Fantastic Article, well written, thoughtful. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:
* "Then it professionalised. Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible."
* "The machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance and extraction. The platforms that promised to connect us were really built to monetise us. The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."
* "Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this."
* "They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of... But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening."
* "Typing was never the hard part."
* "I don’t have a neat conclusion. I’m not going to tell you that experienced developers just need to “push themselves up the stack” or “embrace the tools” or “focus on what AI can’t do.” All of that is probably right, and none of it addresses the feeling."
To relate to the author, I think with a lot of whats going on I feel the same about, but other parts I feel differently than they do. There appears to be a shallowness with this... yes we can build faster than ever, but so much of what we are building we should really be asking ourselves why do we have to build this at all? Its like sitting through the meeting that could have been an email, or using hand tools for 3 hours because the power tool purchase/rental is just obscenely expensive for the ~20min you need it.
From an economics standpoint the current state of the economy and the labor market doesn't really make any sense with the narrative being pushed.
Companies are claiming that they are achieving productivity gains from AI yet we've seen basically no evidence of it. Furthermore, if there were gains from it, we would expect the companies seeing the benefit to invest more into those productivity gains rather than less. Or put bluntly, they claim they are "buying money at a discount" but they just don't feel like buying more money.
The more reasonable explanation is that the economy is actually not in great shape, and companies/leaders are lying about the state of their companies (shocking right?). Companies are taking advantage of "AI" (LLMs) in narrow fields that are already highly codified (software, medical, legal, etc) but adoption is lower or even unwanted in other areas.
The labor market in software probably reflects this. You would avoiding hiring unless you need to; if you need to you are going to hire well because there is a lot of talent in the labor market... the only exception to this might be companies willing to take some risks (lower skill labor) for various reasons (financial, industry, etc).
There are a lot of charlatans out there selling this vision of a world where agents do all the work and software engineers are completely replaced... but it doesn't hold any water. Expect Javons paradox to be your favorite phrase as soon as the economy starts doing better.
If I remember correctly statistics were a state secret in Soviet Russia.
You are getting tbere with your current administation. They are clueless and lying trough their teeth about everything including the economy.
I think this is the real problem you need to solve. Replace them with someone who actually know what they are doing and not someone's retarded cousin who can repeat the party line.
Third–party tools don't bring money to LinkedIn, that's the issue. Rather than try to compete, much easier to force you to use their tools! Reddit did the same thing.
Easy solution is to sell a plan that explicitly allows third-party tool usage. Then they get the money and the users get the tooling LinkedIn is incapable of building themselves.
(except they won't, because they're not after money but engagement, and their built-in tools suck on purpose to maximize wasted time)
This is why I come to this site. Obviously, Twitter's financials are struggling and theres more than a few people rich people who don't want to take the hit... but we can all drop that for a second to discuss the plausibility of data centers in space. Some links and comments I enjoyed:
* https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
* "Technically challenging", a nice way to say "impossible"
* "I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to the public markets."
* "ISS radiators run on water and ammonia. Think about how much a kg costs to lift to space and you'll see the economics of space data centers fall apart real fast. Plus, if the radiator springs a leak the satellite is scrap."
* "5,000 Starship launches to match the solar/heat budget of the 10GW "Stargate" OpenAI datacenter. The Falcon 9 family has achieved over 600 launches." [nerdsniper]
* "No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth."
* "World's Best At Surfing A Temporary Hyperinflation Wave is not a life goal to really be proud of tbh"
I've read the author's articles before and they really are quite cynical. It reminds me of all those 90s shows and movies where all the white-collar work was considered soul sucking and the people who did it were corporate stooges. As if a person should feel shame for working a job and paying bills.
As much as a person may choose to belittle the bureaucracy at companies, it exists for a reason, and often that reason is fairly sensible. It is also simple to avoid bureaucracy if you dislike bureaucracy: just go work at companies where it hasn't had a chance to build up or the company has intentionally kept its bureaucracy in check.
Regarding promotions in bureaucratic companies:
> "You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success"
Whats interesting is that all sorts of companies evaluate performance differently. The better companies will tell you how they are evaluating you - so if you want to get promoted, do the things they say you should do to get promoted. Glue work, crushing jira tickets, making the world a better place... are actually things that a company might positively evaluate you on... or maybe all they care about is shipping and you should just do that. The path to promotion is doing the things that a company is willing to promote you for ("If you want to be loved, be lovable").
For what its worth at Wells Fargo during the account scams your path to promotion was doing illegal stuff. So you know, maybe don't do that stuff and avoid promotion even if you can't leave your job right now.
This is the second time I’ve seen Goedecke criticized as cynical and honestly it quite baffles me, I see it almost completely the opposite. His writing acknowledges the common cynical views of working at large companies but then works to rationalize them, in a pragmatic way.
Naïve question here... personally, I've never found Webmd, cdc, or Mayo clinic to be that good at fulfilling actual medical questions. why is it a problem to cite YouTube videos with a lot of views? Wouldn't that be better?
Medical advice from videos is frequently of the "unhelpful" variety where people recommend home cures that work for some things for absolutely everything.
Also people are really partial to "one quick trick" type solutions without any evidence (or with low barrier to entry) in order to avoid a more difficult procedure that is more proven, but nasty or risky in some way.
For example, if you had cancer would you rather take:
"Ivermectin" which many people say anecdotally cured their cancer, and is generally proven to be harmless to most people (side-effects are minimal)
OR
"Chemotherapy" Which everyone who has taken agrees is nasty, is medically proven to fix Cancer in most cases, but also causes lots of bad side-effects because it's trying to kill your cancer faster than the rest of you.
One of these things actually cures cancer, but who wouldn't be interested in an alternative "miracle cure" that medical journals will tell you does "nothing to solve your problem", but plenty of snake oil salesman on the internet will tell you is a "miracle cure".
Medical topics are hard because it's often impossible to provide enough information through the internet to make a diagnosis. Although frustrating for users, "go see a doctor" is really the only way to make progress once you hit the wall where testing combined with years of clinical experience are needed to evaluate something.
A lot of the YouTube and other social media medical content has started trying to fill this void by providing seemingly more definitive answers to vague inputs. There's a lot of content that exists to basically confirm what the viewer wants to hear, not tell them that their doctor is a better judge than they are.
This is happening everywhere on social media. See the explosion in content dedicated to telling people that every little thing is a symptom of ADHD or that being a little socially awkward or having unusual interests is a reliable indicator for Autism.
There's a growing problem in the medical field where patients show up to the clinic having watched hundreds of hours of TikTok and YouTube videos and having already self-diagnosing themselves with multiple conditions. Talking them out of their conclusions can be really hard when the provider only has 40 minutes but the patient has a parasocial relationship with 10 different influencers who speak to them every day through videos.
The core reason why medical advice online is "bad" is because it is not tailored to you as an individual. Even written descriptions of symptoms is only going to get you so far. Its still too generic and imprecise - you need personal data. Given this caveat, the advice of webmd, cdc, or mayo is going to be leagues better than YouTube, mostly because it will err on the side of caution, instead of recommending random supplements or mediocre exercise regimens.
Those sites typically end with “talk to your doctor”. There’s many creators out there whose entire platform is “Your doctor won’t tell you this!”. I trust the NHS, older CDC pages, Mayo clinic as platforms, more than I will ever trust youtube.
Its sooooo weird to me that indie software is the target... the author is interested in replacing things that were always accessible to replace but not really worth it (Typora is still one of my favs) and not at all interested in replacing trash enterprise software.
I see basically no reason why Salesforce can't be taken down by a 2-3 person team right now. Shopify? Everything Intuit? Atlassian (Jira, Confluence)?
The likely hard truth: 90% of software 'itself' will be easily replaceable, especially indie software. The reason why Shopify, Jira, TurboTax, etc are hard to replace is due to most of the HARD work being OUTSIDE software- the legal work for being a payment processor, legal insurance, special client relationships that only salesmen can foster, high market TRUST requirements, legal COMPLIANCE (HIPAA), etc etc. I'm fairly convinced that AI coding is going to force most programmers to move into becoming experts in specific business hard problems.
100% we are definitely heading towards a world where we work on hard problems and novel problems. The days of a team building a dashboard for a year for a crud app are likely behind us
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