I think this could be applied to most fields where LLMs move in. Let's take the field we are probably most familiar with.
Currently companies start to shift from enhancing productivity of their employees with giving them access to LLMs, they start to offshore to lower cost countries and give the cheap labor LLMs to bypass language and quality barriers. The position isn't lost, it's just moving somewhere else.
In the field of software development this won't be a an anxiety of an elite or threat to expertise or status, but rather a direct consequence to livelihood when people won't be hired and lose access to the economy until they retrain for a different field. So a layer on top of that you can argue with authority and control, but it rather has economic factors to it that produce the anxiety.
In that sense, doesn't any knowledge work have a monopoly on knowledge? It is the entire point to have experts in fields that know the details and have the experience, so that things can be done as expected, since not many have the time nor the capabilities to get into the critical details.
If you believe there is any good will when you can centralize that knowledge to the hands of even less people, you produce the same pattern you are complaining about, especially when it comes to how businesses are tweaking their margins. It really is a force multiplier and equalizer, but a tool, that can be used in good ways or bad ways depending on how you look at it.
Doesn't this imply that you were not getting the level of efficiency out of your investment? It would be a little odd to say this publicly as this says more about you and your company. The question would be what your code does and if it is profitable.
I went online first time in 2010/2011 and I have to say, I wish I didn't. I remember the world before the internet and ever since it started, life became a massive blur...
I mean it's pretty simple:
management will take bad quality (because they don't understand the field) over having and paying more employees any day.
Software engineer positions will shrink and be unrecognizable: one person expected to be doing the work of multiple departments to stay employed.
People may leave the field or won't bother learning it.
When the critical mass is reached, AI will be paywalled and rug pulled.
Then the field evens itself out again over a long, expensive period of time for every company that fell for it, lowering the expectations back to reality.
That's another one for concluding that there's nothing new under the sun. This is the exact dynamic that happened during the offshoring hype.
Now, it's expecting senior engineers to "orchestrate" 10 coding agents, then it was expecting them to orchestrate 10 cheap developers on the other side of the world. Then, the reckoning came when those offshore developers realised that if they produced code as good as that of a "1st world" engineer, they can ask a similar salary, too, and those offshoring clients who didn't want to pay up were left with those contractors who weren't good enough to do that. This time, it will be agent pricing approaching the true costs. Both times, the breaking point is when managers realise that writing code was never the bottleneck in the first place.
This is truly the problem: You either get fired or you get to work 10x more to survive. Only question is how many of us will be in 1st group and how many in the 2nd group, its a lose lose situation.
Exactly. Some jobs moved from database, backend, frontend and devops to "fullstack", which means 4 jobs with the pay of one. People do that job, but with only 8h-10h in a day the quality is as expected. I think overall people will try to move out of the field, no matter how much of a force multiplier AI might be. Its simply a worse trade to carry so much responsibility and burden when you can work in IT or outside of IT in a less cognitively demanding field with set hours and expectations for the same pay (in EU, very hyperbolic statement tbh). Especially when the profit you bring dwarfs the compensation with all the frustrations that come with knowing that and being kept down in the corporate ladder.
My understanding of JavaScript is cursory, but my reading of that webpage is the UI is just smoke and mirrors, and it is just waiting for the whole thing to be processed in a single remote API call to some back-end system. If the back-end is down, it will always stop at 90%. The crawling progress bar is fake with canned messages updated with Math.Random() delays. Gives you something to look at, I guess, but seems a little misleading. Might be wrong ...
Sometimes I feel like the people here live on a different planet. I can't imagine what type of upbringing I would have to have, to start thinkinkg that "eating food" is an engineering problem to be solved.
This might be a controversial opinion, but I for one, like to eat food. In fact I even do it 3 times a day.
Don't yall have a culture that's passed down to you through food? Family recipes? Isn't eating food a central aspect of socialization? Isn't socialization the reason people wanted to go to the office in the firt place?
Maybe I'm biased. I love going out to eat, and I love cooking. But its more than that. I garden. I go to the farmers market. I go to food festivals.
Food is such an integral part of the human experience for me, that I can't imagine "cutting it out". And for what? So you can have more time to stare at the screen you already stare at all day? So you can look at 2% more lines of javascript?
When I first saw commercials for that product, I truly thought it was like a medical/therapeutic thing, for people that have trauma with food. I admit, the food equivalent of an i.v. drip does seem useful for people that legitimately can't eat.
I like eating, I just don't like spending so much time and decision fatigue on prep. I'm probably the target audience for Huel but I don't actually think it's good for you
90% of meals aren't some special occasion, but I still need to eat. Why not make it easy? Then go explore and try new things every now and then
Treating food as entertainment is how the west has gotten so unhealthy
I like satisfying my hunger (my goal most of the time when it comes to food), but making food is not a hobby to me. That said, cooking is often a nice, shared experience with my girlfriend.
I expect AI ads to start with blindingly obvious overwhelmingly excited endorsments, but it won't take long for that to show up in the metrics that won't work very well past the initial intro, and they'll get more subdued over time... but they're always going to be at least positive. The old saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is wrong, and the LLMs aren't going to try to get you to buy things by being subtly negative on them. If nothing else, even if you somehow produced a (correct) study showing that does increase buying I think the marketers would just not be able to tolerate that, for strictly human reasons. They always want their stuff cast in a positive light.
I think I've seen an adtech company use AI influencers to market whatever product a customer wanted to sell. I got the impression that it initally worked really well, but then people caught on to the fact it was just AI and performance tanked.
I don't actually know whether that was the case but that's the vibe I got from following their landing page over time.
Windows 11 usage is declining. The Xbox is selling vastly less than Sony/Nintendo. PC gamers are moving to SteamOS and Linux. The billions poured into OpenAI no longer look so smart given very competitive offerings elsewhere.
Despite all this they still have a hugely profitable business, a pretty decent OS under all the adware, and a defacto monopoly on business productivity software.
Corporations get their software into businesses through the exact same process software gets replaced in those companies… usually through IT and/or users using things personally who become their champions.
So which paragraph do you think was more relevant to their recommendation…the one where they already have most of the customers they will ever have, or the one where people are increasingly moving away from them in their daily lives?
in just last 5 months they got two new corporate customers with 1400 and 550 employees. and this is just me, one nobody that knows about. if you think they are not getting new corporate customers not daily but hourly you mite be tad misinformed.
as an exercise see how many job openings there are where you won’t be using MSFT products if you get the gig :)
Likely using a rather generous definition of “new”. There is a difference between a new customer, and buying a license. Im also fairly doubtful that every server, docker, vm, and appliance is also running Windows. And even if said 2000 users are using Windows for absolutely every system, it’s still a meaningless anecdote about a drop in the bucket. I don’t think anyone suggested that Microsoft doesn’t have customers? But I suspect they were far from “new” customers, even if a new company, because I guarantee something somewhere was replaced for every one of them; bankrupt businesses they replaced, old hardware, whatever. Arguing the opposite would certainly seem to be naive on face.
wasn't expecting to read that Microsoft is not getting new corporate customers but here we are, you learn something new every day :)
none of this is anecdotal, I make a living as contractor and in just past two years have worked on numerous moving-to-microsoft projects, Oracle to SQL Server, AWS to Azure, Sharepoint etc etc... I am not a fan of MSFT by any means but what you are writing makes absolutely no sense. You should read MSFT quarterly earnings reports and not read few anecdotal things people on HN write about MSFT. It is M7 for a reason and practically has no competition (which is why they are able to do shit like Windows 11 and Copilot and... people on HN might be bitching but it is just for entertainment purposes)
Anecdotes like “I’ve done blah blah over two years”? Correct, I ignore anecdotes just like that. You can argue whatever you like — you seem to be heavily financially motivated to do so while I neither own Microsoft stock nor earn my money by convincing people to use their products. As a result, feel free to continue your evangelism while I go ahead and extricate myself from your sphere of biases.
Have you used their products recently? I predict we’re at the beginning of a downward trajectory. I’m not saying they’re going bankrupt but there are better tech companies in which to put your money.
Maybe not the point you were making, but Windows 8 was lame, then 8.1 was an improvement, 10 was more improvement, and now 11 is further improvement. That's from a daily user. A lot of Windows criticism sounds like it comes from non-users or users who want to be in the hater in-group more than they want to invest in setting it up well.
The AI stuff is definitely terrible, but I turned it off a long time ago and never see it, it's another thing I don't understand the outrage about. The FUD about it getting reactivated hasn't come to pass for me.
Windows 11 was clearly a regression after a very good Windows 10. Task bar from Win10 had been completely deleted and a garbage tablet replacement had been pushed in. It's already what, 3 or 4 years in Win11 an task bar still don't have a comparable functionality. It is also slower in performance, it takes visible seconds just to open a volume slider, which loaded almost instantly on Win10 and same hardware. There were multiple severe problems with AMD performance on release, fixed much later, again showing that hey took inferior code or even build from scratch (meaning Win10 had a superior code inside). Explorer has been degraded significantly, I usually use Total Commander and don't have to interact with it, but unfortunately Save/Open File menus are still Explorer ones. And there it has applied this new file "structure" of Today/LastWeek/LastMonth and so on, which overrides normal sorting rules for some folders like Downloads. finding files are now a damn quest. I had to change my downloads directory to a user created one in every program, just to avoid this crap.
And the list goes on, I just don't remember every single UI regression issue I've encountered right away. But Win11 is clearly bad. Not the awful bad, but annoying bad daily.
I agree with your points... From my POV, the pattern seems to be good/bad/good/bad, but what actually happens is a subtle lowering of our standards and expectations that we have towards what an OS has to do and how it does things. With every bad version, the next version seems to be less bad or even good, but what it does is lower the standard further.
Stuff started to move to one drive, office is all cloud now, they are subtly chipping away the personal computing concept...
It's not a skill in particular but I want to decouple the way I think from todays economics. I want to learn skills that give me confidence and well being instead of training me to be a better cog in the machinery, so that I can impress other people or put a price tag next to the value of me as a human. Just enough to be average, but not more to end up living to work to fuel delusions.
I also don't want to be derailed from hyped up technologies that ultimately sell me on a quick path to reach a delusional goal. I want steady and consistent growth and understand the makings deeply.
I keep reading bad sentiment towards software devs. Why exactly do they "bully" business people? If you ask someone outside of the tech sector who the biggest bullies are, its business people who will fire you if they can save a few cents.
Whenever someone writes this, I read deep rooted insecurity and jealousy for something they can't wrap their head around and genuinely question if that person really writes software or just claims to do it for credibility.
Currently companies start to shift from enhancing productivity of their employees with giving them access to LLMs, they start to offshore to lower cost countries and give the cheap labor LLMs to bypass language and quality barriers. The position isn't lost, it's just moving somewhere else.
In the field of software development this won't be a an anxiety of an elite or threat to expertise or status, but rather a direct consequence to livelihood when people won't be hired and lose access to the economy until they retrain for a different field. So a layer on top of that you can argue with authority and control, but it rather has economic factors to it that produce the anxiety.
In that sense, doesn't any knowledge work have a monopoly on knowledge? It is the entire point to have experts in fields that know the details and have the experience, so that things can be done as expected, since not many have the time nor the capabilities to get into the critical details.
If you believe there is any good will when you can centralize that knowledge to the hands of even less people, you produce the same pattern you are complaining about, especially when it comes to how businesses are tweaking their margins. It really is a force multiplier and equalizer, but a tool, that can be used in good ways or bad ways depending on how you look at it.
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