Amen. It's one real "downside" in this day and age is that it requires fairly undivided attention to be used... that aside, it's without question my favorite way to interact with information.
On that note, a big thank you to whoever added "read this page" to Safari on iOS! Being able to turn long form articles into ad-hoc podcasts has been a game changer for me.
Canva destroyed graphic design well before LLMs caught up, but UX is still (somewhat surprisingly) on the ropes.
My bet: front end devs who need mocks to build something that looks nice get crowded out by UX designers with taste as code generation moves further into "good enough" territory.
Then those designers get crowded out as taste generation moves into "good enough" territory.
Yeah, this is notable. If true, every mobile carrier getting hit at the same time says "coordinated incident", from whatever source and for whatever purpose.
Edit to say: my Verizon FioS and cell service are both working fine, no noticeable interruption at any point today.
Second edit to say: never mind, downdetector's home page normalizes report spikes so 1k and 100k both look identical.
This isn't inherent, just a side effect of poorly designed text UI. Suggestions on the input, manual commands, or honest answers in response to the question "what can you do" all do as good a job as a GUI does, and sometimes a better job.
So many of the complaints I hear about TUIs just come down to bad design. Even one input and textual responses require thoughtful design.
That's design as in function, not color palette. Although... that too.
Merry Christmas, everyone! Continually grateful for this community: stumbling into it as a teenager changed my life and I never get tired of spinning out about new tech big and small with the folks here. Stay safe, everybody
As usual, size matters. Equating typical 401(k)s with the economic activity of the class GP is referring to is... absurd.
But pretending small-time participation in public markets is the same as billionaire participation in private markets is a great way to convince the lower classes our financial system isn't structured to move wealth away from them.
MCP has this in the spec: it's called "elicitation", and I'm pretty confident this push from OpenAI sets the stage for them to support it.
Once a service can actively involve you and/or your LLM in ongoing interaction, MCP servers start to get real sticky. We can safely assume the install/auth process will also get much less technical as pressure to deliver services to non-technical users increases.
Three inline subscription CTAs, a subscription pop-up, and a subscribe-wall a few paragraphs in.
Oof!
Reacting to what I could read without subscribing: turns out profitably applying AI to status-quo reality is way less exciting than exploring the edges of its capabilities. Go figure!
I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless.
The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more time on the part I personally enjoy, architecting the build and testing the resultant experience.
> While the LLMs get to blast through all the fun, easy work at lightning speed, we are then left with all the thankless tasks
This is, to me, the root of one disagreement I see playing out in every industry where AI has achieved any level of mastery. There's a divide between people who enjoy the physical experience of the work and people who enjoy the mental experience of the work. If the thinking bit is your favorite part, AI allows you to spend nearly all of your time there if you wish, from concept through troubleshooting. But if you like the doing, the typing, fiddling with knobs and configs, etc etc, all AI does is take the good part away.
Great write up! I've found these techniques pretty effective in tricky times over the years, and they don't only apply to tech workplaces.
That said, they're very much geared toward "polishing shit" leadership. Getting yourself and the people you're responsible for through the hard times is a crucial skill. Getting them out and onto something better is important too, even if it can be tougher to square with the mandate middle managers work under.
The outcome is not the same: allegedly repressive liberal administrations, internet businesses, and tv networks allowed openly authoritarian media to continually build momentum for a decade until that media delivered an authoritarian regime willing to actively dismantle the open system that allowed it to come to power. Contrast that with less than one year of the authoritarian regime, where the full force of the government apparatus is being used to crush political opponents by: defunding educational institutions, ending international soft-power programs, militarizing cities, threatening to de-license broadcasters, and classifying rights-based activist organizations as terrorists.
The liberal era was marked largely by criticism without consequence, where "deplatforming" was a social phenomenon that meant hopping to one of many other open networks, not the dogged federal punishment of institutions and individuals promoting inconvenient narratives. I'll join you in criticizing the liberal order any day, but it's beyond bad-faith to pretend the current administration is just more of the same.
The pessimistic reading is well-represented, so here's another: AI changes the definition of "entry-level", but it doesn't eliminate the class of professional labor that experienced workers would rather not do.
Until AI can do literally everything we can, that class of work will continue to exist, and it'll continue to be handed to the least experienced workers as a way for them to learn, get oriented, and earn access to more interesting problems and/or higher pay while experienced folks rest on their laurels or push the state of the art.
Eh, seems likely to me existing companies are structured for human labor in a way that's hard to really hard to untangle — smart individuals can level up with this stuff, but remaking an entire company demands human-level AI (not there yet) or a mostly AI-fluent team (working with/through AI is a new skill and few workers have developed it).
New co's built by individuals who get AI are best positioned to unlock the dramatic effects of the technology, and it's going to take time for them to eclipse encumbent players and then seed the labor market with AI-fluent talent
It's a good thought exercise, but the opening hinges on a premise that feels obviously wrong: that experts in doing work by hand will do that work faster with AI.
My experience is that, in many cases, people who are very good at doing something by hand are excellent at the process of doing that thing by hand, not generally excellent at doing that thing or talking about that thing or teaching others how to do that thing. And I've found it to be true (sometimes particularly true) for people who have done that thing for a long time, even if they're actively interested in finding new and better ways to do the work. Their skills are fine-tuned for a manual way of working.
Working with AI feels very, very different from writing software by hand. When I let myself lean into AI's strengths, it allows me to move much faster and often without sacrificing quality. But it takes constant effort to avoid the trap of my well-established comfort with doing things by hand.
The people who are best positioned to build incredible things with AI do not have or do not fall into that comfortable habit of manual work. They often aren't expert engineers (yet) in the traditional sense, but in a new sense that's being worked out in realtime by all of us. Gaps in technical understanding are still there, but they're being filled extremely fast by some of the best technology for learning our species has ever created.
It's hard for me to watch them and not see a rapidly approaching future where all this AI skepticism looks like self-soothing delusion from people who will struggle to adjust to the new techniques (and pace) of doing work with these tools.
On that note, a big thank you to whoever added "read this page" to Safari on iOS! Being able to turn long form articles into ad-hoc podcasts has been a game changer for me.