What do you advise? Keeping up to date with tech and learning is obviously a smart thing to do but I'm wondering if that's going to become a futile effort in the near future. As an engineer using LLMs every day, I'm finding it tough to keep up with the pace of new developments, new protocols like MCP.. the pace is wild.
And now we have agents which are going to multiply the pace of development even more.
We can stay sharp but I'm not sure there's really much we can do to stop our jobs - or all jobs, disappearing. Not that this is a bad thing, if it's done right.
What if it starts by handling the boring tasks but ends up taking over the work you actually enjoy?
The "let AI do the boring bits" pitch sounds appealing—because it's easier to accept. But let's be real: the goal isn't just the dull stuff. It's everything.
It's surprising how many still think AI is harmless. Sigh...
Everyone was going to be laid off because of AI within two years in 2022. Well, many have been, but technically not because of AI. Well, not because AI took over their jobs proper, anyways.
AI used to always be 5-10 years away. Now AI is here. What's 5-10 years away now is all the reconfigured or reconstructed economic infrastructure around it.
It may be easy to convince me that tools like this can take over development of web apps. It's harder to convince me that, in the timeframe where these tools actually eliminate web app jobs, that we will be worried about our web app building capacity.
The most generalized economic pipeline is (labor + capital) -> production -> welfare. We're obviously going to be reconfiguring a lot of labor, a lot of capital is going buh-bye, much of production will look nothing like it used to, and we haven't even started discussing whose welfare we're going to be maximizing (hopefully it's people in general rather than real estate owners.)
That's similar to my thinking. It seems we're still (or again?) in an age where an incredible amount of software is being written to validate value propositions and business models. Does anybody need something like this? Does anybody want something like this? What would people pay for it? Surprisingly often, this isn't done too well, and a lot of devs are thrown into working on stuff that is unlikely to be useful to anyone mid term. Many of us are just building lottery tickets.
Tools like this can potentially lead to this on absolute steroids (even as less capital is available), insane amounts of experiments around new products, features and businesses. That way we'd discover more valuable software, and need more developers to scale and maintain that stuff. Because the economics do reverse: At some point in a product's life cycle, that dev salary is well within the profit margin, and not really worth saving. Quite different from the experimentation phase where quantity>quality.
Another thing that could happen is that individuals build their own software more, like Excel on steroids. There would still be value in solving problems for users at scale, but this whole experimentation process wouldn't be so breadth-first anymore. And I suppose funding would be pretty dry for companies "just" solving one problem.
"AI" isn't even the biggest factor here, I believe. Tools to quickly run experiments and cheap labour are readily available. It kinda seems the times where every company felt they need to hire as many developers as possible are pretty much over.
In both scenarios, I suppose good times might be ahead for competent developers that can earn a client's/CEO's trust, and/or excel at solving problems automated tools fail at. Bad times might be ahead for anyone who just executes experiments other people came up with. Unfortunately, I fear that's the majority of us. It might just get more painful before our industry normalises after this prolonged phase of non-stop growth. But I do believe it will. Demographic change leading to shrinking work forces in most developed countries should help soften the blow.
We systematically get posts and blogs and real-world experience showing that software development is actually about maintenance.
Yesterday we had an article about so many half-arsed software in maintenance mode that the world would be ending soon, crumbling under the weight of not-maintained enough software.
So far I've seen LLMs (I pay for GTP 4o btw) very good at producing boilerplate code. Does it help? Heck, yup.
Does it produce even more code needing ever more maintenance? You bet so.
At this rate it looks like we're going to need way more software developers, not less.
Two years is good for me. So long as my tenant isn't also laid off and the stock market doesn't crash as a result of this… or at least everyone gets UBI.
The difference I see is that in Europe, at least where I live, at the end of the month the bank will charge your bank account with the full amount of whatever is the balance of your credit card.
If you have no money you will go into overdraft and that’s about it, you basically have a problem and the bank will keep nagging about that overdraft if you don’t have an agreement.
The goal is to use the “credit” of the credit card for 30 days as a convenience. The implicit expectation is that it will be paid in full at the end of the month.
In countries like US and South America (e.g.) many people see credit card as free money (that they don’t have), so when the end of the month comes they simply don’t have the money to pay the balance or pay very little of it. The consequence is what we all know: high interest on the balance which keeps snowballing.
I know in south america banks even have interface for payment in instalments etc. Here in Europe, at least my bank they don’t have have such feature, I guess it’s just not meant to be used and abused they way it happens in other places.
Gotta love when you’re eating at a restaurant in Chile and when it’s time to pay they ask if you want it billed on your card in 6 monthly installments. Even as an American, it always makes me laugh a bit at the absurdity of doing that for your meals.
What you are talking about is a Charge card, but in Europe you can get a Revolving credit[1] card as well but I would say they are not as common as in US.
On the Charge "credit" card you don't pay interest unless you go into overdraft at the end of the payment day for the month.
With the revolving credit you pay the balance on your own terms but you pay the interest rate for it until closed.
I’m surely missing something but if a company A creates an API for chatgpt, pretty much giving away all its capabilities to some company B (chatgpt), risking getting cannibalised in the process, what is the gain? I mean surely in the short term is the the fear or becoming irrelevant if it misses out the chatgpt hype (will it?), but if the risk of end up becoming a permanent client of chatgpt in the sense that I’m outsourcing the entire value of my company and in fact becoming a hostage of it, trapped, then why do it?
my story: dropped my iphone x ended up with a detached screen.
Decided to fix it myself. While handling the screen and disconnecting cables I managed to damage Face ID sensor permanently.
Decided to take advantage and replace battery. In the process of removing the battery cable managed to damage it in such a way that cable now keeps disconnecting itself.
While trying to disconnect the battery cables by removing the parts near charging connector I managed to pull it a bit strongly and damage the charging connector that is connected to the logic board.
Even if I manage to repair the phone to the state it was (incl face id) with a professional it will cost as much as another phone.
With the experience above I decided I will think twice next time before trying to repair devices myself.
I tried to fix a broken ringer switch along time ago, felt it just needed cleaning.
Took off screen, unclipped connector. Cleaned out switch.
Then I tried to hook connector back, couldn't get it connected back. Panicked. Felt I basically broke it, and needed to buy a new phone. Left it for a day, didn't sleep at night, with a sick feeling since I wasn't ready to buy a new phone at the time. Thought about buying the previous model used.
But then the next day, I figured since it was broke to me, I'd just try really hard to push it back on. Eventually with enough force I thought I'd break everything on it, nearly all my weight, I felt the click of the connector snapping on.
Phone turned on. Switch still didn't work. Gave up fixing my phone after that.
This line doesn’t line up with the data also in the article. The gross margin on each product is about 40%, you then lose 15-25% on stocking the machines, plus have to pay for gas, a car, insurance, repairs, initial outlay of machines etc.
Why do you have to be running around town stocking these machines yourself? Surely there are service companies who do this for you, just like US vending machines.
I spent a lot of time setting up Hackintoshes and, in the end, I always ended up asking myself: why did I bother doing all this?
The time you have to spend maintaining it can amount to a lot. In my case, the machine would always feel sort of unstable with random freezes, etc. You just never really know 100% what's going on behind the scenes, it could be the wrong kext, or the wrong graphics card, or the wrong os patch, the wrong iso used, etc.
If you have plenty of time to play with it, I would say go for it. But if you just need your machine to do work and cannot afford having a computer that may suddenly stop working (and requiring a lot of time to get it going again), just save your time/money and buy an actual apple device.
The idea of having a fast and custom made computer running macOS is pretty enticing, but it's a lot more time consuming/intricate than one would like to admit.
You need to buy hardware specifically for hackintoshing. Don't just buy whatever's in fashion and try to make Mac OS fit.
If you do that it's mostly hassle free. Never had freezes, had stuff like sound not working when coming back from sleep (which i solved by switching to usb audio).
Of course, then something will come along and fuck you up, like Apple dropping nvidia drivers completely. Which is solved by getting an AMD video card. Admit it, it was time you upgraded the video card anyway :)
HP 6300 SFF: $35
NVidia GT 710: $30
16GB of DDR3: $60
Cheap 256GB SSD: $30
More than fast enough for me. Everything works: iMessage, iCloud, etc. No crashes, no freezes, no audio issues. It started on High Sierra and is on Mojave now. Installation straightforward, though it requires concentration as you read the instructions - and no cheating.
It's a low profile card and I don't remember it needing any power being plugged in. To be fair, I think this card is overpriced for whatever performance you would get out of it. That is especially considering I only use it for 2d acceleration. But I needed the card because I could not get displayport from the motherboard working - I suspect it is the particular CPU. Regardless, my entire outlay for this machine was the price of the graphics card.
It is fairly quiet, but I've never heard it really ramp up.
I do vaugely remember the card NOT coming with the shorter edge connect (metal L bracket thingy). Need to look back there and see what I have going on.
I am using Hackintoshes for the past 5++ years and it's running smooth and stable. I always make sure to buy only hardware that is supported and I never had any problems.
Updates were a pain in the past, but recently they are being applied smoothly.
My Hackintosh is my main device (typing from it right now) and I am working on it 10h+ a day for years without interruptions, so I think it's more than worth it for me.
I have had my previous hackintosh since 2014 and only once was there an issue. It all depends how good your boot loader config was. If it was configured properly, it was rock solid.
I once went for the first time to visit a Dutch acquaintance and before I entered the bathroom for a shower I was asked "not to take a long shower because of the electricity costs."
I am Dutch and I would also need a moment to process that request. I would never ask a guest to shower short because of the energy cost. Unless, of course, they stick around for a year and tend to shower for 2 hours each day. This is more about being frugal than being Dutch.
Dutch showers are as a general rule not electricity heated but gas, and those that are electricity heated have typically really old boilers that take forever to warm up, likely the host meant that they too would like a shower later.
That’s the trajectory. Let’s stay sharp.