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I quit. The clankers won

dbushell.com

481–490 of 515 posts

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who should the value go to?

Whoever can materialize it. That's how societies grow and thrive, how a civilization is built - people building things, and instead of capturing 100% of the value, creating a surplus for others to build on top. It's not like any of us ever did anything completely new, isolated and unaffected by influences and contributions of those around us, and those who came before us. Trying to capture 100% of the value and getti…

So you're saying that the most advantaged people (who control the most money to use for advertising and who can buy companies and their network effects at will) should get the most benefit?

> how a civilization is built

No, civilization is built by people who do actual work. Some of that work is services/research and building/maintaining stuff, some of that work is connecting supply and demand. The reward should go to the people doing the work according to how much work they do and their skill level.

> late stage capitalism

Nah, that's the idea that money should be able to create more money without any input of work. And before you say they made that money through work, no they didn't, they either inherited it or got into a position of power from which they can take a disproportionate cut.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#482
post #59

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…

"What if the AI goes away" seems to be a common argument but it's just not ever going to happen without, say, a solar flare wiping out all electronics, which will be an issue which skilled programmers can't help anyway. The same thing happened when high-level languages came around, not many people can hand-write assembly anymore or work with punch cards but society hasn't collapsed.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#483

I think it's probably accurate to say that the vast majority of writers throughout history were writing for an extremely tiny or nonexistent audience. My favorite example of this is Nietzsche, who basically had zero readership during most of his life, beyond a few close friends, and even had to personally pay to get his books published. He only posthumously became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th cent…

This is interesting to me: for some reason I had in my mind that Nietzsche may have been in poor health but was at least somewhat well known in his time. There’s always Van Gogh and Starry Night to think about as well.

He became reasonably well known amongst the German intellectual class, but only after he was already “insane.” There are some interesting anecdotes of this, especially one I came across in Harry Kessler’s diary. During Nietzsche’s conscious life he was basically only read by his friends.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all? But this is not that. The current situations is closer to "what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine". I have been releasing my writings under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license which requires attribution and that anything built upon the material to be distributed "under the same license as the original". And yet I have no a…

>not what the free software movement wanted Sorry, you don't speak for the movement. Plenty of us want this world.

No one speaks for everyone, but when TiVo used the GNU license in a similar one-sided way the free software movement reacted by creating a new GNU preventing exactly that. And, again, the Creative Commons license I'm using was designed (perhaps ineffectively) to prevent precisely this situation. So I feel confident saying that the past actions of the main referents of the free software movement support my view.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a synthesized audio playback button have to do with AI as commonly and hotly discussed?

> sythansized audio playback Thats generated audio. It may not be LLM generated but it's not read by a human. To draw an arbitrary line between _this kind_ of generated content but not _that kind_ is seemingly a matter of perspective and preferences.

Perspective and preferences are two out of N parts that make up a person’s opinion, which in turn is something that makes a judgement about distinguishing two things NOT arbitrary.

But partly overlapping with perspective is reasoning (subjective or objective), which is also something that makes a judgement not arbitrary. But your pre-judgement here tells me that that part is uninteresting to you.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#487

I quit. The clankers won. I don't see any proof that software development is not dead. Software engineering is not, and it's much more than writing code, and it can be fun. But writing code is dead, there is no point of doing it if an LLM can output the same code 100x faster. Of course, architecture and operations stays in our hands (for now?). Initially I was very sceptic, first versions of ChatGPT or Claude were ra…

i think these are great for people who already are senior developers with years of coding experience. I can use claudecode and then walk through the output and spot fix small mistakes or notice when it's going in the wrong direction and prompt it to fix. I think people without years of development experience using these tools can really screw themselves. The problem is every new grad is going to use claudecode right…

>Also, god help you if you tell an embedded developer you use micropython instead of C.

I will never not hate on Micropython.

This doesn't come from a position of gatekeeping embedded software engineering.

I just hate Python.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not what the free software movement wanted Sorry, you don't speak for the movement. Plenty of us want this world.

No one speaks for everyone, but when TiVo used the GNU license in a similar one-sided way the free software movement reacted by creating a new GNU preventing exactly that. And, again, the Creative Commons license I'm using was designed (perhaps ineffectively) to prevent precisely this situation. So I feel confident saying that the past actions of the main referents of the free software movement support my view.

Sorry I was being polite. I'm part of the free software world, and you don't speak for me. And I like the new freedoms that I have to make more free software and free existing proprietary software by remaking them as free.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things will be necessary if progress continues as it has. The AI will do all of that. In fact it will generate software that uses already proven architectures (instead of inventing new ones for every project as human developers like to do). The testing has already been done: they work. There are no vulnerabilites. They are able to communicate with stakeholders (management) using their native language, n…

If this is the case then none of us will have jobs; we will be completely useless. I think, most likely, you'll still need developers in the mix to make sure the development is going right. You can't just have only business people, because they have no way to gauge if the AI is making the right decisions in regards to technical requirements. So even if the AI DOES get as good as you're saying, they wouldn't know that…

To play devils advocate, do the technical requirements even matter in that case if nobody can tell they aren’t being met?

It’s short term thinking IMO, but it’s my interpretation of the argument AI proponents are making.

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