"Past performance is not indicative of future results." and "Don't count your chickens before they've hatched." except in the world of the AI advocates, where they confidently assure us that it's perfectly fine to count our AI chickens before they've hatched because reasons.
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Calling the catastrophic dotcom bust that imploded ~50% of internet companies and caused a ~90% drop in combined market valuation for the remainder and nearly wiped out market leaders like Sun Microsystems and Cisco merely as side effects "A few early companies failing to find product-market fit before the money runs out..." is a very peculiar take.
Nothing peculiar about it. You’re making the same category error as the blog: Trying to equate the failure of a few companies with the failure of a technology.
You’re also trying to include companies which did not fail in your argument about the dot com bubble. Cisco is a very large and thriving company today and networking equipment is everywhere. Why would you use that as an example?
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> "We should want to be targeted in how we use it ... We should be using these capabilities to allow ourselves to work on harder problems."
Yes, people should do those things but we also know that's not what's going to happen to the average developer or the public in general. We are already seeing AI generated nonsense PRs, AI cheating on homework and interviews, AI generated documents and emails containing hallucinations, etc. that points toward a future where people abdicate reasoning and critical thinking instead.
> "It only a loss if you think the skill and ability you are losing is intrinsically valuable..."
I'm fascinated by the AI bros putting hollandaise sauce and making fires on the same level as creating production software. One hopes that it is because they create only very simple software, making the analogy less invalid than it would be for more complex software. If not, the implication is that loss of the reasoning and cognitive ability needed to build foundational software like libraries and frameworks is not important to them.
The only thing that separates homo sapiens from other species is the sapience. Diminishing or atrophying one's own cognitive abilities is the same as climbing down the evolutionary ladder.
I mean, doesn't the fact that people rely on these libraries and frameworks without thinking it itself prove the value of intentionally compartmentalizing off skills?
No one is arguing that everyone needs to build programs ground up from assembly. So what's the magic difference between using a framework and asking a computer to write out the for-loops for me?
What will actually happen is that the vast majority of coders will become completely dependent on AI. Anything the LLM can't do, they won't be able to do. Their output quality will be no better than the output quality of the LLM. If the AI is offline or their token budget runs out, their productivity drops to near zero. They will not be software engineers, merely dime-a-dozen LLM operators.
And the AI advocates might talk big about elevation and becoming architects but don't kid yourself: even for the fraction of coders capable of becoming architects, there isn't enough architectural work to be done for all of them to remain employed.
Sure, by all means, use AI. It is useful and quite powerful when properly wielded. But take care as well because it is shaping you as you use it and you might not like what you end up becoming.
Next time you see someone on HN blithely post "CPU / RAM is cheaper than developer time", it's them. That is the sort of coder who are collectively wasting our CPU and RAM.
If you ran a business, would you rather your devs work on feature X that could bring in Y revenue, or spend that same time reducing CPU/RAM/storage utilization by Z% and gives the benefit of ???
There is probably some low hanging fruit to be harvested in terms of memory optimizations, and it could be a selling point for the next while as the memory shortage persists
That is why we have slow, bloated software. The companies that create the software do not have to pay any of the operational costs to run it.
If you have to buy extra RAM or pay unnecessary electrical or cooling expenses because the code is bad; it's not their problem. There is no software equivalent to MPG measurements for cars where efficient engine designs are rewarded at the time of purchase.
You work on both. Sometimes you need to prioritize one, sometimes the other. And the benefit of the second option is "it makes our product higher quality, both because that is our work ethic but also because our customers will appreciate a quality product".
The business is only going to care about the bottom line. If it's not slow enough to cause business problems, they are not going to say "here's a week to make software faster"
Likewise engineers are only going to care about doing their job. If the business doesn't reward them from taking on optimization work, why would they do it?
This is not true of all engineers and all businesses. Some businesses really do 'get it' and will allow engineers to work on things that don't directly help stated goals. Some engineers are intrinsically motivated and will choose to work on things despite that work not helping their career.
What I'm really getting is, yes, engineers choose "slower" technologies (e.g. electron, React) because there are other benefits, e.g. being able to get work done faster. This is a completely rational choice even if it does lead to "waste" and poor performance.
I agree with this. What you focus on depends on the circumstances. I believe PaulG likes to say that premature optimization is the root of all evil. Early on, you’re trying to ship and get a functioning product out the door — if spending a bit of money on extra RAM at that time helps you, it’s worth it. Over time, as you are trying to optimize, it makes sense to think more about memory management, etc.
Even an editor running under Inferno plus Inferno itself would be lighter than the current editors by large. And that with the VM being weighted on. And Limbo it's a somewhat high level language...
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