switchbak
All in all, I wasn't particularly impressed with the outcome. Obviously GraalVM has more headroom, but that's an even more intrusive change.
When compared with a Rust port of our service, the delta of the efforts is absolutely astronomical. Ridiculous performance, near-instant startup, radically less memory consumption. I mean - duh - but nonetheless, when I contrast the effort vs payback, it's very hard for me to want to invest so much in techniques that have so little payback (graal) when I can put that into an approach that leaves me in a much better place long-term.
If I had mountains of legacy, obviously I couldn't do that, but in my situation it seems like a much more attractive option.
Not that I'd use it, I want to avoid Databricks - the Duck ecosystem is far more compelling for my modest needs, and handles local develop a lot better (IMO).
The issue is there are SO MANY people who stop at the conclusion "batteries are expensive, dirty, use rare materials and are fueled by slave labour" - this level of understanding is ubiquitous in my experience. What I never hear is "compared to what" - like how does the full lifecycle analysis of those batteries IN CONTEXT compare to the status quo?
Or the folks that extend that argument to "EVs are bad". Without even considering the energy mix that they rely on. If you're not even interested in doing a single ounce of research and thinking, you're not making a point - you're regurgitating corporate propaganda.
How alive is a collection of a dozen transistors? A million, billion, trillion? We can't just claim something is alive without being very specific about _why_ we believe it to be alive. The article's suggestion doesn't even begin to mention that.
Or is this more intrusive than I imagine?
Of course we have far too many benchmarks (of questionable utility), but it would be helpful to get OpenAI's take on where it slots in, and how the landscape changes as these get rolled out.
I think there's a generational judgement part of it, and some hearing damage that makes it harder to understand their words on the very low/creaky end.
Not to mention, it can cause real problems for your vocal chords. A little bit is entirely natural, and I don't really notice it in most men, but a lot of young(er) women seem to go overboard on it (in my opinion).
I'm currently experimenting with some custom hardware + software, composed in a way that seems novel, for a niche domain. This is with a new kid coming soon. There's just no way I would have crossed the activation threshold to do that without having LLMs provide assistance.
"software is getting cheaper" - and easier to make, but it hasn't lifted all of the other constraints. Guess who's well positioned to understand what those constraints are and to work well in this new landscape? Answer: they didn't go to business school.
For something like a bank, I think they ought to be mandated to offer a functional website, yes. A slick app is nice too, but not if it’s the only option, specifically designed to steal my data and spy on me.
For sure there's gonna be people falling in love with them though! I find all the anthropomorphization creepy though.
The only exception on the chart is DeepSeek - it scores exceptionally low there, which doesn't exactly track my experience. It usually does what you tell it to, and it's not exceptionally intelligent, but I do find it quite good at what it does (the bulk of code, scripting, etc). I know a lot of folks like it too ... curious if I'm just not exploring the simpler models enough?
But it's a lot better than having things live on the open internet!
Also looking at those old C++ services a whole lot differently now.
What exactly is an LLM sellout? Someone who sees the world moving toward it?
Wouldn't Rust be a sellout too?
Why is Scala an LLM sellout?
If I was to do anywhere near that kind of work on Anthropic, I'd find myself running out of tokens, waiting days to continue working, and leaning on their el-crap models to try to avoid running out again. This happens all the time.
This way I get to leverage DS for nearly all my work, benefit from its far superior latencies, and I still get to lean on OpenAPI / Anthropic or whatever SOTA models I want when I need them.
The only time that really falls down is if I'm doing huge amounts of real novel work, which hasn't been the case for a while.
Seriously - appeal to authority is a fallacy, unless it's an appeal to an authority that I happen to agree with? It's hard to take you seriously.
And holy shit is AI ever a potential for harm when wielded by someone that doesn’t show sufficient restraint (ie: think). I think that’s my biggest problem the last year or so.
Unfortunately I know too well the kinds of crap involved (!) with those labour jobs. I’ll hold on until I have to jump ship. Perhaps a bad idea, but it’s where I’m at.
At least that's how it is today. But last year it was barely even worth using. Next year? Really hard to say, but it feels like it's plateauing to me. Depends on the day you ask though.
Will we be entirely replaced? Maybe. Or it'll get close enough to the "no code" wet dream of a few years back, and you'll have enough low cost LLM kiddies that the whole notion of the highly paid software engineer is just a dead end.
And then what? ... I kind of hate whatever this career is now anyway, I wouldn't mind doing something else, but I'm addicted to that sweet sweet cheese!
I mean ... don't do that. But we have been BOMBARDED with this, literally 100% of our pipeline was fake until we rejigged it a bunch. I wonder how much of peoples challenges are just that the scammers are making the job hunting environment a market for lemons?