Sure, “Trade Secret” non-competes are usually a pretext employers use to keep low-wage workers under their thumbs, but protecting bonafide trade secrets is their only sorta legitimate use, IMO. The world would be better if they were illegal, but letting engineers disperse confidential information from their last employer wouldn’t be the beneficial part.
And where’s the reasonable alternative that competition has provided to many of these enshittified services? They don’t exist because nickel-and-diming people to avoid misery on services they require is far more profitable, and charging a gigantic luxury premium to have everything you want… and don’t want, is even more profitable than that. The system can still be complete shit while providing some remnant of its original functionality. Without proper regulation, the whole thing just devolves into n-opolies hell-bent on extracting as much as they can from everybody else. Well, that’s what we’ve got in many markets.
Having a profitable quarter in which they were given an undisclosed discount on compute only in that quarter does not necessarily mean “Anthropic is Profitable.” It doesn’t mean they’re not, either. Even the breathless article about their first profitable quarter, (which, frankly, read more like a press release,) mentioned in passing that it’s “not clear” if it’s sustainable because their compute expenses are likely to increase. I get the feeling that if they were sustainably profitable, they’d shout it from the rooftops.
But we don’t know.
If someone proudly announces they and their partner could afford to eat at a particular fancy restaurant every night last week, but for that specific week the restaurant had a BOGO deal, and they also didn’t disclose how they determined that they could afford it, you don’t really know if they could sustainably afford to eat there every night, right?
Ah, I see. I’m sure the clothing designer that actually made the design couldn’t care less about technical consistency and was just looking for something ‘tech’ looking that also read well in that design context in that medium.
> I guess Uniqlo is run through Windows though: one thing that struck me was the font, which I’m almost certain is Consolas,
Surely this would use whatever font the virtual terminal profile was set to? I don’t know of any method to choose a virtual terminal font from bash and don’t see any code that addresses it?
Yeah that’s exactly the same if you completely ignore context and market dynamics. It’s like trying to use the patterns of the colonial American horse market as a vehicle to analyze the modern American auto industry.
The amount of work in any given market at any given time is finite. Beyond that, developers likely won’t even be the bottleneck if everyone is a 10x ultradev 3000.
> Has it ever been?
Well… yes? So very many industries shrank, even disappeared in practical terms, because efficiency, automation and technological improvements. Industrial revolution? Calculators? Computerized accounting? I mean the list is giant.
No profession uses only one skill. I’ve had a few, the longest-running as a developer, and there is nothing uniquely varied about working in software. One thing that is pretty unique to software is how superior they feel to most other professionals, when in reality, it’s a pretty mediocre discipline compared to electrical or mechanical engineering, medicine, chemistry…
Cobblers design, make and repair shoes of various kinds, boots for various purposes, slippers and moccasins with leather, cloth, rubber, and many kinds of threads using punches, knives, various machines, glues…
How much does a developer need to learn about their core competency when switching employers? Not even close to as much as a machinist. It’s not a useful comparison.
Even aside from inflation, the prospect of efficiency-borne gains meaningfully benefiting the consumer rather than fattening corporate profit margins, frankly, seems like magical thinking. I’ve seen no evidence that our current corporate culture is capable of it (for any longer than it takes to dominate some market.)
Right, but if things progress as they promised, it will require far fewer people to do the same work, which means the industry already has all the people it so need for at least a couple decades. That’s what happened with tool and die guys when offshoring kicked off, and now they’re scrambling to get apprentices because the last of the OG ones are retiring. There were decades that pretty much nobody (relative to prior eras) got trained for that work.
Yeah. I’ve been saying that for a while (and switched fields entirely.) People were getting hung up on the idea that an LLM could not truly replace a developer, and that’s true, but it doesn’t matter. For the job market to be severely impacted, you just need to reduce the number of people required to do the parts of the job that LLMs suck at, and that only requires increased efficiency for existing developers. Even if your average developer is a measly 30% more efficient, that might create 20% less demand for developers, which would have a giant impact on demand, which would have a giant impact on wages for those still employed.