The sad thing is that the knee jerk reaction here is going to be “omg just vote with your wallet, don’t buy”
But the truth is it’s bullshit and this attitude that companies should be able to do whatever they want because it’s a free market is getting so tiresome
Clearly there is agreement that things can be taken too far - as soon as one single consumer protection/anti competitive/monopoly preventing law exists, you’ve admitted those types of laws are needed
So then you’re only arguing about degrees and companies shouldn’t be allowed to do shit that harms consumers this way
On the surface this seems reasonable - it’s inevitable - discs aren’t going to hang around forever
But this goes back to what it means to own something and we’re all being relegated to serfs who don’t own shit
You wanna get rid of discs? Fine, but give me an alternative so that I still own what I buy and can resell it at will
Second of all, OP never even said anything about no regulation - they specifically said they wanted transparency which is 100% valid and better than a world where the government baby proofs everything for you
Models are already censored - and who they are or aren't uncensored for has a lot of implications which are way worse
And the jets is a terrible example - you picked one of THE highest regulated industries where NOBODY has a problem with regulation
On the one hand - you’re happy for the entrepreneurs
On the other, every single thing I hate as a consumer happens because of lack of competition and these acquisitions that old dinosaurs use to prop themselves up
Every single one - I don’t think I’m exaggerating
Not particularly heart broken about Roku at this point, but still bugs me to see
> And then I started realizing: all the knowledge I have accumulated over the years: the trade-offs between implementations, how acquiring works, how to structure idempotency to prevent double-charges, everything, was becoming useless.
It’s not useless, at least not yet. And the fact that you recognize this puts you way ahead of the typical HN user constantly crying about how AI could never
What’s going to make you a good AI-augmented engineer is going to be treating AI like a good partner
Not like a genius, not like an idiot - these are extremes where all the memes on LinkedIn are generated
Like any partnership you will see it comes with bad ideas and good ideas - that it will challenge your own ideas and be sometimes wrong and sometimes right
Approaching it this way, I think my learnings only accelerated - the conversation is of much higher value because it’s a fast back and forth where I can take a moment to learn on those occasions where its ideas beat mine
You are feeling a little insecure, paranoid is not the word, and that’s a good thing
Tackle the problem for what it is: I have this sidekick now that can help me bang shit out in a fraction of the time it used to
Use the the brain that got you here to figure that out - don’t waste your time on these debating whether ai is good or not or listening to stories about how it’s stupid because one time it suggested something that wrong
You’re going to be fine, put AI to work for you
Ask me again in a few months but for now you’re fine
When the city of San Francisco is handing out tax breaks to companies for forcing RTO in shitty Bay Area infrastructure and Paul Graham loudly and proudly calls wfh communism, it’s hard to not take these findings with a grain of salt
Even if true, I am positive the solution isn’t to stuff people back into offices and rob them of the little leverage they got during covid
Right there with you - this has been my experience as well, to a tee
I can do more now…so I do - it’s really that simple
And it’s way more exhausting because there’s no room to breathe - fresh code to work with every few minutes with prepping for the next set of tasks in between
On the one hand the dopamine’s got me hooked on this like a video game
On the other…I’m as overwhelmed as ever line you said, even if it’s my own doing
Yeah I purposely didn’t get into the right or not - it’s just how I’m seeing things evolve in “real time”
A big part of it is that people feel like they are drinking from a firehouse having to learn to use ai (which is not always just a prompt) and having to leverage it effectively at the same time for real product/business work
I suspect this will settle down at some point too
One other observation I’ve seen: the makeup of a team that can leverage ai is turning out to be different than the make up of the usual high performing Eng team we think about
One of the things missed with AI is that it’s enabled people to do more - either by augmenting skill sets or augmenting bandwidth
In my own circles this has led to more work not less
Expectations are higher, SLAs are tighter. Which makes sense - if a company can mine more gold with less works, they aren’t going to retire workers they will ask for even more gold
Managers are coding again, analysts are expected to write better requirements and do more of their own analytics, lots of worn all around
Eventually we will saturate that and need new people again
I don’t disagree with the general principle that people will lose jobs, I just a) don’t think it will be as accelerated as people claim and b) more obviously the disruption will be felt in roles that are more rote and mechanical in nature - e.g. peoples whose job is in the family of summarizing data or compiling metrics, generating simple content (slide decks), etc and slowly creep up from there
AI is one of those garbage in garbage out things and so far the quality out when the input quality has been great from what I’ve seen. Just a note preemptively to the nay sayers
I grew up on construction sites with my dad. If i've done well in my career, it was from watching him operate - managing huge construction crews, how he figured out who to put on what tasks, handling suprises, setbacks, all that stuff
My dad (now retired) was always super practical about stuff. He'd tell me pretty nonchalantly things like "yeah we're dealing with xyz constraint, we may have to cut a corner over here, but that's ok", when I asked him about it he gave me a little spiel that you can be thoughtful about how you do things, including when you can cut a corner and more importantly, what corners are ok to cut.
I really took that to heart - especially the "be thoughtful about the corners you cut"
If an LLM has consistently one shotted certain tasks and they are rote/mechanical - not reviewing that code is probably ok.
Are you getting lazy and not reviewing stuff that should be reviewed even if a human wrote it? That's probably not ok
I can live with some basic code that broke because it used outdated syntax somewhere (provided the code isn't part of a mission critical application), but I can't live with it fucking JWT signing etc
If you look at the past 3-4 decades, China has just played their cards so well
If/when they overtake the US, all things aside, they deserve it. There is no world where the US overtakes China but there’s a world where China overtakes the US. Best outcome for the US atm is parity.
Just remarkable the things they’ve accomplished in the time they’ve accomplished them.
Always makes me wonder how people use their machine when I read comments like this
I’ve worked in big tech and fast growing startups, side by side at one point or another next to hundreds of nerds that love talking about hardware and software
The touchpad is almost universally loved - I have never ever once her anyone complain about the click - most people didn’t even notice the switch
It has 3D Touch and all that and I’ve never gotten a false click - ever - not exaggerating, in however long they’ve been out
The only complaint I’ve ever heard more than once is that sometimes it takes a second to respond
So I ask you: how do you use your laptop? If no one else complains about this, it’s at least worth asking the question: what do you think you’re doing differently than everybody else?
This was a great comment, you challenged them but in a reasonable way and with really good questions
I wish public discourse were more this way - if someone is arguing in good faith, actually answering what you asked moves the conversation forward, it’s just on the person to give you a serious answer
But the truth is it’s bullshit and this attitude that companies should be able to do whatever they want because it’s a free market is getting so tiresome
Clearly there is agreement that things can be taken too far - as soon as one single consumer protection/anti competitive/monopoly preventing law exists, you’ve admitted those types of laws are needed
So then you’re only arguing about degrees and companies shouldn’t be allowed to do shit that harms consumers this way
On the surface this seems reasonable - it’s inevitable - discs aren’t going to hang around forever
But this goes back to what it means to own something and we’re all being relegated to serfs who don’t own shit
You wanna get rid of discs? Fine, but give me an alternative so that I still own what I buy and can resell it at will