> I sat out the TMT bubble until they quit using the term "information superhighway," and it saved me an 80% drawdown.
> I'm sitting out the AI / chip / SpaceX [AICSX, pronounced like the wrestling shoes?] bubble until they stop using the word "compute" as if it were a noun.
> I'm guessing I'll save myself a drawdown on a similar scale.
That type are called "engineers". I used to interview them and I didn't care if they knew anything about the business.
Large codebases are the most complex things we have ever worked on and can easily become unmaintainable. I wanted people who really cared about code quality and consistency in order to offset this.
I think that it would be even more important to hire people like that now and even though we will need less programmers there were never enough of that type to go around anyway.
My argument was not that LLMs aren't useful but that a compiler is a completely misleading anamlogy.
You compared them to humans. Humans live in the world, have a world model, meet people for lunch and exchange ideas. Agents read markdown files and code.
Simanwords, you spend a lot of time on HN promoting LLMs and being dismissive of humans in comparison. I have to ask:
> there has not been an issue i found that required me to dig into the assembly of a compiled language (there are edge cases if there was a compiler bug, but I have not seen them myself).
The compiler did exactly what you said because the programming language forced you to be exact. There was no room for misunderstanding.
This will never be the case with an LLM even if it becomes infallible (it won't). It's you who is fallible and sloppy until you force yourself to be precise. A programming language can help with that.
> As for how to rebuild it, I haven't figured that part out yet.
Just do some work with the code. If I go back and try to add a feature or fix some bugs on code that I have not worked with for a long time I find it much quicker to build up a mental model of it than code which I have never worked on previously.
Someone instructing AI through the terminal is a bit like an office worker with a tool belt. I don't think you can say anything about their coding ability until they are coding without AI. Even if thats in notepad.
Buy up all the property in an area and raise the rents in order to force other people to give them their hard earned cash so that they can spend it on a yacht in Monaco.
The "good" argument is that people trust other people's opinion more who have not been paid to advertise. I trust the doctor who personally recommends a drug more than the doctor who was paid to recommend the drug - even if they recommended the drug before they were paid. That's a fact of life, it's not "character assassination". Tao didn't do anything wrong by making an ad but he can't expect people to take his opinion seriously after someone gave him a lot of money to state an opinion that favors them.
This could be true but, no matter what, a streetwise person would never trust him after he has taken the money. If he wanted his opinion on AI to be trusted then he should have made his money some other way.
It's interesting user43928 that you only created your account here 19 days ago and that every one of your comments is pro AI. You don't comment on anything else. Also interesting that you promote Fable by name here (it was only released 2 days ago).
(Don't worry, I know I'm rowing against the tide with this comment. The AI people have decided to destroy the commons for a few more millions on top of the billions they have already been given. It's a shame.)
Firing fast works both ways. If I joined your company and I thought you fired someone too fast I would leave, not because I might get fired, but because I've seen where that kind of leadership takes things.
This study showed that people writing computer games had little interest in productivity tools (because they are producing something that is really used). But people who produce things that not really used are obsessed with productivity:
> the perennially unprofitable venture-backed startup, for which faux productivity is connected to the generally immaterial nature of its high valuations, versus the game studio that lives and dies by the profitability of its products.
> In a sector of the economy where "it's not about how much you earn, but about how much you're worth," the labors of the companies whose workflows are built on the kinds of productivity apps that today comprise nearly 40 percent of Product Hunt's output are not actually directed at the creation of a thing, but at the appearance of the creation of a thing.
Maybe this is why Silicon Valley seems to have become obsessed with productivity and AI whereas the people in the industries you mention don't seem as excited. It's because they are actually making real things so they don't have to 'look busy' in order to justify themselves.
Just to be clear: It slows down the overhead of a function call by 50%. It doesn't slow down the function implementation which takes a very large percentage of the time.
This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless"
You pay tech debt with compounding interest at exorbitant rates.
Another way to look at it is to say that like any analogy applied to software development it is weak. It is not like normal debt at all because you must start paying back immediately one way or another. So you can't just pile hack on hack and wait for a year to pay back. You will start having to pay back for the hacks within a couple of months because of the bugs you have to fix and how hard it is to work with the messy codebase. In some cases you may even grind to a halt before you get anything substantial out to the customer. This doesn't mean that you should never hack stuff in. But in general it's cheaper to pay off the debt quickly instead of paying for the debt.