I love how people run to shout "this time is different, eh?" in an ironic tone while ignoring that a lot of times, yes, it was different.
Covid was different -- people dismissed it initially saying it was going to be like the 2009 Swine flu or the seasonal chicken flu we see on media.
The iPhone was different -- many columnists said it was just a fancier PDA and that Palm already had the market.
The 2008 crisis was different -- the signs of a housing bubble were present but were dismissed. The derivatives made it different and it imploded.
There are times when things are actually different and you should be able to identify them. AI is one of them.
I don't even need to elaborate much, as a programmer it's clear how this a game-changer. We are moving past the era when programs were just predictable if/else chains with regex to a world where you can accept non-deterministic, never-before seen inputs and have them to be interpreted accurately. Just like the Internet added another "dimension" to computer applications, AI is now adding another "dimension" previously unreachable.*
* Just as you could make a big local LAN before the Internet, it's obvious that we had past incarnations of the current technology that gave some taste of that dimension, but did not fully "unlock" it.
Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer engineers are just your average consultancy engineer with leet code practice. They have little abstracting capabilities and would be pissed-off if you use some tool/workflow that's not "The Google Way™" (and that includes things like Github for code reviews (instead of Gerrit or a Gerrit-clone), multirepos or monorepos without Bazel, anything else than gRPC...).
And the managers... Oh, the managers... They just act for the sake of their own promotion even if that means damaging someone's else career or the company in the long term. And will complain about things not being done the "Google Way", even if the proposed Google Way failed multiple times in that context (startups and scaleups, in my case). But what's really shocking is how they have no interpersonal skills, to the point of making you constantly question yourself: how, why, did this person ended up in a management track in a supposedly Y-career company? How not only did they got there but also promoted multiple times for this role?
Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.
Covid was different -- people dismissed it initially saying it was going to be like the 2009 Swine flu or the seasonal chicken flu we see on media.
The iPhone was different -- many columnists said it was just a fancier PDA and that Palm already had the market.
The 2008 crisis was different -- the signs of a housing bubble were present but were dismissed. The derivatives made it different and it imploded.
There are times when things are actually different and you should be able to identify them. AI is one of them.
I don't even need to elaborate much, as a programmer it's clear how this a game-changer. We are moving past the era when programs were just predictable if/else chains with regex to a world where you can accept non-deterministic, never-before seen inputs and have them to be interpreted accurately. Just like the Internet added another "dimension" to computer applications, AI is now adding another "dimension" previously unreachable.*
* Just as you could make a big local LAN before the Internet, it's obvious that we had past incarnations of the current technology that gave some taste of that dimension, but did not fully "unlock" it.
This time, it's truly different.