301–310 of 370 posts
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I pay to have my car serviced... but I don't employ a full-time mechanic.
You clearly don't have enough cars. Once you get enough cars, especially if any of them are classic cars you actually want to drive occasionally and want to be in a driveable condition, you might want to have a full time mechanic.
I have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general, which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments. However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption. If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by…
Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the sophisticated point you think you're making
I didn't mean to imply that anyone of asian descent is inherently generating "spaghetti code". If that's how it read, I apologize, that was not my intention.
To further clarity, I've dealt with a number of these offshoring agencies (the really inexpensive ones specifically), and their output is very similar to what AI produces today. They have extreme turnover rates, and team assignments change at random so lost context and variable output is common. They do operate cube farms just like US workers, though I'm not sure why that's pertinent to call out though.
I agree, however, that I'm not saying anything sophisticated or complex, merely stating an observation.
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My Bose headphones are at 8 years and in perfect condition with 90% of original battery life. Adjusted for inflation, they were way cheaper than those older headphones. Excellent quality olive oil is incredibly easy to find, if you're buying bottom barrel junk then that's on you. New vehicle prices when adjusted for inflation have not risen at all; when adjusted for features/comfort/reliability/luxury they've fallen…
My Sony died very quickly. My Apple's are on their way out. Everyone I know is past their first earbuds purchase. Inflation adjustment doesn't apply when the product life is so incredibly different. The fact you even know your pairs life shows the previous effortless use of headphones versus modern use has been enshitified. I said Olive oil mayonnaise is an enshitified product abusing loopholes. That you can't read i…
> My Sony died very quickly. My Apple's are on their way out.
i'll never buy those apple earbuds ever again; hundreds of dollars down the drain and more e-waste cause those batteries cant be replaced... and sony: charging 70 bucks for wired earbuds and the cover falls off after a couple months usage what the f... (ok rant finished)
The slop is sad but a mild irritation at most. It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
Some of us have a perfectly good game plan for that. It's called Universal Basic Income. It's just that many powerful people have a vested interest in keeping the rest of us poor, miserable, and desperate, and so do everything they can to fight the idea that anything can ever be done to improve the lot of the poor without destroying the economy. Despite ample empirical evidence to the contrary.
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As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
The fact that it's a voluntary arrangement instead of forced makes a significant difference.
That said many of those employered in service industries and to some extent the gig economy have limited options and their participation is barely "voluntary" in modern capitalism.
Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context. The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works. > I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring. For almost every product/service ever offe…
Excellent point which leads to one related but less commonly mentioned:
If you build a product that lasts 25 years and that's what people want, you need to price it in such a way that if the entire market buys your product, you will run out of customers (for roughly 25 years or until new customers are born). Otherwise, you have a big rush of revenue early and then it drops off a cliff.
(I'm oversimplifying here but this is partly why there is a trend to make things more disposable or have a limited lifespan).
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> We haven't got more battery life 15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here). Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago. And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our ma…
Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full week between charges. Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2720_Flip
The new dump phone likely has more functionality and uses a much more robust wireless network.
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> things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology, appliances, the list goes on and on. And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation. Home gadgets / IOT are much m…
Most of the things you call "way cheaper" have massive costs that aren't reflected in the price tag. The TVs, phones, and IoT appliances are spying on you 24/7 and pushing ads in your face. In terms of quality, much of that is highly debatable. If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made the joke…
SSD is not only faster but also quieter and more efficient. See how much power a modern laptop consumes vs 20 years ago?
> Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
You said everything is trade off but choose to believe the future will get worse. Seems contradictory? I believe life will go on, and in 2046 people will complain about modern life and talk about how good things were 20 years earlier.
> I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it. "Terrified" is a strong word for the death of any craft. And as long as there are thousands that love the craft, then it will not have died.
Till this day even there exists IDEs with proper auto-complete suggestions (or editors with LSP support), there are still a lot of people prefer doing it in the old way (vim/emac/nano) and none of them get fired for that.
Z3 exists but we still like to solve algorithms by hand. High level languages exists but C/C++ codes are still written every day, even asm is still used.
On the brighter side of the issue, we now have ton of legacy projects written in obscure languages (COBOL, FORTRAN) that only some dozen people can maintain effectively, and those people are mostly at retirement age now. GenAI can solve that.