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AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

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Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#81

Post by bandrami »

jasonlotito wrote: post #55
neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

Others have addressed other aspects of this, but I want to address this: > I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. I don't know exactly what you mean by boilerplate stuff, but honestly, that's stuff we should have automated away prior to AI. We should not be writing boilerplate. I'd highly encourage you to take the time to automate this stuff away. Not even with AI, but with scripts you can run to automate boilerp…

So many use cases for LLMs I've read leave me asking "did none of you have a working text editor?"

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#82

Post by bandrami »

neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

This conversation keeps missing me because I don't think I've typed out boilerplate in like 20 years.

Were people actually physically typing every character of the software they were writing before a couple of years ago?

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#83

Post by geerlingguy »

jerf wrote: post #11
zemo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

full disclosure I work at Whatnot but that sort of thing is a large part of the appeal of Whatnot to me, that people are showing off the stuff live on stream and you can ask questions about it

AI is in spitting distance of being able to do that too.

I sometimes wonder if the random people sitting there hawking a pile of Amazon goods that pops up after every Amazon purchase are already AI.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#84

Post by hansmayer »

embedding-shape wrote: post #17
neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

Really? How long you've been a developer? I've been almost exclusively doing "agent coding" for the last year + some months, been a professional developer for a decade or something. Tried just now to write some random JavaScript, C#, Java, Rust and Clojure "manually" and seems my muscle memory works just as well as two years ago. I'm wondering if this is something that hits new developers faster than more experienced…

> random JavaScript, C#, Java, Rust and Clojure "manually"

Right, sounds very credible to me. What did you write, an addition function in each of those?

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#85

Post by boh »

AI is destroying the economic premise that has drawn so much investment into Silicon Valley. It's going from a capital light business model with network driven moats that allow market domination, to a capital heavy, high burn-rate model with the potential to not only offer ZERO moat protection but destroy the ones that already exist. Cloud infrastructure + vibe coding now make it possible to quickly replace existing apps with custom fit alternatives. Open source+cheap Chinese LLMs may not be as good as Opus but maybe good enough turns out to be good enough ( Sun Microsystems Vs. Linux is a good example). Currently AI has just as much potential destroying Silicon Valley as it does building it up.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#86

Post by awongh »

butlike wrote: post #59
awongh wrote: post #16

I think it's clear to me that AI will be both things: 1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the contraction of all things horse-related when the internal combustion engine came around but- it will also be 2) new technologies and ideas enabled by a completely new set of capabilities The real question is if the economic boost from the latter outpaces the los…

So now the ancillary question from your example is: "Is hand-spun cotton better than industrialized polyester?"

If you're implying that hand-spun cotton is better, that's an easy question to answer- people used to spend a huge amount of their income on clothing, also spending a huge amount of time washing it. Industrialization made clothing so much cheaper that it's now completely disposable. There's plenty of reasons why that's not a bad thing.

One reason people forget that "good quality" shoes existed was that you could only afford to buy one pair ever, not that things were made better, necessarily. (or could be both, but that replacing a pair of shoes was a financial hardship, because hand-made things, even back then, were expensive).

Even if you're against fast fasion I don't think anyone wants a pair of shoes to cost $10,000.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#87

Post by desireco42 »

neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

Honestly, you shouldn't be working on a plane. This thing where people are plugged in all the time is just insane.

Yes, you lost some abilities. Install local model so you have someone to talk to while you are on the plane ;)

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#88

Post by petra »

barrkel wrote: post #37

The lack of robotics mention somewhat undermines this article. I don't think it's intrinsically wrong, we are in a late stage of a transformation. Software is eating the world and AI is (so far) most profitably an automation of software. There is plenty of money to be made along the way. I don't really buy the article's seeming confusion about where the money is going to come from. Anthropic is making billions and si…

The question is whether robotics will look like a some number of platforms with little development to adapt to different scenarios, or a million types of machines that are highly fit for purpose.

Because the first situation won't create that many jobs. The second one might.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#89

Post by roxolotl »

ori_b wrote: post #60
Zealotux wrote: post #4

I'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.

We're racing to build hell.

A hell that’s been widely documented in fiction as well. That’s the part that’s so wild to me about this. None of this was unseen. Across every medium the extreme commercialization and general collapse of the social contract due to AI has been described and a lot of the authors have been largely prophetic.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#90

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Yeah, I agree with TFA I think.

Introduction of new mass production techniques often has an initial wave of high profit when early adopters have an initial advantage... existing workers are more efficient... but this will followed by a long term decline in the rate of profit as margins aggressively fall ...

e.g. if every software company uses AI to double its coding speed, the price of software will eventually drop by half.

As "AI" becomes a required and common commodity input, competition will drive prices down until the productivity gains are entirely captured by customers, leading to margin compression across the sector.

Also... firms will be forced to invest in using AI just to stay in the same place. If you don't adopt it aggressively, you'll be priced out; if you do, your margins still shrink because everyone else did too.

So... yeah, I don't think this is the next part of a "digital wave" if that means giant increase in new startup investments and SaaS companies etc, it's actually probably the start of I think a margin collapse and consolidation in our industry.

If it's 2x easier to build e.g. a CRM, we’ll end up with 10x more CRMs, leading to a "race to the bottom" on pricing.

The last 15 years of investment by people like YC etc seems to have been in businesses that were "like Uber but for ". Service businesses on which a small layer of software automated things, and drove some sort of explosion of customers. I don't really see how VCs are going to separate wheat from chaff on this front anymore? If anybody can do it.... what's the value of any particular approach over the others? I'd think the result would be consolidation?

So I suppose if you're selling "the means of production" in the form of GPUs you're in a good spot, but even that is likely to be subject to aggressive downward pricing.

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