I don't think vibe-coding will replace anything. However, what if AI tools can make skilled developers more productive, particularly at simple tasks in unfamiliar environments? You could see that reducing the engineering costs of simple utility applications. There are tons of pitfalls that many here have pointed to but also maybe opportunities to do things that wouldn't have been cost effective.
Also: In my life the easier it has gotten to create and run software, the more software people have wanted and the more they have been willing to spend on it.
> I don't think vibe-coding will replace anything. However, what if AI tools can make skilled developers more productive, particularly at simple tasks in unfamiliar environments?
That's not good enough.
Now that the world has successfully laughed off the "our models are so good they're superintelligent" AGI claims, AI companies and investors have moved on to the "our models are so good they're going to do all your workers' jobs" angle.
The insane investment is for AGI/total job replacement, not developer productivity tools. We are going to be sold pie-in-the-sky claims for a long time until the world wisens up to this rhetoric the same way we did with AGI nonsense.
One cost is to the savings of Japanese people who don't get a competitive rate of return on their savings. They save a lot and generally don't invest abroad.
When it was created DirectX was a really useful thing for game makers. It made it easier to write hardware accelerated applications that were also consumer friendly. Contemporary Windows is full of anti-patterns. MSFT just can't seem to resist sticking things into it that make it less pleasant to use in support of MSFT's ecosystem. It's no wonder Valve invests into trying to be independent of that.
I think it would be healthy for everyone if the hype around this stuff would die down a bit. There's too much pressure to invest in hardware and too much uncertainty around the business case. I am excited to see what can be built but I hope a bunch of people don't have to get wiped out financially along the way.
My whole professional life I have lived in a world where business was done in most of the world-- more or less-- according to American rules of law and trade. I have benefitted enormously from being able to buy things from all over the world when they are cheaper and sell the things I make to most of the world.
I have family members who think America should be first. They love it when the US snubs other countries. In general they are people who are retired, work for the state or local government, or don't do things that generate much wealth. So they are really oblivious to how the world order has benefited their country. But maybe that is because I benefited and they didn't.
America had been first all the time since at least 1945 while driving the globalizaton. What can be more "first" than extracting all possible kinds of value - cheap labor, educated immigrants, mineral resources, transaction fee from whatever goes through the financial networks, profit from the global trade flow, etc. - from the rest of the world?
>But maybe that is because I benefited and they didn't.
"didn't"? Having one of the best retirements in the world immediately comes to mind.
MAGA is about mythically great 50s or 60s i guess. Back then the technological complexity of the time allowed to have "in-house" all the technologies needed to build even most complex products. Today the "house of 340 million" is too small to fit all the tech needed for even moderately complex modern products. The tech pyramid became much higher and has much wider foundation. As a result, tariffs hit most strongly the domestic manufacturing which needs all those imported components/materials.
I think we agree! My point was that America was first, but you only saw that if you were doing business at a corporate level, particularly in things like tech or finance. If you lived in a small town, you saw your manufacturing shut down. If you lived in a big city you knew people who were doing business all over the world with great success.
And also I agree that the whole country benefited economically. But its hard to see that when your region is doing badly.
>But its hard to see that when your region is doing badly.
May be proponents of globalism should have financed those voters travel to other countries to see what real "doing badly" looks like.
In US, as far as i see, whenever/wherever somebody is struggling, doing badly, it can mostly be attributed to 2 problems - 30 or something years stagnant minimum wage, which today is several times less than minimally reasonable, and tremendous limitations on housing construction, both problems are inflicted by politicians on the regular people.
Only 1.1% of workers earn the federal minimum wage. There are billboards in my state for grocery store stockers advertising $19/hour, and this is not a state with a higher minimum wage than federal. I think min wage concerns are generally wrong; the main problem is wage growth not tracking housing costs. Doubling or even tripling the minimum wage would overall do approximately nothing to the sentiment of economic despair.
The minimum living wage should be driven by local housing costs. Many sources of financial advice recommend spending no more than one-third of your income on housing costs. By that rule, the minimum living wage should be three times the cost of a mid-tier one-bedroom apartment.
For those who would claim that's too much to pay for a "minimum wage job," I have another question: Should a job that does not pay enough for someone to live be allowed to exist? We have those kinds of jobs today, and the companies with these jobs have whole departments teaching their employees how to gain social support such as rent assistance and Medicaid.
> the minimum living wage should be three times the cost of a mid-tier one-bedroom apartment.
I would argue very-low-tier even if I were taking your position, or even low tier with roommates
> Should a job that does not pay enough for someone to live be allowed to exist?
I don't know, probably. For local service jobs like janitors, demand is inflexible, and they'd probably end up just getting higher pay. I worry about what happens to any job that could be done for cheap, remotely, in a foreign country. Manufacturing already happened this way, and with a high enough minimum it would happen to landscape architects, middle managers, accountants, etc. In the absurd case it could be cheaper to ship overseas your HVAC or even your car for repairs, instead of paying a mechanic. It could be cheaper to telephone a foreign doctor, food costs could be dwarfed by labor costs to the point that fast food is luxury, it could be cheaper to ship your dog across the border to go to a vet. It seems like we'd be putting a whole lot of people out of jobs and business, with their customers going remotely to a sweat shop.
Now if we pair the minimum wage increase with suitable tariffs so that people aren't shipping their cars for repairs, sure, but that is never brought up.
Gives me an idea. If I was rich and wanted to fix the healthcare system, I might look into charters plane flights/accomodations and find the most lucrative medical procedures and offer people a better way overseas. We count on people being the adversarial counterweight in the US but they don't really have the means to truly be that anymore. I bet it wouldn't take a whole lot of enabling people power to destabilize the current medical system.
What industries could people take power back in this way?
Look up medical tourism. It's a thing already. The value-add would be vetting the medical practitioners. You go to your doctor because you trust them to do the right job. You go to a doctor in a foreign country, and it feels much more dodgy. Medical tourism groups may already do this; I haven't investigated it.
I toyed with the idea when I needed a couple of crowns. A friend of mine in Estonia and I worked out that two crowns is the break-even point for traveling to Estonia and seeing his dentist.
Private companies invented 'the company store' and paying their labor in script so that labor never had a means to leave (your pay is useless outside of the company town).
Politicians got rid of company pay choices and made them pick from a list of options after it was established companies couldn't be trusted to make the wage choice on their own.
So yes, and for good reasons. Unless your argument is that companies should be allowed to pay in useless company scrip?
Government oversite is so necessary and has become so pervasive and successful that Conservatives are like fish that don't believe water exists. They assume our successful heavily regulated Capitalism is the default state of Capitalism.
There is a lot more to life, and to the sentiment of "America First", than economics. I interpret the MAGA movement as mostly not about economics, but about trying to revert to previous social and cultural norms and values. Sometimes, even acknowledging and accepting the negative economic consequences of that.
For example most Republicans I know, when confronted with the idea that illegal immigrants benefit the economy, still want them deported. The economy is not their primary concern with most issues. Framing Trump's actions always economically misses the point a lot of times.
Moreover, America First is a sentiment of spending our attention and money on our internal problems, like redirecting foreign aid to domestic aid. It's a feeling of, why is Africa getting billions of my tax dollars when I can't buy a house? This is completely unrelated to our foreign business practices except to the extent that we were doing charity for a nebulous status. At least that's what I think people voted for. In practice it has been America burning its goodwill for no reason.
>MAGA is about mythically great 50s or 60s i guess.
No, it's not, and that's what makes it so powerful. Everyone gets to decide for themselves when America was great. For some it's before the Civil War, when the darkies were working in the fields picking cotton and knew their place. For others it's the 1940s when the US was kicking ass in Europe and the Pacific and other countries knew their place. For some it's the 1950s when women were barefoot and pregnant and also knew their place... you can probably see a bit of theme here.
In any case everyone gets to choose their own imagined golden time when A was G, typically at the expense of others (women, African-americans, minorities, other countries, ...). And you can even see which era the different groups prefer, e.g. the tradwives want to be back in the 1950s when women were unpaid domestic servants, etc.
I know an America-First who runs their own business and imports a ton from China. Now they're feeling the pain, but I'm not sure it's changing any minds. It runs deep.
Doesnt matter what they think. Go check the headlines in British or French news papers from pinnacle of Empire to unravelling and the level of ignorance and cluelessness will be staggering. The chimp troupe has 3 inch chimp brains to process reality. That brain has hard limits on how much info and change it can process and how quickly it can update existing beliefs. In groups beliefs these update rates and limits slow processing down even further. So incoherence is the norm and story tellung is the survival hack. Once you get that you stop focusing energy and time on the unpredictable and uncontrollable.
That's a smart take. However, the cost and time to make GTA6 is mostly baked in at this point.
What I think is likely is that the cost of many other types of games in the future will be reduced because of AI. It's an open question how useful AI will be but I think its clear that it can make a lot of tasks in game making more efficient.
Like their predecessors, they were initially conceptually clean and simple in the beginning too. But then decades of feature development, the scope creep overcomes the clean architectures and design decisions. Lets see if Godot remains the same in 10-20 years, I'm cautiously optimistic :)
But they don't have all the same owners. If I own company 2/3 of company A and it is worth $0, and I own 2/3 of company B I can't force company B to buy company A for $1. The company B shareholders will be upset and could sue.
Maybe this is a good deal for shareholders of SpaceX and xAI. But then maybe it isn't a good deal for one set of shareholders. I have no idea, but I would love to be a shareholder in SpaceX and would not want to be a shareholer in xAI. Totally depends on the price of course.
I don't think only AI says "yes you are absolutely right". Many times I have made a comment here and then realized I was dead wrong, or someone disagreed with my by making a point that I had never thought of. I think this is because I am old and I have realized I wasn't never as smart as I thought I was, even when I was a bit smarter a long time ago. It's easy to figure out I am a real person and not AI and I even say things that people downvote prodigiously. I also say you are right.
Also: In my life the easier it has gotten to create and run software, the more software people have wanted and the more they have been willing to spend on it.
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