the original point? The workplace is getting AI-ified, so there are lots of people who are unwilling/unable/uncomfortable changing the way they work to deal with it.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is absolutely true.

I had a boss early in my career (around 1990) who considered typing effeminate and was mildly horrified at what the world was coming to with all us guys who were cheerfully using a keyboard. He had a secretary who did all his typing. This was ~5 years before email became common, but I'm sure he would have had all his emails printed so he could read them properly.

meh, they had cavalry and muskets before, and most of us couldn't read. Still lost.

Good question, and the question of our age, for sure.

I loved the article that was on HN a while back (original article here [0] be warned it's a quite a long read). It compared the current revolution we're undergoing to the Mercantilist revolution when we stopped being farm workers and started doing other things instead, driven by technological change in agriculture.

The answer they came up with: we don't know yet. Much like the move from subsistence farmers who started working in a factory had to rely on other people to feed them, we have to answer this question ourselves and it'll probably involve doing something very different. And wonderful - subsistence farming is a shit life (despite all the influencers saying how amazing being in touch with the land is) and we would all prefer to be working in an nice clean office than trudging knee-deep in muck in the rain trying to keep our crops alive and pest-free. The same will probably be true once the dust settles on this revolution and we'll all be profoundly glad that AI came along.

The big problem we have to face as a society is that we cannot allow all the value from this technology to be captured and retained by the wealthy few. Our ancestors had to fight the same conflict with factory owners during the Industrial Revolution, and they didn't manage to win that war completely despite all the blood shed and battles won.

[0] https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/cognitive-mercantili...

I think this is Broken Window fallacy[0], though.

If a business can create software cheaper, then it can charge its customers less for that software (or, conversely, if a business can use an AI to create bespoke software for cheaper than it would cost to buy that software) then the customer business saves money. It, in turn, can use that money to improve its offering to its customers. They, in turn, and so on.

Having cheaper things means everyone gets more things. The value created is created further down the supply chain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Well, the most recent example would be the Adobe suite rewrite [0]

[0] https://www.afr.com/technology/ai-can-make-free-copies-of-ad...

I've seen this phrased as "some people enjoy software development because they like making things, others enjoy it because they like solving the mental problems it throws up, others enjoy it because it pays well", and AI is really only helping the first type of programmer.

This. I now get Claude to spin up sites as needed, with dynamic functionality using vanilla JS and CSS. No frameworks, no CMS, nothing. If it needs a server and database then there's a ton to choose from, I'm currently using Cloudflare Workers and D1 but that could change in an instant to any similar service. Posting a new page is a matter of editing the text and images and then asking Claude to upload it and format it properly. 2 minutes' work.

The question is "what business value is AI driving?" and the answer was "a solo founder cut all the devs and still delivered a product".

Separate question: "now that AI is here and development isn't a moat any more, how does a business defend itself from competition?"

That second question is a direct result of AI. Five years ago the amount of cost and effort spent on software development was a moat. Now it's not. So that answers the first question completely, I think.

As for the second question - market sector knowledge, customer contacts and industry reputation, all the usual non-technical things that make a moat. Also, we may now be living in a world where software companies cannot expect to be monopolies in their markets any more. This company will have to compete with many similar competitors for market share, like in most other markets. I think this is a good thing. Less enshittification will ensue.

Seeing the panicked state of the PHP ecosystem at the moment, and having worked in the financial system in the past, I dread the thought of what would happen to global banking if a frontier model broke a maths problem that underpins our crypto systems...

Disagree - the article made the point very clearly that pre-Mercantilism the value was in the land, not the people (who were low-value agricultural workers at best). Mercantilism was the revolution that made people valuable.

It's interesting, because licensing is based on copyright, and copyright doesn't apply to AI code.

In theory, things will become even more free, because you can copy whatever code you like, it's all in the public domain because it was all written by an AI (or enough of it was that a court will decide that copying the whole code base is fair).

And the ability of AI's to reverse-engineer binaries means that even hiding the code won't be enough.

Companies may write T&Cs that try to cover some of this, but they'll still have lost the biggest protection they have.

So, in theory, we move to what the FOSS movement have always wanted: all the code available, all the time, with anyone able to change whatever they like about the software they run.

Somehow I don't think anyone is going to be happy about this, though.

Agree, but I don't think the 1% that make the decisions share our viewpoint. They like Musk, Altman, et al

yeah, agree. So many decisions made with no consideration of the impact on the user or customer.

As I understand it, the back-propogation of the weights adjustment involves comparing the result they got with the "correct" result from the data. The problem with data outside of training is that there's no "correct" result - nothing to judge against, so no method of back-propogating the weights corrections. But I could be wrong.

I was addressing the other half of the initial statement:

> Nothing about the conception of knowledge as "justified true belief" implies that machines can't accrue knowledge.

Even if the LLMs could adjust their weights in response to knowledge that they encountered post-training, they would need to make judgements about what is "true" so that they can only add "justified true beliefs" to their weights.

I agree that this is also a problem humans have, and we do really badly at it because we tend to weight social conformance more than factual accuracy.

And yes, I agree that this problem bears no relation to the question of whether they're intelligent, or even sentient. I was answering a different question.

> Most of the times half of the class would get an F.

Doesn't that mean she's just not doing her job right? I mean, her job is to teach the class physics. If the class doesn't know the simple physics questions she's asking them, isn't that her fault? Why is she failing students when her teaching methods are so obviously not working?

Given stories like this, shouldn't we be glad that AI is completely disrupting our education system?

...and here I am, twenty years later, writing code! Every day I turn up to a standup meeting that goes on for 30 minutes, where I get to say "no blockers"! then I start on my JIRA tickets, and make the product that my company produces worse for our users in tiny increments. Honestly, the world would be a better place if I just did nothing, but I need the money and we get pipped if we don't complete enough tickets in a day.

In the evenings, after the kids go to sleep, I work on my side-project, an app that lets you preorder coffee from the local cafe so you don't have to wait so long. I've been working on it for six months and I dream of the day I can quit the day job and work on it full time.