If you're making a proposal, I feel like an RFC carries a lot more weight than a slideshow or an email. If you really don't need feedback or approval from anyone, sure, go it alone. But if you do need or want to run it past someone, let the document you send them reflect the amount of thought you've put into it, and then maybe they'll hesitate before going off half-cocked & suggesting some idea you already considered.
> This leads to authors having to re-explain their thinking in detail
What I like about RFCs (or similar documents) is the ways they work to prevent this. Recently I was involved in planning an initiative without a document like this, and we had to keep explaining and re-explaining the motivation for our decisions to stakeholders and higher-ups. With a document (assuming everyone reads the document before giving feedback), most questions get pre-empted; the ones that don't only need to be addressed once, because the answers end up in the version of the doc which you show to the next person.
Certainly I think it's worth being selective about who you're soliciting comments from, to avoid a too-many-cooks situation, but rare is the project that doesn't need anyone's approval or feedback. Presenting a big fat document gives a sense for the amount of thought that has gone into the design, which quells the kind of off-the-cuff "why not X?" comment you might get in response to a boxes-and-arrows chart and a high-level summary.
Ideas were never worth much. Implementing a quick prototype was always pretty simple. How easy is it, with modern tooling, to build a collaborative web editor? Just slap together prosemirror and automerge and you're already there. Still, nobody has displaced Google Docs.
The value proposition of SaaS is ultimately just that it's not a hack.
Most SaaS products could be replaced by a form + spreadsheet + email workflow, and the reason they aren't is that people don't want to be dealing with a hacky solution. Devs can hack together a nice little webapp instead of a network of spreadsheets, but it's still a hack. Factoring in AI assistance, perhaps SaaS is now competing with "something I hacked together in a week" as opposed to "something I hacked together in a month," but it's a hack either way.
I am absolutely going to pay for analytics and dashboards, because I don't want the operational concerns of my Elasticsearch analytics cluster getting in the way of the alarm that goes off when my primary database catches fire. Ops visibility is too important to be a hack, regardless of how quickly I could implement that hack.
Sure, but I think the argument they're making is, if AI can produce good, non-slop applications at high speed, why isn't there a glut of new, high-quality software? Slop kinda proves their point.
Why do companies have games with crap performance if the underlying hardware is so good? Why did the avro arrow get scrapped? Why are there countries with energy prices much higher than what nuclear offers?
There's a world of difference between the technical capabilities of a technology, and people actually executing it.
Yeah but there are zero barriers to market. France can't sell its nuclear energy to Australia, but anyone anywhere can release software. If anyone is exploiting this, it should be visible to everyone.
Companies can release games with crap performance because nobody else is making the same game as them. The idea being put forth here is that, with AI, you can just clone someone's product for nothing. So why isn't that happening?
The article provides a few good signals: (1) an increase in the rate at which apps are added to the app store, and (2) reports of companies forgoing large SaaS dependencies and just building them themselves. If software is truly a commodity, why aren't people making their own Jiras and Figmas and Salesforces? If we can really vibe something production-ready in no time, why aren't industry-standard tools being replaced by custom vibe clones?
> If we can really vibe something production-ready in no time, why aren't industry-standard tools being replaced by custom vibe clones?
That's a silly argument. Someone could have made all of those clones before, but didn't. Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI.
I feel like these anti-AI arguments are intentially being unrealistic. Just because I can use Nano Banana to create art does not mean I'm going to be the next Monet.
> Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI.
Yes it is. "How much will this cost us to build" is a key component of the build-vs-buy decision. If you build it yourself, you get something tailored to your needs; however, it also costs money to make & maintain.
If the cost of making & maintaining software went down, we'd see people choosing more frequently to build rather than buy. Are we seeing this? If not, then the price of producing reliable, production-ready software likely has not significantly diminished.
I see a lot of posts saying, "I vibe-coded this toy prototype in one week! Software is a commodity now," but I don't see any engineers saying, "here's how we vibe-coded this piece of production-quality software in one month, when it would have taken us a year to build it before." It seems to me like the only software whose production has been significantly accelerated is toy prototypes.
I assume it's a consequence of Amdahl's law:
> the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.
Toy prototypes proportionally contains a much higher amount of the type of rote greenfield scaffolding that agents are good at writing. The sticker problems of brownfield growth and robustification are absent.
Also `asyncio.subprocess`, which lets you manage multiple concurrently running commands. Very handy if you need to orchestrate several commands together.
Ok tbh bash uses the system package manager to install command-line utilities, and using the system package manager for python packages HAS been tried, and the parallel use of system packaging and independent package managers is part of why python package distribution is such a mess.
Why using independent package managers alongside the system one? I think the introduction of non system packagers is what brought us the whole mess we are in. Most system packagers allows for custom repositories.
Because the system package repository doesn't package everything & isn't always up to date. And if you introduce other repos to fix this, then you have an ecosystem with multiple instances of the same package distributed at different versions in different repositories, and God help you if you need multiple versions of one package, or if you need a different version of Python entirely. Nix could do it, but not anything else.
No—system python is for the system's scripts, and user projects should have their dependencies sandboxed in a virtual environment. That's the only model that really works.
I think you could argue teenagers have a right to discuss political issues in the public forum. That's basically the definition of good citizenship, and (for better or worse) social media is the public forum of the day. Kids don't go from zero rights at 17 to full rights at 18; minors' rights are limited, but they do have rights.
I dunno if that'd fly in Australian courts though.
Well kids can discuss political issues across other discussion boards just not those on the social media sites impacted by the ban. They can also continue to do it say, in person in public.
I think the discussion of political issues in a sensible way on platforms like instagram, tiktok, X, Reddit etc for those ages is perhaps a lower priority than the mental health impacts that those platforms in general provide.
What other discussion boards? They've all been subsumed by Reddit.
I was on Reddit a lot as a teenager. I was the kind of argumentative kid who likes to iron out the wrinkles in their beliefs by defending them, and the internet offers and endless stream of people willing to discuss niche subjects. It had a positive impact on me.
What mental health impacts? We haven't really established that social media has any, writ large. Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation has been very influential in teen social media ban discourse (in fact, I'm not sure the Australian ban would have happened without it), but Haidt never manages to establish a link between social media and depression or anxiety [1]. People just assume social media is really bad for teens, but the extent to which this is true, the proportion of the population for which it is true, and the extent to which social media may actually be valuable to some teens (e.g. to gay kids in conservative towns who are looking for community) is just not established.
I have a real problem with policy that seeks to cut teenagers off from communities they're part of without any interest in establishing the value provided by or the harm caused by those communities.
[1]: Haidt notes that teen hospitalizations related to mental illness have risen since the early 2000s, discounts the recession and climate change as possible explanations, and then just assumes that social media is the only other explanation (it isn't; for instance, teens started getting hospitalized way more after Obamacare lowered the cost of hospital stays). Elsewhere, he's cited a self-report survey indicating that social media use had a high mental health impact on teens, but the indicated impact of social media was greater than the impact of binge drinking, which was greater than the impact of eating fruit, which was greater than the impact of having survived sexual assault (https://bsky.app/profile/michaelhobbes.bsky.social/post/3kxs...). So, that survey is not reliable. Basically, Haidt doesn't actually have any evidence of how bad social media is for teens. He relies on his audience already believing this intuitively.
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