Actually, riding horses is a great example, and you happened to pick a domain within which I dabble: People are not capable of riding horses today at the level of skill of a nobleman from Renaissance Europe. People at the forefront of the riding arts today read manuscripts from Guérinière, second-guessing at the meaning of every last syllable, because many of those sources describe things that are unintelligible and unfathomable today that seem to have been quite commonplace. And this is despite even the centuries of continuity of government funding for institutions that have been dedicated to trying to prevent precisely this. (Namely the Spanish Riding School of Vienna and similar institutions in Lisbon and Jerez, the Cadre Noir, etc.)
Also: Saying that "learn to code" has been reduced from a meme about a surefire ticket to economic security to the equivalent of glassblower, is not really refuting what, in broad strokes, the original point actually was; is it?
How will they hire experts from those professions on whose output to train on, if they destroy the skills currently extant in those professions? Maybe lawyers will still read contracts every once in a while. Certainly, programmers around me no longer bother with reading code. ...and you can make an argument that a similar effect will happen that is widely observed in language-learners: Namely, if you only ever use a language passively (to read/listen), you're not necessarily able to use it actively (to write/speak).
> large corpus of commercially available source code
Like garbling up GitHub? Currently, people put hand-crafted code there to earn "street cred". Will people continue to do that, if AIs regurgitate their code without giving credit? Will people continue to bother with learning to code, when AI has reconfigured the economy to make this skill a worthless commodity?
To be clear: I don't envision a scenario where people who are completely unable to code will come out of nowhere, and make a career out of prompting claude to write software without ever learning to code. What I am saying is that the threshold of what constitutes "good enough" coding skill has shifted down, and those people who already knew how to code now have a certain multiplier on the outcomes they deliver. (this multiplier is high if you measure on low time horizons and gets lower, the longer the time horizons, but the latter doesn't matter in managers' minds). So there will, for a time, be a massive overhang of good-enough coding skill from "old stock", so to speak. For those who do not already know how to code, this make the proposition of learning to code right now uneconomical. If there is already a massive oversupply of grapes in the market, and you're trying to decide which crop to plant, then planting more grapes is economically probably a pretty poor decision. It would be better to plant things that are undersupplied.
> Part of the industry always seek humans able to code with deep understanding.
Name them. In my 16 years in the business I've never come across any; I've always worked under leaders who did not care about code quality in the slightest and just looked at outcomes, and when outcomes stopped happening as a result of poor code quality were always unable to connect those dots (or wilfully looked the other way).
I think embedded software for highly-regulated medical devices or whatever is just not enough to take in all the "AI-refugees" who are now seeking meaningful work that has been taken away from them. The pessimistic side of me expects that it's probably not true in the first place that these industries work any different than what I'm used to. And even the optimistic side of me has to admit that the laws of supply and demand imply that, in those few niches where it still matters, there are enough people out there desperate to do that kind of work right now, that it will be done for free and won't present a real earning opportunity.
> The coding we want for industry sure. Difference between IKEA and my uncle, an incredible, sought after carpenter.
The thing is that programming was one of those rare crafts/arts, where you could have your cake and eat it too: Since you were writing all the code by hand, and since that process takes a fair bit of time anyway, you might as well write good code at no extra cost (which is where the artisanship comes in). Now the difference between good code and cheap code that does the same thing is the difference between 2 months of hand-crafting code and micromanaging LLMs versus an afternoon of vibing, and that is much less defensible from a business point-of-view.
I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. The practical question for someone planning out their career from todays' point of view, is that it's uncertain when that time will come, and these markets can and will stay irrational for longer than any single individual trying to resist them will be able to stay solvent.
I was referring to something slightly different namely that price, horsepower, and socioeconomic status are all monotonically increasing functions of each other when you look at any given lineup of cars -- say you're comparing the different company cars owned by a given company, the different cars in the lineup of a given manufacturer, or the cars parked outside the venue when there's a wedding and the extended family has been invited. The cars themselves are all "trivial" variations of each other. I've noticed this more strongly in Germany than in other countries I've lived in (which is a few). You don't get the kind of variety of styles and designs you would get in the U.S. and many cars that are commonplace in the U.S. like a Ford Mustang or a Dodge RAM, when you encounter it in Germany, would instantly read as "someone desparate to get noticed".
But the variation in horsepower is still there. It's not like cars with 300 HP are forbidden in Germany. It's just that they need to fit in the continuum. The 300HP BMW is the CEO's car, and its existence is justified by the fact that the other top managers drive the 200HP version which is otherwise almost the exact same car, which are in turn justified by the fact that the middle managers drive the 120HP version, and if you're a new-hire individual contributor then anything more than 90HP would cause a scandal if word got out. (I'm painting a mental picture here; obviously not making a universal claim).
I think that culture is part of the reason why a $30k electric pickup truck would ruffle feathers so much, and it's a particularly stupid reason, but I think it's real.
The "Kastenwagen" example from above escapes that calculus by clearly being something that stands completely outside of any established continuum of this kind. The rare Ford Mustang or imported Dodge RAM that you sometimes see in Germany is similarly socially/politically acceptable on the grounds that it would either be expensive as hell, or a car buff's hobby. Both of those cases mean the owner has duly paid for their ticket to the high-horsepower social club (either financially, or by having a respectable hobby and putting in the work), whereas a $30k electric pickup that you can just buy would come across as "cheating the system".
The distinction gets at something interesting though, and it's a weird intermingling of culture and politics. I think a truck as owned by a consumer, and as an American would understand the word, is, at least in part, a lifestyle statement derived from maybe overprovisioning on the horsepower. Such a lifestyle statement in Germany seems to be perfectly socially acceptable when it ties in with luxury and doing your "civic duty" by buying German, but it clearly ruffles feathers and meets with political headwind when it ties in with the culture and financial constraint of the "commoner".
I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.
It's not the substance of what is being said, but the "moral outrage washing" communication strategy, employed by a market participant who is themselves deeply immoral, that I find kind of interesting, entertaining, noteworthy, funny, and morally objectionable.
Also: With something like a 75% market share that Chrome enjoys, I don't see how they can keep a straight face when complaining about the anticompetitive practices allowing a competitor to hold on to a 10% market share.
If there's any pinning needing to be done it would be on lax antitrust laws or enforcement in the U.S. In the E.U., all of these companies consistently get slapped on the wrist about all of these things, but there's only so much the E.U. can do, if these companies get a safe haven in the U.S. and if the E.U. wants to continue to trade with the U.S. relatively freely. The U.S. is taking a stance that it benefits them more to be the domicile of evil monopolistic global megacorps than to police the necessary preconditions for the existence of free markets (which would imply that other nations could compete more freely with the U.S.) The E.U. has no such conflict of interests, so it's easy for them to take the "moral" high ground (although it's not moral to be precise; more like an appeal to free market values, which, they themselves, are also happy to violate on a case-by-case basis pretty much as it suits them).
The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for.
If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?
If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.
You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”
Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”
The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?
If anything, the lesson to learn from the LiMux failure has nothing to do with technology or with project planning + execution, but with politics. If you extort millions from government as a for-profit business, most of which ends up as pure profit, there is an “emperor's new clothes” dynamic. It aligns the interests of government officials with yours in driving a narrative that there was good value generated for the taxpayer from that taxpayer money you got. Also: You now have those millions in a war fund, which you can use as negotiation mass. (In the case of LiMux and Munich, Microsoft relocated their corporate HQ to Munich as a quid pro quo for the City of Munich abandoning the LiMux project, which directly benefitted the City of Munich because it now got to tax Microsoft in a way that it didn't previously get to do). … these kinds of strategies game theoretically dominate any kind of play that's possible through open source.
> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably ...
People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.
I came here to say precisely that. I was on svn before git was a thing, and I've never moved off it for any projects where I get to decide such things.
To a first approximation, one could say that distributed version control is a problem nobody ever had, and nobody ever intends to have. (GitHub is the world's centralized monorepo.)
Yet, distributed version control is the majority of the reason why git's mental model is so overcomplicated.
In a perfect society, companies would find that the more negative externality they create, the more difficult a time they'll have finding people willing to do it for them. One case in point is when a civil-oriented software company starts taking on military contracts and putting their people to work towards death and destruction. In a perfect society, the reaction we would get is the employees going "wait a second; I liked this company when I joined, but I never signed up for this." … and even in our less-than-perfect society, we do get some of this; what we need is more of this, not less.
Also: Saying that "learn to code" has been reduced from a meme about a surefire ticket to economic security to the equivalent of glassblower, is not really refuting what, in broad strokes, the original point actually was; is it?