- someone responds with a Gen AI-enabled service that is
1) really impressive
2) is currently offered pretty much for free
3) doesn't have that many tangible benefits.
There's many technologies for which it's very easy to answer "how does it improve life of an average person": the desktop, the internet, the iPhone. I don't think Udio is anything like these. Long-term, how profitable do you expect a Udio-like application to be? Who would pay money to use this service?
It's just hard to imagine how you can turn this technology into a valuable product. Which isn't to say it's impossible: gen-AI is definitely quite capable and people are learning how to integrate it into products that can turn a profit. But @futureshock's point was that it is the AI investment bubble that's losing hype, and I think that's inevitable: people are realizing there are many issues with a technology that is super impressive but hard to productize.
I find it annoying either way: it doesn't provide valuable/novel information and isn't conducive to productive conversation (in part because it's unclear if it's sarcastic or earnest)
why is it that any mention of Rust on the internet will bring about these wildly-overshooting claims. The amount of production software having been re-written in Rust (or replaced by a Rust counterpart) is minimal. This kind of rewrite is rare for any programming language. Yet claims like this are everywhere.
which is why it's not a good analogy: you make a powerful tool like "programming language" easier to use, you get more people with the power to write programs. You make an unreliable and brittle tool like ChatGPT easier to use, you get more crap content on the Internet.
Not saying that there won't be good use-cases for Large Language Models, just saying that the analogy doesn't work: these things will be useful if used by competent people in very specific use-cases. The way ChatGPT is used now is just to generate a lot of hype and middlebrow content: with that in mind, I think its low barrier of entry is actually a negative (it causes things like this: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt...)
The ratio of dumb stuff to reasonable stuff being said about ChatGPT is dizzying; I truly hope it has reached its peak and this kind of hype and poorly-thought-out analysis dies down soon.
This whole article could be summarized as "How to protect your career? Be good at your job!"
The 'software dev' section is particularly off-putting. It starts off with a code-snippet that is ridiculously wrong: it defines 'typos' as any string matching this regex: '(\w+)\s+\w+'.
That's right, if your text contains a word followed by whitespace followed by a word, that's a typo.
The code could only appear correct to someone with no knowledge of the domain and no experience coding. The fact that this was published on "wearedevelopers.com" is a bit sad.
The article then goes on to deliver this piece of wisdom: "Coding will soon become no more than a means to an end. Which it always was."
OK, if it always was, then why is this news, or a disruptive change? Also, is anybody involved with writing production software convinced that coding is somehow not a means to an end? What else would it be?
I don't have much knowledge of the other careers mentioned in the article, but I suspect the analysis and advice there is about as flawed. The suggestion that teachers should have ChatGPT grade papers while they spend more time "face-to-face with struggling students" seems particularly vapid and shortsighted as well. How would they even know who is really struggling if they're not reading their work, delegating it to a notoriously unreliable tool?
I'm with you, but I also think that discussion about specific tools often is wrongly prioritized over discussion of general principles. The lesson should be "always profile your programs, and be especially wary of third-party dependencies" rather than "avoid this specific library at all costs."
I'm assuming they also understandably don't want to start a flame war, where their specific criticism of the library is going to be taken to mean "this library is always bad, do not use it, even if its effect on performance is negligible in your case."
Many in the US tend to associate Christianity with right-wing ideology, but there's actually quite a few examples of a varied history of left-wing Christian thought and action. Sticking to US history: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter, Dorothy Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Day).
Outside of the US, Liberation Theology in Latin America was an ideology/movement explicitly linking Christian (mostly Catholic) teachings with Marxist-inspired struggles for workers' rights (sometimes those links are easy to do, if you focus on quotes such as "blessed are the poor").
I do agree that FOS software is not socialism, and that donations aren't socialism. But it's important to note that many people who work on FOS software do so without expecting anything in return. I think that idea is in sharp contrast with typical right-wing and centrist economic theories that view human beings as mostly money-driven, self-centered individuals.
What is mysterious about Chekhov’s success? Genuinely curious as someone who has only read a few of his stories but finds them clearly very well written and influential. Maybe the extent of his success is still somewhat surprising?
If he’s trying to do that, then I’d say he should focus outside of engineering and more on product design, marketing, and brand.
“How to build a Super App” is not that complicated, from an engineering perspective. It does requires hard work, especially if you want to build it fast.
But the big problem is not really how to build it as much as how to make it successful: how to make people use your app over other ones they already use. There are apps like Venmo and WhatsApp that cover WeChat’s use cases pretty well, why should people switch to Twitter?
Step one would probably be to get people to trust your app. I don’t think the latest developments at Twitter make it seem particularly trustworthy
> engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship.
I really don't think this is an engineering problem. If I was a tech lead and a product manager came up to me with this, I'd tell them they need to figure out what they mean before they start talking to engineers. Software-Development is not concerned with the nature of truth and misinformation, it is concerned with what works given precise goals.
Nobody in engineering school or at an engineering job gets taught or learns what counts as misinformation and how to assess it: you need people with humanities expertise for this.
The "Do you want to read..." prompts are actually a good example of what I mean, because the engineering that goes into making those is quite trivial. But the idea of using them, trying to make them effective at their goal, and determining how much they're working, these are all things that fall outside of engineering, and have more to do with product-design and sociology.
Creating a feature is not as important as getting people to use it, and use it the right way.
Based on the features Elon has rolled out so far (Twitter Blue), it seems to me they're putting more emphasis on just building it, rather than figuring out how people will use it and whether it will be beneficial
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
I see.I think we're in partial agreement regarding "discoverability" then, although I wouldn't call it "discoverability": I'd say the problem is more simply due to the fact that the tutorial is out-of-date and not very user-friendly. When I started using Emacs I barely looked at the tutorial: its first focus is on how to navigate paragraphs of text using Emacs key-bindings, but as soon as I realized the "normal" bindings (using arrows) worked, I ditched the manual and opened the file I had to work on.
I learned Emacs slowly and piece by piece. But the quality of "third-party" tutorials I've been seeing (like Mastering Emacs and System Crafters, or DistroTube) is quite high. And the forums (reddit or emacs.stackexchange) are quite welcoming.
> it's very difficult to deduce that the keyword to look for is "yank". How do you even find out you can customize something, if you can't name it?
The nomenclature is kind of annoying, though there's good arguments for keeping it that way (mostly around legacy reasons, but also because the names have specific Emacs meanings, eg "point" is not exactly the same as "cursor", "kill/yank" is not exactly the same as "copy/paste" etc).
But getting used to these things and figuring out how to use them is really just a web-search away in my experience. You just type "how to copy/paste in Emacs" and you'll come across tons of useful information. Obviously this isn't thanks to Emacs itself, it's thanks to the internet, but my point is that it seems a reasonable assumption that modern users will mostly use this approach to get acquainted with a new system.
In my experience, relying on a search engine/web forums/other expert users is the typical way to learn new software tools. Isn't this how people learn how to use git, or the Unix-style command-line? Commands like "rm", "mkdir" or "rebase" are unfamiliar and even confusing until you take the time to figure them out.
I've done the same when using different IDEs: I don't even know if Eclipse has an official manual/tutorial. But Emacs still beats most other IDEs in terms of discoverability because, after figuring out that "paste" is done by "yank", I can easily look at the internal documentation for the function (which is, granted, quite verbose, but detailed and exhaustive) and even its source code.
> a city with public transport system that is so cheap, reliable, and well-connected, that many people don't even care to get a car.
I agree with your point here; I wouldn't call it a counterargument as much as an extension of the analogy. Public transport works perfectly for people traveling around the same routes. Most IDEs offer less customization but are optimized for specific (common) uses. But if you're going to want or need to use your IDE and system in specialized way, or if you just like to tinker and customize a cool program, you'd benefit from learning how to use Emacs.
"I have investigated a number of
cases like this, and in every one the data has been correctly recorded in the
database, but for some reason it is displayed/exported incorrectly."
> Emacs' defaults, discoverability, overall polish - just sucks
Agree that there's plenty to dislike about Emacs' defaults, especially in terms of polish/GUI, but can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "discoverability"?
I find that the self-documenting features are really great: whenever I want to understand what something does or how it works, I can do "describe-function", "describe-key", and "describe-mode", not to mention inspect the actual source-code with just a few clicks. I miss these features whenever I use other programs.
If by discoverability you mean "figuring out how to implement a specific thing I'm thinking of" then I'm curious what the ideal solution would be. For me, it's "use a search engine and, failing that, a web forum." But this isn't unique to Emacs: I and most people I know use this approach for all programs, and I don't see how a specific program could improve on it. I'd be interested in alternatives though.
> the barrier to entry is too high for people who need to focus on getting their work done today
This point is often brought up and I 100% agree with it, and think it's important that new users are aware of it. That said, I don't know if there's an easy way to get around it: you get the most out of Emacs once you're somewhat of a power user. To use a simplistic analogy: if you need to travel to the next town and you don't know how to drive, it's probably faster and definitely safer for you to walk or take the bus. Learning how to drive will take time and effort but it will pay off in the long run.
My advice to new users is to start slow, use Emacs for only a few small projects, explore different functionalities but don't expect to do everything in Emacs right away, and check out some of the great tutorials out there, like the book "Mastering Emacs" or the "System Crafters" series on YouTube
- someone claims that Gen AI is overhyped
- someone responds with a Gen AI-enabled service that is
There's many technologies for which it's very easy to answer "how does it improve life of an average person": the desktop, the internet, the iPhone. I don't think Udio is anything like these. Long-term, how profitable do you expect a Udio-like application to be? Who would pay money to use this service?
It's just hard to imagine how you can turn this technology into a valuable product. Which isn't to say it's impossible: gen-AI is definitely quite capable and people are learning how to integrate it into products that can turn a profit. But @futureshock's point was that it is the AI investment bubble that's losing hype, and I think that's inevitable: people are realizing there are many issues with a technology that is super impressive but hard to productize.