The reason that European tech sucks is that people in Europe are open to such arguments. If an engineer in the US started talking about SHOULD vs MUST, some PM would just give them that "what the fuck did I just listen to" face, spend the next few minutes gently trying to convince them that the customer experience matters more than the spec, and if they fail, escalate and get the decision they want.
For example, why does Google handle this differently for consumer and enterprise accounts? Well it's Google so the answer could always just be "they are disorganized" but there's a good chance that in both cases, it was the pragmatic choice given the slightly different priorities of these types of customers.
Sure, but if you look at more complex picture of engine development you could just as easily support the proposition that programmers are currently not in any danger (by pointing out that the qualitative differences between IC and steam engines were decisive when it comes to replacing horses, and the correct analogy is that much like a steam engine could never replace a horse, a transformer model can never replace a human).
Not detracting from the article, I think it's a fun way to shake your brain into the entirely appropriate space of "rapid change is possible"!
Idk why the author thinks that C would be a better language than Rust for vibe coding. Intuitively, I would have thought that the more formal constraints the system imposes, the better for vibe coding (since the more powerful static checks make it harder to write incorrect code).
Of course in practice I think the author is actually correct - LLM's struggle more than humans with sophisticated formal constraints and less than humans with remembering to write a bunch of boilerplate. But I think it's a pretty counterintuitive result and I'd love to have seen more discussion of it.
This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Its definitely wrong - I've used these exact checkout systems at places with way longer menus than any stadium has ever or will ever have. Even if that wasn't the case, it would still be way too speculative of premise to be worth seriously discussing, especially when the Occam's Razor "they reduced the menu size because its easier, they have a captive market, and why try to make good food when you can just charge $20 for a beer" explanation is right there in front of you.
The article starts by blaming AI for the reduced food menu, a speculative claim which the author made no attempt to validate and which is almost certainly incorrect. I stopped reading right there.
People in the US prefer Signal over Telegram because Signal was created by people who took security seriously, and Telegram wasn't.
People outside the US prefer telegram because they assume that Signal is probably compromised, or at least highly vulnerable to compromise, by US intelligence - they trust Pavel Durov's history of expropriation and arrest more than they trust some nerds who claim that our product is secure.
No, just different definitions of "usable". Although it's worth noting that an average test is testing stuff that even the most advanced type system never could.
For example, why does Google handle this differently for consumer and enterprise accounts? Well it's Google so the answer could always just be "they are disorganized" but there's a good chance that in both cases, it was the pragmatic choice given the slightly different priorities of these types of customers.