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This is very true, and my complaints aren't about open source or even AI written software!

Before the 2010s ruined software, you generally:

- Purchased or downloaded a software package.

- Installed it onto your local machine.

After that you were free to do what you liked with the software.

Now software generally:

- Runs on someone else's computer, or is at least locked behind a login.

- Is served to you through a web browser.

- May be revoked or changed without notice at any time.

For this reason, regardless of reliability or capability, software was generally better in the past.

This is very true, and is the (perhaps not obvious) subtext of my post as well. I'm not arguing that self driving cars are never going to happen or that AI won't eventually change the nature of a lot of work. There is a big leap between AI changing how programming is done and AI changing every other job too. The other poster arguing that "programming is harder than most other jobs, and therefore AI will eat them too", is taking a very stereotypically myopic and arrogant "computer person" posture.

Prices can't rise while salaries fall in a functioning economy. Humans will continue to be cheaper for many physical applications. Your suggestions of the inevitable exponential curve for the improvement and application of these technologies is wildly misguided.

Automated harvesting machines for fruits is not an accomplishment of AI. Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI. Robotic manufacturing is nothing new.

Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.

AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.

Huge environmental win if considering a fixed supply & demand, but Jevons Paradox kicks in with tokens in the cloud

The quantity and quality of communications that have been externalized and become effectively searchable and retrievable has increased by many orders of magnitude since paper mail was invented. I think even if you agreed that the State might have had that right then (which not everyone would), it would be good to reconsider what that means with the communications and information systems of today.

I think it is very clear that the "deal" with Gmail is that they host your email and use the platform to sell you things based on the content of the email (and your Google account profile in general). I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, but I don't think Amazon is defending my best interests by stripping information from emails so that I (and thus Google) cannot see their contents. Of the two companies at play in this scenario I dislike Amazon more. I can understand why you might dislike Google more; certainly they have been working hard on similar walled garden tactics on every service and platform they control. However, in each specific such scenario I am going to come down against the company crippling their product and punishing their users, and in this case it is Amazon.

Right now I am upset at Google for what they are pulling with Android developers and app installations; and I am perpetually mad at them and every other company for abandoning true third party APIs for using their services. RIP XMPP chat. RIP the golden iteration of any walled garden product that I happened to like that big tech then killed with an update, which is impossible to functionally recreate because APIs for services no longer exist.

But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.

I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.

archive.is / archive.ph haven't loaded for me for a while, but since people are sharing fresh links it must be working somewhere. Am I experiencing a DNS block?

This is the motte and bailey fallacy. Yes, LLMs can do harm by making the wrong API calls. No, LLMs are not going to do the things implied by the comment I responded to above.

You should unplug, my friend. These words are fantasies. LLMs are token prediction engines and they aren't going to build their own data centers. They can't keep their own lights on. The real world is full of fractal details that a disembodied token prediction engine will never come to grips with. Even if they started to, you could probably defeat them with the kind of logic used to combat evil sentient computers on a Star Trek episode because they are "play pretend" machines.

This line of reasoning doesn't hold up for many harmful habits that people voluntarily partake in. It's OK for someone to believe that using an AI as an approximate therapist might be a bad idea, especially in light of the many publicly documented cases of AI feeding delusional thoughts and encouraging suicide.

I enjoyed reading this review of movie reviews

I find your perspective on LLM generated programs to be an interesting and fresh take

You reminded me of the 10 years I spent loading up Achewood every week after it was functionally ended. (Although recently I discovered Onstad has a Patreon, and is regularly drawing new comics again behind the paywall). Most of the internet feels the same way, but there are still pockets of creativity. If you can tolerate a podcast (or a radio play, if you prefer), I really enjoyed listening to the first season of Valley Heat last year. Very silly. A friend linked it to me, and I surprised myself by actually giving it a try; I am glad that I did.

Steam has existed for an eternity compared to any console specific game store. It's not great that you can't resell what you have on Steam, but at least you get to 'keep' it.

As soon as I read the quoted paragraph, I rapidly scrolled to see how much more was written, then closed the tab. Generating a lot of code might be 'free' now but the generated code is very costly. I don't have the time to read an article written upon such a premise.

The reports of AI powered 10x development speed are greatly exaggerated

The eternal September began long before any of the things this post is eulogizing came into existence, things which I also remember fondly. There's still room for creation.

I enjoyed Good Work's recent coverage on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0ltbBby9FU

Is this implying that you don't believe people will hire programmers anymore?

Someone claiming to be the creator of Dark Castle says they are working on a 40th anniversary edition in the comments of that video.

If you can cure a cancer by framing it as a data analysis exercise that doesn't seem to be a bad thing.

Children generally have these things called "parents" who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn't a contradiction.

I'm not as good as Fabrice Bellard either but I don't let that bother me as I go about my day.

From the article:

  Historically, it would take a reasonably long period of consistent effort and many iterations of refinement for a good developer to produce 10,000 lines of quality code that not only delivered meaningful results, but was easily readable and maintainable. While the number of lines of code is not a measure of code quality—it is often the inverse—a codebase with good quality 10,000 lines of code indicated significant time, effort, focus, patience, expertise, and often, skills like project management that went into it. Human traits.

  Now, LLMs can not only one-shot generate that in seconds,

Evidence please. Ascribing many qualities to LLM code that I haven't (personally) seen at that scale. I think if you want to get an 'easily readable and maintainable' codebase of 10k lines with an LLM you need somebody to review its contributions very closely, and it probably isn't going to be generated with a 1 shot prompt.

The first one is pretty funny because Gmail search itself has a lot of issues.