what is missing from this is the issue of power. tech companies interpret the rise of AI as empowering management and disempowering workers.
It's the American way to disempower workers. Tech people used to have a moat called expertise and management believes AI has made that obsolete.
Eventually workers in America will need to fight for power, probably through unions. That is the time honored way. There will be a lot of degradation and impoverishment on the way there I think. Fasten your seatbelts.
I was walking through a startup neighborhood in San Francisco the other day and I encountered several telephone poles which were posted with advertisements for software engineering jobs. These were not generic or scam advertisements. This was a particular startup, looking for software engineers. What is old is new again.
Shout out to American Giant. I have like 15 t-shirts from them, some are ten years old and they look new. Buying good stuff saves money in the long run!
Not just many foreign militaries. Our military. General Dan Caine by report advised Trump about the negative consequences of this action. MAGA elected a fantasist and narcissist and we will all bear the consequences. I was no fan of Kamala but the appalling limitations of Trump are of a different order and it is a disgrace that our voters by majority elected him.
Private car ownership is better everyday for suburbs and rural areas but in cities that is not true. Public transit can improve downtown access and reduce congestion. You need some density for transit.
This is not Facebook but I have a young friend who gets her news on Epstein from tiktok. She is convinced they were eating babies. I do worry (a little) that she will go over the conspiracy theories deep end. I told her tiktok news was bad "mental hygiene" but she didn't get it.
The prospect of going the last mile to fix the remaining problems reminds me of the old joke:
"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."
I'm anxious about code quality in critical infrastructure in 5 years or so.
Also my mastery of code starts with design and implementation that results in deep, intuitive understanding. Then I can do good code reviews and fix bugs fast fast fast.
Now engineers leap from AI assisted or even dominated implementation to code reviews. Lots of reading code without that deep level of mastery. With this approach I have less confidence in the humans who are in the loop.
What I find missing in the vibe coding discussions is precisely what we can't know, which is how this will work out over time in practice. A couple concerning data points I gleaned recently (sorry no references):
- the LOC per PR is going up.
- the number of bugs per LOC is going up.
I wonder whether 'enshittification' will hit the installed software base hard in the future and the software engineers tasked to fix it will not have been brought through the rigors of designing and implementing complex systems on their own, without LLMs.
This doesn't address the degradation that may happen when LLMs are increasingly trained on LLM output.
BTW I used to work in AI and I don't think scaling is a solution here.
For the first time I have begun to doubt Microsoft's chosen course. (I am a retired MS principal engineer.) Their integration of copilot shows all the taste and good tradeoff choices of Teams but to far greater consequence. Copilot is irritating.
MS dependence on OpenAI may well become dicey because that company is going to be more impacted by the popping of the AI bubble than any other large player. I've read that MS can "simply" replace ChatGPT by rolling their own -- maybe they can. I wouldn't bet the company on it. Is google going to be eager to license Gemini? Why would they?
I'm amazed no one brings up the obvious: the need for reactions that are reliable at high speed. There is no way I will trust my tuckus to a freeway driving Waymo for a couple of years.
The judge IIRC found that training models using copyrighted materials was fair use. I disagree. Furthermore this will be a problem for anyone who generates text for a living. Eventually LLMs will undercut web, news, and book publishing because LLMs capture the value and don't pay for it. The ecosystem will be harmed.
The only problem the judge found here was training on pirated texts.
It's the American way to disempower workers. Tech people used to have a moat called expertise and management believes AI has made that obsolete.
Eventually workers in America will need to fight for power, probably through unions. That is the time honored way. There will be a lot of degradation and impoverishment on the way there I think. Fasten your seatbelts.