You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.
So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.
For most teams, whether or not you can say no to building something is ambiguous at best, at least if you wish to stay on that team and at that company. It's definitely one of the things that has made me vote with my feet in the past. With agentic coding, the ability to say no is pretty much gone because the perception is that it's just one more parallel thing we can throw an agent at.
The thing I see from agentic adoption that I find lamentable as a software engineer is that timeline expectations have collapsed to absurdity. You can plan a project to do a major migration, do all the estimations on how long something will take, and if you give an answer that says weeks and cite the evidence, product and leadership will now claim it should take days, citing their ai's design.
It's exhausting. Even if you are an expert, you now have lost the implicit trust that came from years of building political capital, shipping efficiently, and delivering value for multiple companies, because a different prompt with different context from the one you provide gave a different answer than what you did.
During delivery, if you read your code produced line-by-line and review for correctness, and put in additional guardrail automations that slow the automated build, and ship 4 times a day with a defect rate of 5.4% with agentic coding, you are compared unfavorably to teams with a change defect rate of 15.7% that ship 13 times per day, because you are too slow.
And you are individually compared with whole team outputs. Even if you deliver at a rate ten times greater than the worst contributor at your company, if you are not outputting code at the rate of an entire team of 5, you are not meeting the expectations of product and leadership anymore.
All of this is to say, yes, people are looking at software engineers as both the bottleneck and unnecessary, even at high technology companies, right now. They are looking at them that way because they have their own agents that are biased to think that the engineering claims are wrong and agents are sycophantic.
It has been a very bad bet that hardware will not evolve to exceed the performance requirements of today's software tomorrow, just as it is a bad bet that tomorrow someone will rewrite today's software to be slower.
I'm going to guess that someone who can afford smart glasses can afford to have another pair of unsmart glasses. What is it about the _glasses_ that people find creepier than a smartphone that can literally do even more invasive things than the current glasses technology?
Great, let's regulate it! And why are glasses more offensive than cell phone cameras, or go pros, or drones? I genuinely do not understand why people don't worry about the other form factors, but draw the line at the glasses, so help me here. To be clear - I understand why people find being recorded creepy. I don't understand why the glasses form factor is creepy but random cell phone recordings that are shared on the internet all the time without the consent of the recorded people aren't.
It seems like a more polite way of handling this in private spaces is just to ask that people take them off - just like we do when a pig farmer walks into our house with their boots on.
I get why people are creeped out by them, but we get filmed or photographed hundreds of times a day in a big city when we are in public spaces. Gatekeeping a potentially useful technology for being filmed in public -- well, everyone is _already_ filmed in public. ATM cameras, stoplight cameras, drone cameras, smartphone cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras. You are on camera every time you step out of your house. You are on camera every time you open your work computer. Singling out cameras in eyeglasses as "creepy" is kind of worrying about a drop in the ocean. Cameras on self-driving cars. Nanny cams. Closed-circuit cameras. The things are everywhere, and they are always invasions of privacy. Why is the line the "creeper" glasses?
I'd be ok with it if we were for banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces. But we're very much not.
And if we're not, then having a personal heads-up display that is contextual to your current surroundings or has augmented reality capability is too useful to not use (eventually). I'm bad with names, and good with faces. That use-case alone would be worth it for me, if it were available.
I mean, I grew up with AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC... yet I switched every time a new tech came out with more of my friends on it. Why do we think discord will be any more sticky than Digg or Slashdot, or any of the above?
People will migrate, some will stay, and it will just be yet another noise machine they have to check in the list of snapchat, instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter, twitch, discord, group texts, marco polo, tinder, hinge, roblox, minecraft servers, email, whatsapp and telegram, and slack/teams for work.
Isn't that true of python as well? I would argue that Github's decision to use markdown for formatting, more than any other, is what resulted in its widespread adoption to other use cases. The simple tool to share code ate the world.
I'm continually surprised that Microsoft hasn't completely cornered the market on LLM code generation, given their head start with copilot and ready access to source code on a scale that nobody else really has.
The last one is fairly simple to solve. Set up a microphone in any busy location where conversations are occurring. In an agentic loop, send random snippets of audio recordings for transcriptions to be converted to text. Randomly send that to an llm, appending to a conversational context. Then, also hook up a chat interface to discuss topics with the output from the llm. The random background noise and the context output in response serves as a confounding internal dialog to the conversation it is having with the user via the chat interface. It will affect the outputs in response to the user.
If it interrupts the user chain of thought with random questions about what it is hearing in the background, etc. If given tools for web search or generating an image, it might do unprompted things. Of course, this is a trick, but you could argue that any sensory input living sentient beings are also the same sort of trick, I think.
I think the conversation will derail pretty quickly, but it would be interesting to see how uncontrolled input had an impact on the chat.
I'll add to this - if you work on a software project to port an excel spreadsheet to real software that has all those properties, if the spreadsheet is sophisticated enough to warrant the process, the creators won't be able to remember enough details abut how they created it to tell you the requirements necessary to produce the software. You may do all the calculations right, and because they've always had a rounding error that they've worked around somewhere else, your software shows calculations that have driven business decisions for decades were always wrong, and the business will insist that the new software is wrong instead of owning some mistake. It's never pretty, and it always governs something extremely important.
And adding ads into the responses is _child's play_ find the ad with the most semantic similarity to the content in the context. Insert at the end of the response or every N responses with a convincing message that based on our discussion you might be interested in xyz.
For more subtle and slimier way of doing things, boost the relevance of brands and keywords, and when they are semantically similar to the most likely token, insert them into the response. Companies pay per impression.
When a guardrail blocks a response, play some political ad for a law and order candidate before delivering the rest of the message. I'm completely shocked nobody has offered free gpt use via an api supported by ad revenue yet.
Tech debt doesn't accrue because of fast feedback iterations. Tech debt accrues because it isn't paid down or is unrecognized during review. And like all working code, addressing it has a cost in terms of effort and verification. When the cost is too great, nobody is willing to pay it. So it accrues.
There aren't many features that you'll never touch again. There are some, but they usually don't really reach that stage before they are retired. Things like curl, emacs, and ethernet adapters still exist and are still under active development after existing for decades. Sure, maybe the one driver for an ethernet adapter that is no longer manufactured isn't very active, but adding support for os upgrades still requires maintenance. New protocols, encryption libraries and security patches have to be added to curl. emacs has to be specially maintained for the latest OSX and windows versions. Maintenance occurs in most living features.
Tools exist to produce extra productivity. Compilers are a tool so that we don't have to write assembly. High-level interpreted languages are a tool so we don't have to write ports for every system. Tools themselves are abstractions.
Software is abstractions all the way down. Everything is a stack on everything else. Including, even, the hardware. Many are old, tried and true abstractions, but there are dozens of layers between the text editor we enter our code into and the hardware that executes it. Most of the time we accept this, unless one of the layers break. Most of the time they don't, but that is the result of decades of management and maintenance, and efforts sometimes measured in huge numbers of working hours by dozens of people.
A person can write a rudimentary web browser. A person cannot write chrome with all its features today. The effort to do so would be too great to finish. In addition, if finished, it would provide little value to the market, because the original chrome would still exist and have gained new features and maintenance patches that improve its behavior from the divergent clone the hypothetical engineer created.
LLMs output react because react dominates their training data. You have to reject their plan and force them to choose your preferred architecture when they attempt to generate what you ask, but in a different way.
We can have better tooling for sharing apps than the web. First, it needs to be built. This takes effort, iteration, and time.
Second, it needs to be marketed and gain adoption. At one time, Netflix and the <blink> tag it implented dominated the web. Now it is a historical footnote.Massive migrations and adoptions happen.
Build the world you want to work in. And use the tools you think make you more productive. Measure those against new tools that come along, and adopt the ones that are better. That's all you can do.
I'll attempt to provide a reasonable argument for why speed of delivery is the most important thing in software development. I'll concede that I don't know if the below is true, and haven't conducted formal experiments, and have no real-world data to back up the claims, nor even define all the terms in the argument beyond generally accepted terminology. The premise of the argument therefore may be incorrect.
Trivial software is software for which
- the value of which the software solution is widely accepted and widely known in practice and
- formal verification exists and is possible to automate or
- only has a single satisfying possible implementation.
Most software is non-trivial.
There will always be:
- bugs in implementation
- missed requirements
- leaky abstractions
- incorrect features with no user or business value
- problems with integration
- problems with performance
- security problems
- complexity problems
- maintenance problems
in any non-trivial software no matter how "good" the engineer producing the code is or how "good" the code is.
These problems are surfaced and reduced to lie within acceptable operational tolerances via iterative development. It doesn't matter how formal our specifications are or how rigorous our verification procedures are if they are validated against an incorrect model of the problem we are attempting to solve with the software we write.
These problems can only be discovered through iterative acceptance testing, experimentation, and active use, maintenance, and constructive feedback on the quality of the software we write.
This means that the overall quality of any non-trivial software is dominated by the total number of quality feedback loops executed during its lifetime. The number of feedback loops during the software's lifetime are bound by the time it takes to complete a single synchchronous feedback loop. Multiple feedback loops may be executed in parallel, but Amdahl's law holds for overall delivery.
Therefore, time to delivery is the dominant factor to consider in order to produce valuable software products.
Your slower to produce, higher quality code puts a boundary on the duration of a single feedback loop iteration. The code you produce can perfectly solve the problem as you understand it within an iteration, but cannot guarantee that your understanding of the problem is not wrong. In that sense, many lower quality iterations produces better software quality as the number of iterations approaches infinity.
The problem with the dark forest hypothesis is that there's already no way to hide from the techinically advanced malignant actors that could execute a Dark Forest strike in the first place.
If your civilization is technically advanced enough to be a potential threat to such an actor, the highly energetic actions you are undertaking for interstellar travel will be visible to all of space via radio and infrared telescopes. Given that it will be economically infeasible to launch all of the payloads required to produce interstellar spaceships from within the gravity well of a planet, the orbital infrastructure required itself will lkely be visible as a periodic dimming of the planet's sun. It too, will give off infrared radiation detectable by a far-off technically advanced malignant actor.
There is no hiding in space. Your only hope for species and evolutionary survival in a dark forest is to aggressively disperse to uninhabited target systems. However, this also increases the likelihood that one of those systems will go rogue and eliminate the other ones it knows about.
Given this, the best strategy seems to be first avoidance of contact, then diplomacy, then detente, and finally alliance and assimilation in a Dark Forest universe. The allied powers can ensure that any bad actors that attempt elimination strikes are outnumbered and eliminated themselves.
On top of that, space is infinitely large. There are an enormous amount of finite resources within a planetary solar system which are way more energetically economic to exploit than ones in other systems. Once a civilization is forced to expand for survival beyond its local system, it is likewise economically cheaper to avoid warfare to claim one particular planetary system for its resources than to fight an interstellar war that risks the annihilation of the conflict participants' civilizations. There are literally an infinite number of systems to choose from.
There's no reason to destroy other competitors when the resources you are competing for are infinite. In such a scenario, which our universe seems to be an example, the only reason for conflict is malignant choice.
The prisoner's dilemma between two or more civilizations presented in the series would never need to occur.
The philosophy behind Three Body is just terribly cynical and illogical in the face of what we know of the existing universe. It makes for a great story, but the type of aggression posited in technical species doesn't provide an evolutionary advantage.
It should be noted that the entire Dark Forest philosophy presented in the book came from an unstable, traumatized, suicidal, xenophobic, nihilistic genius. Not the sort of person who you want forming the zeitgeist for existing in a much larger ecosystem of other civilizations.
If you accept the premise, then the series is great. But the premise assumptions are fundamentally flawed.