181–190 of 247 posts
I wonder if vibe coding is partly what happens when software engineering fails to converge on reusable abstractions. Instead, we got fragmented tools and endless reinvention of the same components, and LLMs arrived as an ad hoc abstraction layer on top.
Read up on Cluster B personality disorders (borderline, narcissism, sociopaths/psychopaths) and you see the similarities. Love bombing, gaslighting, a shared fantasy, etc. It's very interesting and scary at the same time.
Bullshit is more dangerous than lies.
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> Similarly, many senior software engineers are reporting 2-10x productivity increases. But are they making 2-10x compensation compared to before these tools? If not, these tools are not really useful to you, they are useful to your employer. The most shocking thing I find about LLM-assisted development is how gleefully we are just handing all this value over to our employers, simultaneously believing that they are g…
> handing all this value over to our employers, simultaneously believing that they are great because we're producing more. You could turn the table and say that you can now launch your own business with far fewer resources. Who needs financial capital if you can do it all with solo / small team labor capital? Gossip Goblin ditched his studio and now a16z is trying to throw him money, which he's turned down. He's turn…
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You're welcome! I imagine you already know this one as well but just in case. Learning to Learn by the late Dr Richard Hamming. See especially Chapter 2. A point Hamming makes is that when transitions from hand to machine production occurred, usually what is built ends up changing as the old techniques don't transfer 1:1 from the old world. So for instance, we went from nuts and bolts to rivets and welding (Dr Hammin…
I have not read Hamming yet, thank you!
> more like witchcraft than engineering Welcome to web development buddy > how ML might change the labor market Human labor is expensive. If LLMs do make things cheaper and faster to produce, you don't need that many humans anymore. Again, assuming the improvement is real, there absolutely will be shrinkage for existing businesses in headcount. What remains to be seen is how much cheaper machines make work. 1.5x? 2x?…
> That ship left port like 30 years ago dude. Laborers have no power in the 21st century. Maybe we should fix that.
The answer has always been the same: self-regulated profession and trade unions. Instead the ever efficient software engineers have efficiently dug their own grave. The regulated professions aren't going to be affected by the AI because their members understand that preservation of job security[0], their pay and QOL is more important than automating themselves out of existence. [0] https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opi…
Also you forgot the link?
But, thanks to all the companies working on open-weight models, I'm starting to think this might no longer happen. Currently open-weights models are said to be just months behind the top players (and I think we should really try to do what we can to keep it that way).
I'm wondering what the predictions would be in the case where AI becomes very powerfull, but also models are generally available.
Two possibilities come to mind, the first one where all the money no longer spent on employment would go towards hardware. New hardware manufacturers or innovators could jump in and create a bit more employment, but eventually it would probably all progress in one direction, which is the only finite resource in the chain, the materials/minerals needed for the hardware. Those materials might become the new "petrol". It's possible that eventually we would have build enough chips to power all the AI we need without needing more extraction, but I wouldn't underestimate our ability to waste resources when they feel aboundant.
In the second possibility, alongside a very powerful open-weight LLM, there could be big performance advancements, which would make the hardware no longer the bottleneck. But I'm struggling to imagine this scenario, maybe we would all be better off? Maybe we would all just be deppressed because most people won't feel "usefull" to society or their peers anymore?
The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…
Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.
It's worth noting that after ~50 years[edit: to preempt nitpicking, yes I know we've been using computers productively quite a bit longer than that, but that's roughly the time when the computerized office started to really gain traction across the whole economy in developed countries], we've only extracted a tiny proportion of the hypothetical value of computers, period, as far as benefits to the economy and potential for automation.
I actually think a lot of the real value of LLMs is "just" going to be making accessing a little (only a little!) more of that existing unrealized benefit feasible for the median worker.
My expectation is that we'll also harness only a tiny proportion of the hypothetical value of LLMs. We're just not good enough at organizing work to approach the level of benefit folks think of when they speculate about how transformational these things will be. A big deal? Yes. As big a deal as some suppose? Probably not.
[edit: in positive ways, I mean. I think we're going to see huge boosts in productivity to anti-social enterprises. I'd not want to bet on whether the development of LLMs are going to be net-positive or net-harmful to humanity, not due to the "singularity" or "alignment" or whatever, but because of the sorts of things they're most-useful for]
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cheers. I think you're doing a good job and ruffling some feathers here! Your content has been great. I highly recommend reading Marx. Your content has related Marxist topics like the 'Fetishism of Commodities' (Software as Witchcraft) and the Labor Theory of Value.
There's a copy of Das Kapital on the shelf behind me right now, though I don't count myself conversant enough to go super deep on class critique. Figured I'd point a few very vague fingers in that direction and let folks with more experience talk about it.
brushing the socialism aside (been there seen that), it talks about the deskilling as inevitable technology consequence. IMO LLMing puts that on steroids, and eats higher up the mental-chain