There was an interesting podcast recently from freakonomics about Epic software and how it’s always been private. It reinforced my perception that companies do better for humanity when they stay private.
Most C corps have the same tragedy of the masses problem that we face with pollution and resource scarcity. Not to mention that the average anything is mediocre. So, in a word, yes.
I really hope that some of these big players in the AI market will stay private. There are already enough headwinds to them being a force of good in the world without having to report to shareholders of the lowest denominator.
Talked to my therapist about this just this Friday. I have a friend, let’s call him Saul. He’s got an air about him, the way he carries himself. Good looking but not great looking, wears a certain kind of goatee that looks a little devilish. He presents as he is a gentleman, has manners, good listener, has a light touch - masculine but also effeminate in a way.
Women adore him! Like every woman I’ve ever met says she likes Saul. Not necessarily romantically, but just generally likes him and enjoys his company.
I’ve lived with this man on multiple occasions. He has caused my friends and I emotional harm. He will act overly aggressive about the smallest transgressions. I put a day bed in the common room one time, for a few weeks, and rather than approaching me about him not liking it, he demonstrated overt sex acts on it. The last time I lived with him a decade ago, he and my ex would berate me and the other roommate, in very toxic emotional ways, like in some kind of sadistic hedonist thing that they shared doing together - I think it came from them both being tortured souls from their respective upbringings. Likewise, when he didn’t get his way or the rise he wanted, he would just yell or throw things. Rather than approaching in a discussion, he’d go nuclear.
But that’s not the worst part, because it wasn’t all about what happened to me. A good friend of mine and him started dating about a decade ago. Started out great, romantic, etc. but then he started doing the same things to her, so she broke it off and moved back home. The dude, on multiple occasions, drove the two hours down the road and would just stalk her. Like follow her all damn day. Would make sure she knew he was around.
We’re older now, I see him around town. We have coffee on occasion. He seems to be doing better, got an education, and has a little business that’s woman centric that seems to be doing well.
But I won’t ever forget what I know about this man. The closet is full of skeletons, and damned if this meme wasn’t on point.
Please don’t give the village people any more ideas…
“Sorry I told you what I actually think”
Tiny home that I’m moving into in two weeks. And then a larger home that I plan on moving into at the end of the year if i can ever get my contractor to fix the mess his “buddy” made on the last roof repair.
And then, in addition to those two, just myself.
So…you used a calculator instead of doing math in your head?
History has proven again and again that the first woman to win will be a conservative. With more of the blue collar union guys starting to vote conservative, this becomes even more probable.
Even so, I really hope I can look on this comment 3 years now and be proved wrong.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/19/health/tlc-man-132-pound-scrotum
I got big balls and I cannot lie All y’all others can’t deny When a girl walks in with a itty bitty waist And there’s a big round thing in their face They get Concerned
Lazy request warrants a lazy response. LMAITFY:
About 1.2 to 1.4M active users across the fediverse, with Mastodon making up the bulk at around 990k MAU on its own. Other platforms are much smaller: Pixelfed ~110k, Lemmy ~48k, PeerTube ~40k, Misskey ~21k.
Since these instances are defederated, it’s an approximation.
I’m looking forward to the day that the true holodeck is invented so that these dweebs can live in their narcissistic libertarian fantasy worlds. Maybe then the rest of us can then live our lives cohesively and take care of this planet like we should have been doing all along.
Death panels by any other name wouldn’t be so bleak.
You talking about Harry Buns?
But QI, that’s the good stuff. I’d walk over mountains and rivers for more QI.
I use a chromecast and, good golly, the number of times I get 90+ second ads is insane. I downloaded nebula the other day and, once I finally get my fill of avgn in the next week or so, I’m leaving and never looking back.
“It’ll happen this time, I’m sure of if guys.”
Court sizes have shifted before, they can shift again.
Ugh, this is reminding me that my DM swears that my dual wielding, grappling rune knight/barbarian’s fists are not “melee weapons” and thus cannot use any of the runes that are activated by a melee weapon.
If Bruce Lee’s were licensed as lethal weapons, then why the hell can’t mine, Dan!?
What he describes is exactly what I’m seeing as well. But I also think his last section emphasizes the importance of having a human steer the ship. If you think LLMs are sycophantic when they talk to you, the Code Review Agents / LLMs are doubly so for their own work “dev bot: you asked me to do x so that’s what I did.” QA bot “I can verify that you asked dev bot to do x and that’s exactly what it did” - Humans have to be in the mix to ensure that a) the code is organized and not recursive spaghetti and b) that the software actually does what you wanted it to do both from the front and backend.
The AI does homogenize some of the playing field, but experts are still needed who understand the intent of the software. I wouldn’t trust an AI dev to conform to all GAAP standards. They can help inform code and even provide the documentation, but ultimately a human needs to validate the deliverables.
And if you thought agents were bad at updating legacy code, just see what they can do with their own code when you ask it to add 50 + features that weren’t in the original request. 🤯
So, let me give some advice to others entering into this industry. The way I see it, there are going to be 2 distinct paths in software moving forward.
be customer facing - product management is going to be merged with implementation consulting. These will be the “private eyes” who understand how a customer is using the software, understands the enhancements, the bugs, etc and also trains the customer how to use the software. With how fast AI can now code, it will be interesting to see if we go back to a world where everything is bespoke and disparate (like those homegrown access dnd back in the day) - I certainly hope not or if we’ll stick with platform “COTS” software (think SAS, Intuit, workday, Kronos, Maximo, etc). I’m any case, customers will request more customization because they’ll start to realize it’s now much easier to customize. These “private eyes” will be who informs the developers and helps structure how the updates can work within the platform framework. I think the era of product management and implementation being separate careers is dead.
The development architects. These will be the folks who take in the inputs from the customer facing team and determine the best way to build it into the architecture. They’ll have a legion of agents that they control: research, development, QA, technical documentation. Each architect will be in charge of a district product line. You need people who are experts in their domain to do this work. And these people once again become those developer unicorns that were once (and in some cases still are) the backbone of software companies. Your developer will now be doing the work that a team of 5-10 people would have done in the past. But that should also mean that we should be able to employ more of these brilliant architect types.
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What I struggle with long term, however, is why do we need system software at all? People notoriously hate entering info into systems. They may want to see the data in fancy graphics and infographics, but no one wakes up in the morning and goes “I’m really looking forward to doing all that data entry today.” Humans are also notoriously bad at updating where they are within workflows - we tend to work in the physical realm and update the software as time allows. Agents can and will do a lot of this work moving forward. And they’ll do it (if the systems are built with standards in mind) more consistently than any human would have - a person will just need to validate the data governance. This is how we get to the world of Star Trek, where the computer does the technological lifting and humans do the the human interaction bits. I think (but not sure - do we go back to mainframes???) that databases will still be needed. But software workflows can all be dialed in through training the LLMs. I’m already starting to see it with some of the tools available, but right now it’s very Wild West - at some point once we get the horse back under us, there will need to be standards built in, rather than each person doing it just a little bit differently and therefore getting slightly different results.