askmike
What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s
AI Hacking, Fearmongering and Prometheus
AI Hacking, Fearmongering and Prometheus
If you zoom out and look at other industries, we've seen this before many many times: Fast food completely commoditized the food industry. There are still extremely skilled people making the "highest quality" food. For example those at michelin star restaurants, these businesses typically don't make money by selling food anymore, they stay around for other reasons (hotel needs a fancy restaurant with a famous chef). We've seen the same when it comes to many other products: toys, furniture, most electronics, etc.
Nobody can swim against the forces of capitalism here, just not enough people care about high quality hand crafted software (the only people that really do are people right here in this thread hand crafting software). Sure there will be some corners of the economy where people doing everything by hand will keep their head above the water.
Think of it this way: back when people were sending letters to each others and responses took weeks, people (non professional writers) put a lot of thought into writing these letters. I'm sure if you show these people the average (non AI) emails we've been sending each other the last few decades they will complain about all the slop too (including how we all converse to each other right here). But you can definitely argue that this exponentially increased communication and sharing of ideas has outweighed our decreased ability to write properly (in self defense: I'm not a native english speaker).
This obviously sucks for those who care about high quality hand crafted software, but this is going to open the floodgates in terms of the accessibility of software development. And it's yet to be seen whether this is going to take all our jobs away or not. What's very much true (like the article says) is that the future job of software dev is going to look different, and the change is coming fast.
Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.
It's not about it being hard to create and manage a website, it's that the vast majority of customers use social media platforms (as well as platforms like google maps) to find out about shops and F&B. For many businesses having an Instagram page will draw a lot more people than having a random website.
OpenClaw and the Right Level of Automation
https://askmike.org tech blog (slightly outdated, but working on it)
This is definitely an interesting way of looking at it. If your blog ends up in pre-training data, it will become part of the AI. Or if not, an AI might still fetch it when a user asks something specific. It reminds me of voting in a democracy, which many people consider a right and a duty - but in reality a single vote is hardly going to swing any election.
I can definitely relate, and find this true as well. While a (monetary) return has never a big focus for me. It's still hard to keep going over time with motivations around self improvement, accountability, etc.
Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void
So in the Dutch tax system there is no difference between realized and unrealized gain. As such it doesn't matter when you buy/sell your investments. It doesn't impact your tax burden. The effect you get is that everyone's wealth just slowly erodes away, just like with inflation (unless your yield outpaces that).
But with this new law that all might change.
As to a more constructive path: bureaucracy all over EU is definitely considered a big problem (for startups, and for many others) and there are a bunch of movements aimed at addressing them at all kinds of levels. For example look at the eu acc movement.
I think everything I wrote a decade ago in node still runs fine.
Except for the vast majority of the world that doesn't use the English language.
Where do you think your income and bank balances are tracked and stored? On pieces of paper?
If half of all people stop sending bitcoin around, the amount of electricity used doesn't go down by 50%. So you sending or not sending bitcoin doesn't impact the electricity spend by miners at all.
Miners mine to secure the network, there is not a certain amount of electricity needed per transaction.
The biggest crypto markets in the world are quoted in tether.
What makes open source tick is (a) a culture around freedom on an almost philosophical level (free software movement) and (b) extremely low entry bar for anyone to use and participate. And it works in a way where any type of monetization is hard (it's hard to attach $ value to open source things). I hope I turn out to be wrong, but it's very hard to wire in any $ incentives or routes while keeping it actually open source.
If you want to write software and get paid properly when someone uses it, there is a whole existing industry for this (paid software).
From the Tea website:
> We’re not changing how open source works—it’s still free. web3 has introduced powerful new paradigms that allow value to be compensated without direct payment. Creator economy, meet open source.
The money needs to come from somewhere, the only way I can see this work is if you change culture in a way big companies (the only ones that can pay without it limiting their usage) that use open source software are willing to somehow pay money.
Any other type of economic system where people pay for tokens representing a part of some open source project without any cashflow (or future cashflow) is dangerous.
Adding an explainer of what's happening might get rid of your irritation, but it might just irritate many other readers coming there for the meat. All the other posts are about the same topic, so this blog seems to more document details of what's happening as opposed to explain the basics to everyone.
That's an interesting definition of a billboard. So if there is a billboard next to a road, and the road goes under construction for weeks/months it ceases to be a billboard for that time? Or if most people leave a village and it empties out.
> This requires installing a bunch of software, identifying peers on the Ethererum mainnet, asking them for their idea of the latest block, determining the most-worked-branch, validating its entire history, looking up a particular contract, determining its state at that block, extracting some text from it, and then somehow displaying it, for one person to see. At least that would be the somewhat trustless and decentralized way to do it.
Trustless and decentralized are not the same thing. I agree that would be "somewhat" trustless (Do you trust your OS? Do you trust your compile toolchain? How deep does trustless need to go?)
Instead, this is a webapp with a link to a blockchain explorer. It's trivial to check another blockchain explorer or your own node if you want.