Is it teaching people anything? I suspect it's just enabling the "author" to spend even less time actively thinking about whatever task they're performing.
This is pretty hyperbolic. Great products that were much better than what they replaced or competed with, but "beyond wild dreams of millions of people"? You'd think they cured cancer in 2003 or something...
I'd add to this by asking: how much more PMF can you get when you have a two week horizon of new customers before you literally run out of compute resource in a major cloud provider data centre?
Sounds like customers are coming in thick and fast.
If this is the dynamic and the company can't spare a few weeks to solve it, something has gone seriously wrong in a very interesting way.
Disclaimer: UK centric thoughts (because that's where I live)
Some projections are signalling deflation on the horizon.
Given the brutal cost of living crisis, I suspect the government and BoE have grossly underestimated how hard things are getting (and how much harder they'll eventually get) for a giant slice of the population.
I'm an absolute lay person here, but surely maintaining (relatively) higher interest rates whilst cutting government investment and raising the tax burden to post war highs during the worst cost of living crisis in a generation is an economic wrecking ball.
If my naive take is anywhere close to sensible, I'd bet on a screeching u-turn and rates lowering again to try and rescue the situation.
Side question: what are "normal" levels for interest rates? I hear people use this term all the time (usually while advocating for hawkish rises in some direct or implied way). Surely the interest rate mechanism is inherently dynamic and therefor entirely context specific, rendering the notion of a "normal" level useless.
I occasionally struggle with issues around optimism/pessimism.
Working in a start-up I'm surrounded by others who are overwhelmingly optimistic (which is such a powerful bulwark against the brutal struggle, especially in the early days).
I try my best to be as positive as I can, but on reflection I'm probably a slight optimist, or neutral in my overall outlook.
I can't help feeling like some other team members see me as constantly dragging things down when I point out issues etc. I guess I can sometimes feel like a total pessimist when contrasted against individuals who are overwhelmingly optimistic, despite not in-fact having a tendency toward pessimism.
Maybe I'm a barrier to progress :)
It's a strange relativism that I only encounter in my work environment. In everyday life, I definitely don't feel pessimistic.
I wonder if, relatively speaking, the extreme blind optimist can make the more rational, reserved optimist seem negative by comparison. Gaining a good overall perspective is key I guess, although never easy.
Devs can get by working few hours a day, some barely do any work at all
Not sure how others here feel, but I have to say that when I've found myself in situations where there isn't much work to be done I find it utterly soul destroying.
Always feel guilty doing anything else in down-time when I'm billing a client and so sometimes end up sitting in a weird stand by mode, feeling like I'm somehow being lazy.
True, but then we've essentialy had limitless image generation capabilities since we've had the tools to make marks. I guess this is faster, and in other ways it offers promising new opportinities for people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.
Others are interpreting my original comment as "this is not art", but I'm not really trying to make that argument. Art is entirely subjective and i don't presume to define what is or isn't art.
I guess my point is more specifically "what itch does this scratch"?
It's really cool, and that may well be the answer tbh.
Aside from the fact that I explicitly praised the achievment, my point actually relies on said appreciation.
I guess my musing was hypothetical but I was careless in communicating that. I get that we can't centrally plan innovation or human effort - and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society where this was the case.
Hate to say it but when i see stuff like this it only reminds me of what we could have achieved if this ingenuity had been applied in another domain.
Can't help feeling that this accidentally harms creative types and risks swamping us with visual junk.
The technical achievment is astounding but no-one would seriously claim that crafting an image via a short prompt is creative except in the most cursory way.
I'm probably missing some life changing use-case, but apeing art in random styles can't be it.
This is an excellent framing that's rarely expressed. Most people focus on the tax aspects, and that makes sense - it's easy to feel a sense of injustice if you think others are somehow getting away with paying less tax.
In reality, the actual difference is marginal, and in return contractors forfeit every protection taken for granted by permanent employees. Paid leave, sick pay, redundancy pay, protection from indiscriminate firing, (often generous) pension contributions etc.
It's not so much that they refuse to disclose the methodology, it's that there is no methodology. The rules are (I suspect intentionally) vague and the degree to which any given factor (duration of contract, working practices etc.) applies, seems to vary from case to case.
This creates an environment of great uncertainty for freelancers, but also one where HMRC can never be sure themselves, if they're properly pursuing those accused of being in breach.
They seem to regularly lose many of these cases on appeal when a (presumably) fair minded judge is asked to look at the facts.