241–250 of 348 posts
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I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.
The problem with scrapping the web for teaching AI is that the web is full of 'little bobby tables' jokes.
AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
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It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…
Agreed! I recently listened to a podcast (video) from the "How Money Works" channel on this topic: "How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines. If those are the cause…
The timeframe of expectations have just shifted, as everyone wants to experience everything. Just knowing the possibility of things that can happen already affects our desires. And since everyone has a limited time in life, we try to maximize our opportunities to experience as many things as possible.
It’s interesting to talk about this to older generation (like my parents in their 70s), because there wasn’t such a rush back then. I took my mom out to some cities around the world, and she mentioned how she really never even dreamed of a possibility of being in such places. On the other hand, when you grow in a world of technically unlimited possibilities, you have more dreams.
Sorry for rambling, but in my opinion, this somewhat affects economics of the new generation as well. Who cares of long term gains if there’s a chance of nobody experiencing the gain, might as well risk it for the short term one for a possibility of some reward.
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People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…
This false dichotomy is still frustratingly all over the place. LLMs are useful for a variety of benign everyday use cases, that doesn't mean that they can replace a human for anything. And if those benign use cases is all they're good at, then the entire AI space right now is maybe worth $2B/year, tops. Which is still a good amount of money! Except that's roughly the amount of money OpenAI spends every minute, and i…
For reference, AirHelp alone had revenue of $153M last year (even without my money ;-P): https://rocketreach.co/airhelp-profile_b5e8e078f42e8140
This single niche industry as a whole is probably worth billions alone.
Now multiply that by the number of niches that exist in this world.
The consider the entire universe of formal knowledge work, where large studies (from self-reported national surveys to empirical randomized controlled trials on real-world tasks) have already shown significant productivity boosts, in the range of 30%. Now consider their salaries, and how much companies would be willing to pay to make their employees more productive.
Trillions is not an exaggeration.
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This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / stati…
Loosely related: voice control on Android with Gemini is complete rubbish compared to the old assistant. I used to be able to have texts read out and dictate replies whilst driving. Now it's all nondeterministic which adds cognitive load on me and is unsafe in the same way touch screens in cars are worse than tactile controls.
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Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence. I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to…
> if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever. Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.
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It's because Copilot isn't (just) a model, it's a brand that's been slapped on any old rubbish. If Clippy were still around, that'd have been rebranded as Copilot by now.
If they resurected Clippy and made it the face of their Ai I would switch in a heartbeat.
It's almost a revenge of the engineers. The big players' path to "success" has been to slap together some co-pilot loaded with enterprise bloat and try to compete with startups that solve the same problems in a much cleaner way. Meanwhile, they believed the market was already theirs—so their logic became: fire the engineers, buy more GPUs. I have mixed feelings about this. I've interviewed several people who were aff…
>I've interviewed several people who were affected by these layoffs, and honestly, many of them were mediocre engineers by most measures. But that still doesn't make this a path to success. How mediocre are we talking about here? (I’m curious)
You can find secret little pockets within Microsoft where individuals & small teams do nothing at all, day in and day out. I mean literally nothing. The game is to maximize life and minimize work at the expense of the company. The managers are in on the game and help with the cover-up. I find it hilariously awesome and kind of sad at the same time.
Anyway, one round of layoffs this year was specifically targeted at finding these pockets and snuffing them out. The evidence used to identify said pocket was slowly built out over a year ahead of time. It's very likely that these pockets also harbored poor & mediocre developers, it stands to reason that a poor or mediocre developer is more likely to gravitate to such a place.
Not saying all the developers that were laid off were in a free-loader pocket, or that this cohort must be the ones that were interviewed. I'm only suggesting that the mediocre freeloaders form a significant slice of the Venn diagram.
Top signal. Phase transition is imminent.
Blaming slow sales on salespeople is almost always a scapegoat. Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t. Not saying that sales is useless, far from it. But with an established product that people know about, the sales team is more of a conduit than they are a resource-gathering operation.
If your organization is filled with the $4k type and not the $25k type, you're going to have a bad time.
I was #7 in the US while working at a small dealership. I moved the the large dealership mentioned above and instantly that dealership became #1 for that brand in the country, something they had never done before. Because not only did I sell 34 cars a month without just cannibalizing others sales, I showed others that you can show up one day and do well so there weren't many excuses. The output of the entire place went up.
So, depending on the pay plan and hiring process, who exactly is working at Microsoft right now selling AI? I honestly have no idea. It could be rock stars and it could be the $4k guys happy they're making $10k at Microsoft.
It's almost a revenge of the engineers. The big players' path to "success" has been to slap together some co-pilot loaded with enterprise bloat and try to compete with startups that solve the same problems in a much cleaner way. Meanwhile, they believed the market was already theirs—so their logic became: fire the engineers, buy more GPUs. I have mixed feelings about this. I've interviewed several people who were aff…
>I've interviewed several people who were affected by these layoffs, and honestly, many of them were mediocre engineers by most measures. But that still doesn't make this a path to success. How mediocre are we talking about here? (I’m curious)