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What could have been

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Re: What could have been

#81

Post by h2zizzle »

roxolotl wrote: post #74
simonw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you gave me $100 billion to spend on API interoperability, knowing what I know today, I would spend that money inventing LLMs.

For $100 billion you could get public standards for APIs of all kinds implemented. I don’t think people understand just how much money that is. We’re talking solve extreme hunger and create international api standards afterwards money.

Yeah. Much of that money is going to physically building data centers, in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. "Look, I just need a few billion, to build a server farm, to build the machine god, who will tell us how to solve the homelessness and housing insecurity." If it works? That'd be neat. Right now, it sounds like crackhead logic.

Re: What could have been

#82

Post by IcyWindows »

socalgal2 wrote: post #70
pixl97 wrote: post #61

>There isn’t a single day where I don’t have to deal with software that’s broken but no one cares to fix Since when does this have anything to do with AI? Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way. If it's not going to cost the company in some measurable way issues can get ignored for years. This kind of stuff was occurring before the internet exists. It boomed with the massive growth of personal comput…

> Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way All software is this way. The only way something gets fixed is if someone decides it's a priority to fix it over all the other things they could be doing. Plenty of open source project have tons of issues. In both commercial and open source software they don't get fixed because the stack of things to do is larger than the amount of time there is to do them.

It's worth pointing it that the "priority" in both open source and closed isn't just "business priority".

Things that are easy, fun, or "cool" are done before other things no matter what kind of software it is.

Re: What could have been

#83

Post by joegibbs »

You could have a society where there's one single spreadsheet package made by a team of 20 people, a few operating systems, a new set of 50 video games every year (with graphics that are good enough but nothing groundbreaking so they'll run on old hardware) created according to quota by state-run enterprises, Soviet style.

This would be very efficient in avoiding duplication, the entire industry would probably only need a few thousand developers. It would also save material resources and energy. But I think that even if the software these companies produced was entirely reliable and bug-free it it would still be massively outcompeted by the flashy trend-chasing free-market companies which produce a ton of duplicated outputs (Monday.com, Trello, Notion, Asana, Basecamp - all these do basically the same thing).

It's the same with AI, or any other trend like tablets, the internet, smartphones - people wanted these and companies put their money into jumping aboard. If ChatGPT really was entirely useless and had is the right move if you want a sustainable business in the future. Sears and Blockbuster could've perfected their traditional business models and customer experience without getting on the internet, and they would have still gone broke as customers moved there.

Re: What could have been

#84

Post by medhir »

ipsin wrote: post #12

I wonder about the world where, instead of investing in AI, everyone invested in API . Like, surfacing APIs, fostering interoperability... I don't want an AI agent, but I might be interested in an agent operating with fixed rules, and with a limited set of capabilities. Instead we're trying to train systems to move a mouse in a browser and praying it doesn't accidentally send 60 pairs of shoes to a random address in…

I feel like it’s not technically difficult to achieve this outcome… but the incentives just aren’t there to make this interoperable dream a reality.

Like, we already had a perfectly reasonable decentralized protocol with the internet itself. But ultimately businesses with a profit motive made it such that the internet became a handful of giant silos, none of which play nice with each other.

Re: What could have been

#85

Post by sublinear »

> organizations such as Blender, Godot, or Ladybird and...

So you want an open source project to really succeed? It's not money, but real passion for the work.

Write better documentation (with realistic examples!) and fix the critical bugs users have been screaming about since over a decade ago.

Sure fine pay a few people real wages to work on it full time, but that level of funding has to deliver something more than barely documented functionality.

Re: What could have been

#86

Post by pixl97 »

dougdonohoe wrote: post #64
pixl97 wrote: post #61

>There isn’t a single day where I don’t have to deal with software that’s broken but no one cares to fix Since when does this have anything to do with AI? Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way. If it's not going to cost the company in some measurable way issues can get ignored for years. This kind of stuff was occurring before the internet exists. It boomed with the massive growth of personal comput…

The point is that money that is going into GenAI or adding GenAI-related features to software should be going to fix existing broken software.

Then you missed the point of my post. That money never did. It went back into the hands of the investors, the investors that are now putting money into genAI.

Re: What could have been

#87

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

simonw wrote: post #21
ipsin wrote: post #12

I wonder about the world where, instead of investing in AI, everyone invested in API . Like, surfacing APIs, fostering interoperability... I don't want an AI agent, but I might be interested in an agent operating with fixed rules, and with a limited set of capabilities. Instead we're trying to train systems to move a mouse in a browser and praying it doesn't accidentally send 60 pairs of shoes to a random address in…

LLMs offer the single biggest advance in interoperability I've ever seen. We don't need to figure out the one true perfect design for standardized APIs for a given domain any more. Instead, we need to build APIs with just enough documentation (and/or one or two illustrative examples) that an LLM can help spit out the glue code needed to hook them together.

As if the challenges in writing software are how to hook APIs together.

I get that in the webdev space, that is true to a much larger degree than has been true in the past. But it's still not really the central problem there, and is almost peripheral when it comes to desktop/native/embedded.

Re: What could have been

#88

Post by ares623 »

sublinear wrote: post #85

> organizations such as Blender, Godot, or Ladybird and... So you want an open source project to really succeed? It's not money, but real passion for the work. Write better documentation (with realistic examples!) and fix the critical bugs users have been screaming about since over a decade ago. Sure fine pay a few people real wages to work on it full time, but that level of funding has to deliver something more than…

> It's not money, but real passion for the work.

Yeah, nah... passion only sustains a person for 3 days max before they expire.

My theory is that open source boomed in the last few decades because developers had enough income and free time from their day jobs to moonlight as contributors. With the gravy train ending, I suspect open source will suffer greatly. Maybe LLMs can cover what was lost, or maybe corporations will pay their engineers to contribute directly (even more so than what they do now), but there will definitely be some losses here.

Re: What could have been

#89

Post by roxolotl »

simonw wrote: post #78
roxolotl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $100 billion you could get public standards for APIs of all kinds implemented. I don’t think people understand just how much money that is. We’re talking solve extreme hunger and create international api standards afterwards money.

Having lurked around in the edges of various standardization processes for 20+ years I don't think this is a problem that gets fixed by money. You can spend an enormous amount of money building out a standard like SOAP which might then turn out not to have nearly as much long-running as the specification authors expected.

That’s totally fair. Money though is a representation of desire and the reality is people don’t have interest in solving these problems. We live in a society where there’s much more interest in creating something that might be god than solving other problems. And that’s really the main point of the article.

But also even if the W3C spent $10m a year for the 10 years SOAP was being actively developed according to Wikipedia that would still be 1/1000 of the 100billion we’re talking about. So we really have no idea what this sort of money could do if mobilized in other ways.

Re: What could have been

#90

Post by ern »

wnc3141 wrote: post #29
user3939382 wrote: post #19

I've been watching this my whole life. UML, SOA, Mongo, cloud, blockchain, now LLMs, probably 10 others in between. When tools are new there's a collective mania between VCs, execs, and engineers that this tool unlike literally every other one doesn't have trade offs that make it only an appropriate choice in some situations. Sometimes the trade offs aren't discoverable in the nascent stage, a lot of it is monkey-see…

you forgot IoT

I have 4 cameras, a home security system, a remotely monitored smoke detector, a smart plug, 4 leak sensors, smart bulbs, a car whose location and state of charge I can track remotely, a smart garage door opener, a smart doorbell, and 7 smart speakers.

I think IoT was more than just hype.

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