I think a good analogy will be the way word processors changed printing. Suddenly anyone with access to a computer had the ability to do professional level editing and layout. Most of them didn’t have the taste or skills to use the tools to the fullest, but it still opened up a ton of possibilities that weren’t available before because it was never practical to hire an actual professional to do a poster for a dinky church bake sale before. But now, church bake sales can have pretty slick looking posters (and websites) depending on whether any of the volunteers cares enough to get.

The stuff LLMs will democratize will be a lot more impactful than nice posters for car wash fundraisers though. So in that sense it will be different, but I don’t think it will crack the market for proficient experts in the field in the same way photoshop didn’t destroy graphic design and CAD didn’t destroy drafting. It may get rid of the market for a lot of the second-tier bootcamp grad talent though, so I wouldn’t be getting into that right now if I could help it.

I think this is exactly right. I've been thinking of "this time" as similar to the advent of digital spreadsheets. Spreadsheets existed for thousands of years but spreadsheet programs transformed spreadsheet work that took hours or weeks into seconds. You still had to know what you were doing, and if you knew what you were doing you were easily 10x faster than those that didn't.

I think we are in a similar situation with code generation now, then only difference in my mind is that LLMs come with a massive platform risk. Who's to say that one day anthropic decides my company is too much of a competitor to use their tool (like they've already done with openai) or what if they decide that instead of pulling their product from my use they just make it generate worse code, or even insert malicious payloads. A dependence on these tools is wildly more risky than dependency on a word processor or a spreadsheet program. It reminds me of the arguments around net neutrality and I cannot fathom how people building on top of, and with, these tools do not see the mountain of risks around them.

We have a generation of computer programmers who have known nothing but building on top of AWS. Vendor lockin at a career level. Most were building on top of Microsoft before that. Platform agnosticism and open source and specifically the ownership and control was mostly niche.

I don’t see that changing.

> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success.

I think I have a conversation at least weekly where I have to explain to someone that using an LLM to convert COBOL to Java (or whatever) will not actually save much effort. I don’t know how many ways to explain that translating the literal instructions from one language to another is not actually is not that hard for someone fluent in both and the actual bottleneck is in understanding what sort of business logic the COBOL has embedded in it and all the foundational rearchitecting that will involve.

I think the challenge is that the addictive formats will naturally outcompete the healthy ones because they’re, well, addicting. They exert a force pulling people into their orbit and starving anything designed for healthier (less frequent) engagement.

I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.

id say maybe marketing? make a "healthy" social network and frame the other one as really bad for you?

I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?

I think we're talking fast food rather than nicotine.

We know that fast food is bad for us. But fast food companies keep putting the things that we like into it. So a lot of people, when tasting actual, real, good-for-you, food decide that they prefer fast food. Other people are aware that fast food is bad for them and prefer real food. It's a choice that we leave up to the individual. Unfortunately we then allow the fast food companies to advertise so they can affect the choice.

We don't really have an answer for this as a culture. We should make the fast food companies responsible for the harms they're causing, but we don't have a mechanism for that. We could stop them advertising, as some countries have done, but that starts a whole process of questions about what the government can and can't do that ends up in bad places.

I think you are right, it's more fast food, or maybe to extend the metaphor its like processed or ultra-processed food. Systematically prepared with lots of ingredients to give you something that is "food" but has been modified to amp up the sugar and salt to levels that make it basically impossible to stop eating. It also loses almost all of its nutritional value and is often cheaper than real food. Just like social media is cheap because its been infused with ads and data tracking sales. A "free range organic" social network would have to cost more.

We do have gov. mechanisms for controlling what can be sold as food so it seems plausible, but those only happened after we went through a period of time where companies would literally put poison into bread as a filler, and the whole rotten meat packing industry thing. Maybe we are in that phase now but even so i dont expect there to be enough of a social movement to control these things (and as you say... how is tricky)

still "real food" might not have the reach of mcdonalds, but it does exit and thrive. maybe there is market for a healthy network? based on the comments here and a lot of anecdotes, I suspect there is some latent demand.

I'm a Mastodon user, so yes, there is demand for "real food". But I am in no way a representative member of the mass market.

And the social media companies, who have essentially unlimited resources, would fight it tooth and nail

I take poorly directed targeting advertisements as a performance indicator for how well my data privacy efforts are working. When the ad targeting has you dead to rights is when you need to worry.

To an extent, sure, but I think also a sign their analytics were never as good as they claimed.

For example, so far as I know my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?

> my name is strongly gendered male, so why the boob surgery ads?

Probably so you can suggest it to your partner.

This. My wife and I can hardly buy each other surprise gifts because the targeted advertising gives us away every time.

In my experience it’s mostly sexual adjacent content with just enough plausible deniability that you could say it’s a comedic sketch or something. They’re not funny, and the punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic structure of a joke.

Yeah linktr.ee links instead of OF links.

In theory user behavior to serve you ads you want to see for stuff you might be interested in is a feature. The problem comes because the same technology to power that can also power the—much more lucrative—industry of serving ads that are optimally designed to fry your brain and scam you. And then on top of that, it creates a business incentive for you to use a lot of psychological tricks and dark patterns to foster increasingly addictive and anti-social behavior to keep people stuck in a feedback loop of doomscrolling.

Old Apple had a productive tension between Jony Ive and Scott Forestall on which direction to go in with design, with Steve Jobs as a tie-breaker.

After Jobs passed away Tim Cook failed to manage that tension productively and was put in a position where he had to choose between Ive and Forestall. He chose Ive, which in itself was probably the right choice, but there was nobody with Forestall’s clout to temper Ive’s more wanky tendencies.

Much of the other stuff people complain about is kind of just the reality of being a company that sells to millions or tens of millions to being a company that sells to hundreds of millions or close to a billion customers. A lot of the charm and whimsy gets harder to sustain. I’ve long felt that Apple needs to just do a Toyota/Lexus sort of split and have a second nameplate for doing more avante garde, quirky, and lower volume hardware and software projects.

To Ives credit he tried to do the brand split and focused on Apple Watch as the test bed first with “Edition” then “Hermes”

There just wasn’t the demand.

That seemed more like experimenting with interesting industrial design approaches and materials though. It’s not as much like, a very distinct side-hustle to design stuff that’s completely different.

They sort of do this with Beats as a parallel business to their own Apple speakers with products that aim at a totally different market. They need to start doing that with computers too. The entire Mac lineup is designed to be, like, a Honda Accord or Camry. But the Mac Pro is crap, they need a business-line that makes a computing equivalent of a pickup truck but they don’t want to commit.

Apple News unironically would have been better if they had just made an RSS reader with a way to subscription gate feeds and a rule that you have to do provide the full text of the article. They could have just put their energy into just polishing up a known and weathered and broadly adopted technology but nooooo, they needed something with platform lock-in so they could book more “services revenue.”

They didn’t need to do like half the work they did, and a lot of what they did do in order to make the news feeds prettier are seldom adopted because Apple doesn’t want to do the hard partnership work to drive and support it.

The acting as if there is a clearly demarcated distinction between the “public” and “private” sectors seems mostly like a 20th or 19th century atavism. The only substantive difference today seems to be that the former actor is more restrained by political input (in functioning democracies at least) and the latter is less so. But in terms of who has authority over how people live their lives and the level of totalizing control over communication and commerce it’s more like overlapping and competing fiefdoms than the “state = coercive power” and “private sector = market power” dichotomy people often try to imply.