It goes beyond this, the job is to understand the underlying need. When a clients asks for a button to be bigger, what's in their head is they fear it's not visible enough. Many times the client was happy when I implemented something unrelated but that solved the issue, like changing the colours to increase the contrast between the background and the button, adding space around, etc. so that it pops out more.
But what is discussed here is not banning far right parties but a specific one that goes further than what should be allowed legally. From what I’ve read AfD goes way beyond what say Le Pen or Meloni parties propose.
Progress in AI definitely makes the question of economic planification at a state level relevant again, at least for parts of the economy, be it for the disruption it causes to market economy (that was already showing lot of cracks btw) or the capabilities it gives to handle beyond human level complex systems.
I’m not following robotics closely but last time I checked we were still far from “human level ability”, it was PR lies notably from Tesla that play on the confusion with the progress in AI.
> People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming.
It is known since the 80s as the Moravec paradox that coginition is not the hard part in robotics.
Automation is coming for manual jobs that are repetitive in a controlled environment, like warehouse logistics. But automation for jobs that require fine hand dexterity, constant adaption to new environments and human interactions (trades, healthcare, etc.) is not on the horizon.
My even biggest concern is the US will support Russia in a hybrid war as they are currently doing in Ukraine, from disabling Starlink, convenient trade obligations/restrictions, to grounding F-35s.
> On the other hand the capability of systems in just the last two months has improved so much that it feels like the average hype undersells what's happening right now but that knowledge is extremely unequally distributed as the greatest capabilities are most familiar to software engineers that have fully embraced agentic coding, which even earlier this year was still somewhat questionable but now is too highly productive to avoid.
I've been hearing this for years now, and it's not my experience so my conclusion is that it's only true for a subset of software engineering that is overly represented on internet forums like here. I imagine if you work in the tech industry on a software product the latest capabilities are game changing. But for the majority like me who work in non tech industries where code was never the hard part of projects to begin with there has been little evolution in the job in one year. Sonnet 4.5 one year ago could already write the code. Most of the job is working out with other humans on the client/business side. To progress beyond that not only would AI need to have a human level cognitive/world model to understand all the dynamics, but also have access to all the information that only people have in their head, as what is written and in specs is only a tiny part of how a business works day to day in reality.
Not saying there is no disruption. Just giving the perspective that in software outside the tech industry there is no vertical acceleration happening, much less in day to day operations outside of software. The tech industry is a big part of the economy, but not all.
To derive the tradeoffs and interpret product requirements you need interacting with humans and understand the underlying motivations and politics of the project and the organisation behind it. The specs the customer gives you is not what is really needed to meet the underlying objectives, you have to iterate with humans that know the business in the loop. Not saying we'll not reach that, but at this point it means the AI has a deep world model and nobody has intellectual work anymore because the whole organisation is AI.
I have been coding professionally for 15 years, and while I like coding I was always more passionate about the product design side and the end result, be it business apps or video games, I like what it does, not specifically how it's done. Either at my small agency or for hobby projects not writing code by hand anymore is not a loss a for me, code is just a mean to an end. I get some people are more passionate about the tooling and the code itself, but it's not because someone doesn't share that it's not a real perspective.
I think there is too much confusion between AGI and consciousness. Consciousness seems to exist without human level intelligence, as we can see in other mammals. On the other hand LLMs have already reached "AGI" as others commenters have pointed out. I don't get the semantic debate on AGI, nor why consciousness is used to move the goalpost.
Despite this I agree with your last paragraph, computationally a GPU rendering a video game or doing inference is similar so I don't think consciousness emerges from the order of mathematical operations like some magical formula. And as said above LLMs capabilities vastly surpass those of other animals than humans that appear to be conscious and don't even have language.
So in fact I think it's the opposite, LLMs are actually proving consciousness doesn't emerge from computation. I find it very interesting philosophically because it challenges what historically was considered special about humans, that high level consciousness is a prerequisite for reasoning and language abilities. But kind of obvious in retrospect when doing mindfulness and being able to be conscious without thoughts.
I feel like the opposite, it seems like people desperately want it to be a miracle drug and are irrationally hostile to discussion or research on side effects. Kind of the same thing happened with cannabis and the downplay on mental health disorders. Given how much money is at stake maybe there is also a big marketing push.
Edit: also regarding the moral/discipline thing, to many people me included the larger issue is absolutely not this, it’s obviously a good thing if people can improve their health. It’s that we are unhappy that the answer to food designed to be addictive and that is poisoning people is having to research a drug and having the whole population take it to protect themselves. I have a hard time celebrating such a waste of resource and a supposed market "innovation" hiding yet another government failure at regulation. When people were poisoning themselves with lead pipes, the answer was not having the whole population take a drug to manage the effects of lead poisoning. Even if there was absolutely 0 side effect I would be happy for the individuals losing weight, but unhappy with the larger picture.
From my experience in big and medium sized companies or even startups I would say that this was already the state of things before AI. Most leaders and top management were following internal committees, that were following consultants recommendations, that were themselves recommending what others were doing and was hype and/or following Gartner like "studies". The motivation was equally dubious, and many developers already had problem with management and product direction, but many didn’t bother to question it. AI just makes it obvious.
Nike has Nike SB for skateboard and they are (were?) awesome, the last two pairs I bought lasted more than 5 years being worn everyday. For comparison Vans last at best 6 months for me.
I think the parent is talking about quality stuff, and is specifically addressing that in contrast spam is increasing. It’s especially true in video games, more games then ever are released, but the amount of actually enjoyable quality game has barely increased. Last time I checked SoA models were still very lacking at game design, let alone capable of creating a finished original and fun game.
Europe explicitly does not provide security guarantees to Taiwan. A large majority of Europeans would not support an intervention. Seen from here sure it would be a loss for Democracy, but there are bigger problems today like climate change and global stability. War for and democracy at all costs narratives doesn’t work like in the US.
I’m in Europe, and I have the same sentiment regarding salary. The difference is I’m more than happy with a simple life and experiences that don’t cost too much money. I have free healthcare, plenty of time for social or outdoor activities. Travels and material things are nice, but I feel like young people are forgetting it doesn’t get better than spending time with friends and family and laughing with them or enjoying nature. Whether you makes 50k a year or you are a billionaire it’s the same (not talking about genuinely poor people obviously). Driving a lambo is additional fun, but that’s hardly what makes a day interesting in itself for me, so sometimes I’m not sure what younger people obsessed with getting rich, at least in Europe, are chasing.
The US had the strongest military in the world using outdated 20th century metrics. The new reality is the world is watching the US losing the war against Iran, depleting critical weapons inventories that need China’s supply chain to be rebuilt.
One way insulation does not exist. If your house is insulated to keep the heat inside, it is also very good at keeping the heat outside / cold inside.
Also tangentially many Europeans seem to be confusing insulation with inertia, saying their house is correctly insulated against the heat when in fact it’s just a stone building that is taking more time to heat up. At the extreme you have European churches buildings that are very badly insulated but stay cold most of summer because of all the stone mass.
One thing Europeans have yet to realize is that good insulation only works when the nights are cold enough to evacuate the heat before it reaches the inside, and that during a strong heatwave there is no adaptation possible, AC is needed.
You should rewatch Office Space, The Matrix or Fight Club to remind you what a typical office job was like in the 90s and what Gen X grew up with. Thinking you are entitled to a fun and creative job is more like a Millenials fantasy to me.
At their core all these self help books are not teaching you how to reshape your speech, but emotional intelligence. They are teaching better understanding of other and yourself. You can then use this understanding to have more fulfilling relations, or more easily manipulate others if you are less well intentioned. The line is very easy to draw, being honest is natural, you say the truth and are open to genuinely understand and build on the other person responses. On the other hand manipulating takes a very different mindset of faking being open to what others are saying.
Bitcoin has a 1.5T market cap with 0 revenue. I think Musk really got his eyes opened when he started playing with Dogecoin a few years ago. He applied the lessons successfully with Tesla, making the company an empty shell PR vehicle to support the TSLA "token".
Interesting chart that confirms hiring dynamics for SE have not much to do with AI despite all the PR, as in 2023 models and agents capabilities were quite limited, and now that capabilities increase hiring is picking up. I hope more journalists will start to challenge that narrative.
I guess we are simply not doing the same job. I’m customer facing, and the bread and butter of my job is to create software for the customer and client’s needs and constraints using proven tools and solutions, exactly like in civil engineering. Sometimes there are projects that require innovation, and yes some can specialize in innovative projects, but that’s not the majority of projects. In fact in my study in university the specialization between software, electrical, civil, etc. happens late in the cursus.
Thanks I think that explains part of the misunderstanding: I’m from a country where engineer is a regulated title, you can’t call yourself a software engineer if you indeed didn’t go through a comparable certification to a civil engineer.
I dont understand why software engineers insist on keeping the craftsmanship aspect of writing code. Compare to other engineering disciplines, like civil engineering. Engineering was never about going in the field yourself to build things with your own hands. You can become a great civil engineer without building bridges that fail yourself. To me it doesn’t matter that the thing I design is built with a crane or AI. I can design quality control processes too to ensure the thing is built up to standard, I don’t have to build the thing myself to be sure. There is nothing wrong with artisanal code crafting, I appreciate this too, but professionally that’s not engineering. It seems AI is just forcing us to clear the confusion the hard way.
I'm not in the field but I think it's because historically neural nets were looked down and deemed unpromising because they lacked understanding, compared to Symbolic AI or SVM for example. Since the Deep Learning revolution, which is engineering driven, the trend has inverted, research to understand and theory are seen as the things that hindered progress with neural nets in the past.
To me it was already quite intuitive, we are not really managing the psychological state: at its core a LLM try to make the concatenation of your input + its generated output the more similar it can with what it has been trained on. I think it’s quite rare in the LLMs training set to have examples of well thought professional solution in a hackish and urgency context.
I understand why they might be anxious, but my point is it’s unrelated to the technology itself. Imagine people denying the internet works in 2000 because of the Dotcom bubble. Same with layoffs, they are not really due to AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_corporate_m...), it’s a political discussion. And the antiwork vibe is not new, I have strong political convictions on how we should more equally redistribute capital gains so that even if AI was able to replace software engineers it would not be an issue but again that is political.
LLMs tooling brings a lot to senior devs. I have 15 YOE, I own a small agency, we are shipping faster, with less bugs, and believe it or not we are hiring, because we are able to take more work and grow, as it is logical without the political issues plaguing the US in particular. The market is already adjusting, hence why to me we are way past the point of developing professionally without LLMs.
So no I don’t get why the political topics are not discussed elsewhere and the irrational denial of the technology because of said political issues.