Can you explain the reason?
Otherwise the sky may realize it's in the control group.
Readit NewsScarblac commented on 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend thedailyadda.com/95-of-co... · Posted by u/speckx
In some products, certain AI features have become expected. If a product doesn’t include them, it risks losing customers, making it a net negative for the market. At this point, companies either invest in AI or risk falling behind.
Can you name some of those products?
Scarblac commented on Tiny microbe challenges the definition of cellular life nautil.us/a-rogue-new-lif... · Posted by u/jnord
My biology is a bit rusty but I really have to wonder — are plants and animal cells even “alive”?
Take away the mitochondria and bacteria… can cells live on their own?
If no, then are we that all that different than this microbe?
Might even be sheer arrogance to think that we are the “host” (much like cats/dogs domesticating humans). Maybe we only exist to serve the mitochondria (:->
You were a single animal cell at some point. Seems to me that it must have been alive.
Essentially nothing can live on its own, certainly not animals.
Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.)
The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct.
What actually seems to be happening, however, is this:
- obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market
- companies want writers that understand how to use AI tools to enhance productivity, but understand how to modify copy so that it doesn’t read as AI-written
- the meta-skill of knowing what to write in the first place becomes more valuable, because the AI is only going to give you a boilerplate plan at best
And so the only jobs that seem to have been replaced by AI directly, as of now, are the ones writing basically forgettable content, report-style tracking content, and other low level things. Not great for the jobs lost, but also not a death sentence for the entire profession of writing.
Seems a bit optimistic to me. Companies may well accept a lower quality than they used to get if it's far cheaper. We may just get shittier writing across the board.
(and shittier software, etc)
That form of migration is happening all over the world right now.
Virginia opossums, traditionally associated with the deep south, are now routinely spotted around Toronto, and are moving even further north. Armadillos, though still shy of the Canadian border, have crossed the Ohio River. American alligators, long stopped around Cape Hatteras, are now spotted in the tidal creeks of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. [1] Lobsters are moving north to the Canadian Maritimes from New England, and the blue crabs of Chesapeake Bay are filling the niches they're leaving behind.
It's much the same way in Europe. The European praying mantis used to be a hot-climate central Italian and Balkan insect. Now it's routinely spotted in Germany, has been found as far north as Latvia, and I found one in the usually-chilly Slovenian mountains just the other day!
Wherever you are on the map, look at the climate and ecosystem a few hundred miles south. That's likely where things are heading for you; it's a safe bet that the species that thrive there are the ones that are going to be best adapted to where you live in the second half of the 21st century.
[1] - https://defenders.org/blog/2023/12/why-we-almost-said-see-yo...
But not all species are mobile enough, and up north the winters are darker and the summers are lighter.
The shift will be incomplete, other species just go extinct.
The point is that good software engineers are good at doing the "hard part". So good that they have a backlog of "trivial" typing tasks. In a well functioning organization they would hand off the backlog of trivial parts to less experienced engineers, who might be herded by a manager. Now we don't need the less experienced engineers or the manager to herd them.
And how do we get new experienced engineers?
Scarblac commented on Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big eidel.io/exit-tax-leave-g... · Posted by u/olieidel
In many ways this feels like average software engineers telling on themselves. If you know the tech you're building, and you're good at splitting up your work, then you know ahead of time where the complexity is and you can tell the AI what level of granularity to build at. AI isn't magic; there is an upper limit to the complexity of a program that e.g. Sonnet 4 can write at once. If you can grok that limit, and you can grok the tech of your project, then you can tell the AI to build individual components that stay below that threshold. That works really well.
But the hard part is figuring out the more complex parts. Getting that right is what takes the time, not typing in the more trivial parts.
Scarblac commented on Writing a good design document grantslatton.com/how-to-d... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
Is there a collection of good design documents somewhere?
I'm a few decades into my career and can't recall ever seeing any.
For anything bigger than small size features, I always think about what I do and why I do things. Sometimes in my head, sometimes on paper, a Confluence page or a white board.
I don't really get it. 80 % of software engineering is to figure out what you need and how to achieve this. You check with the stake holders, write down the idea of what you want to do and WHY you want to do it. You do some research.
Last 20 % of the process is coding.
This was always the process. You don't need AI for proper planning and defining your goals.
And of course for most things, there's a pretty obvious way it's probably going to work, no need to spend much time on that.