Nothing in this space “smells right” at the moment.

Half the “ai” vendors outside of frontier labs are trying to sell shovels to each other, every other bubbly new post is about this-weeks-new-ai-workflow, but very few instances of “shutting up and delivering”. Even the Anthropic C compiler was torn to pieces in the comments the other day.

At the moment everything feels a lot like the people meticulously organising desks and calendars and writing pretty titles on blank pages and booking lots of important sounding meetings, but not actually…doing any work?

I for one, would certainly prefer a wider ecosystem of _more refined_, less bloated tools.

The current system of a near-monoculture of garbage sucks.

Users care about performance and jank, it’s just that they’ve been successfully forced to shut-up-and-deal-with-it. They’re not involved in purchasing or feedback, and the people that are don’t use it enough to care, or just don’t care. Users who complain about it may as well shout into the void for how much companies take note, but hey, at least we got an ai button now!

Atlassian products are a great example of this. Everyone knows Atlassian has garbage performance. Everyone complains about it. Never gets fixed though. Everyone I know could write customer complaints about its performance in every feedback box for a year, and the only thing that would happen is that we’d have wasted our own time.

Users _care_ about this stuff. They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it.

I find outside of specific use cases the performance and jank are down to the developers and not whether it's native or not

Obsidian is an Electron app which is pretty much universally loved. We can both give single examples

i think you've to be more nuanced here - perf becomes important only on the extreme. i think there are compromises to be made between perf and go-to-market.

“They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it” is a roundabout way of saying users don’t care about it enough.

Software decisions are often not made by who will use said software.

Aaaaand that is why we, as end users get machines which are sluggish, because literally every. Single. Application is taking this attitude.

Shock horror, the waste adds up, and it adds up extremely quickly.

I don't really care about memory or how much of it is taken up by the editor. I have enough memory for the work that I do & UI performance would make no difference to my workflow.

I am dying to know where you’ll get the energy and manufacturing scale in order to achieve this with current, or current+50-years technology.

Do tell.

The energy to build the system comes from the partial assembled system, plus some initial bootstrap energy. It grows exponentially. We seem to have enough today to build small factories in orbit.

The manufacturing scale comes from designing factory factories. They aren't that far in the future. Most factory machinery is made in factories which could be entirely automated, so you just need some robots to install machines into factories.

I was told ca. 2003 or so that because features on computer chips were getting smaller at some rate, and processor speed was getting faster at some other rate, that given exponential this or that I'd have tiny artificial haemo-goblins[1] bombing around my circulatory system that would make me swim like a fish under the sea for hours on end. But it turned out to be utter bullshit. Just like this.

[1] https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/respirocytes

Well the company of the former microcontroller has gone out of their way to make getting and developing on actual hardware as difficult and expensive as possible as possible, and could reasonably accused of doing “suspect financial shenanigans”, and the other company will happily sell me the microcontroller for a reasonable price. And sure, thy started off cloning the former, but their own stuff is getting really quite good these days.

So really, the argument pretty well makes itself in favour of the $0.5 micro controller.

Using mystery vibe coded software in a tightly regulated, consequence-heavy environment, that’s so reassuring! /s

Is it _just_ speech-to-text, or god-forbid are you giving it scans and having it write reports for you too?

It’s text to speech with structured reports support. Jesus Christ stop with the moral panic already.

FYI I also assumed that it is doing something more dangerous, mostly because you mentioned being radiologist as relevant.

Is it calling some external API or doing this text to speech locally?

On one hand, it’s extremely tiring having to put up with that section of our industry.

On the other, if a large portion of the industry goes all in, and it _doesn’t_ pay off and craters them, maybe the overhyping will move onto something else and we can go back to having an interesting, actually-nice-to-be-in-industry!

I can't help but think of a video of a talk by someone- uncle Bob maybe?- talking about the origin of the agile manifesto.

He framed it as software developers were once the experts in the room, but so many young people joined the industry that managers turned to micromanaging them out of instinctual distrust. The manifesto was supposed to be the way for software developers to retake the mantle of the professional expert, trusted to make things happen.

I don't really think that happened, especially with agile becoming synonymous with Scrum, but if this doesn't pay off and craters the industry, it seems like it'd be the final nail in that coffin.

Getting into a position where you can tilt the playing field exclusively in your benefit is 100% the logical outcome of for-profit companies in capitalism.

It’s so transparently and frequently stated outright, that building companies geared around achieving that has become the norm: it is the fundamental business-model of _every_ _single_ unicorn startup, or the company that buys them. Launch, squeeze out competitors by relying on VC money, capture the market, and become the sole dominant force in that market and use your position to then pull up the ladder behind you and cement your position. Uber and Facebook are prime examples of this.

Using power to tilt the playing field is the logical outcome of all political systems, not just capitalism.

> capture the market, and become the sole dominant force in that market and use your position to then pull up the ladder behind you and cement your position

This is worth discussing in detail. Becoming dominant by providing a better thing, or investing more capital, is not tilting the playing field, it's winning the game. Getting government protected monopolies, special tax write-offs, subsidies, exclusive grants is. Uber and Facebook are not anticompetitive just because they are dominant, they are anticompetitive to the extent that they specifically use their dominance to influence politics.

Woah woah woah, that sounds like a skill set we might have to _pay_ someone for??? Can’t we just prompt the model to do that??

While I know your comment was in sarcastic jest, the question folks are asking this month is "can't we just pay one person to prompt ten models to do that?"