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kamaal commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'   theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS
blackhaz · 2 days ago
Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call.

At least in my personal case, struggling with renewal at Virgin Broadband, multiple humans wasted probably an hour of everyone's time overall on the phone bouncing me around departments, unable to comprehend my request, trying to upsell and pitch irrelevant services, applying contextually inappropriate talking scripts while never approaching what I was asking them in the first place. Giving up on those brainless meat bags and engaging with their chat bot, I was able to resolve what I needed in 10 minutes.

kamaal · 2 days ago
Its strange you have to write this.

In India most of the banks now have apps that do nearly all the banking you can do by visiting a branch personally. To that extent this future is already here.

When I had to close my loan and had to visit a branch nearly a few times, the manager tells me, significant portion of his people's time now goes into actual banking- which according to him was selling products(fixed deposits, insurances, credit cards) and not customer support(which the bank thinks is not its job and has to because there is no other alternative to it currently).

kamaal commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'   theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS
kamaal · 2 days ago
Most people don't notice but there has been a inflation in headcounts over the years now. This happened around the time microservices architecture trend took over.

All of sudden to ensure better support and separation of concerns people needed a team with a manager for each service. If this hadn't been the case, the industry as a whole can likely work with 40% - 50% less people eventually. Thats because at any given point in time even with a large monolithic codebase only 10 - 20% of the code base is in active evolution, what that means in microservices world is equivalent amount teams are sitting idle.

When I started out huge C++ and Java code bases were pretty much the norm, and it was also one of the reasons why things were hard and barrier to entry high. In this microservices world, things are small enough that any small group of even low productivity employees can make things work. That is quite literally true, because smaller things that work well don't even need all that many changes on a everyday basis.

To me its these kind of places that are in real trouble. There is not enough work to justify keeping dozens to even hundreds of teams, their managements and their hierarchies all working for quite literally doing nothing.

kamaal commented on Sequoia backs Zed   zed.dev/blog/sequoia-back... · Posted by u/vquemener
skydhash · 2 days ago
They also don’t bother to announce a Vim or Emacs one either. VS Code provides good default and most people don’t care about editor fluency. Which is why they keep using it.
kamaal · 2 days ago
>>They also don’t bother to announce a Vim or Emacs one either.

vim has a universal and in many ways a eternal use case. You have to edit a file at some point on a server, be it a self hosted or even on ec2. Thats kind of the only real use case for vim.

In these days of AI assisted coding, no one really 'edits' code. A lot of editor short cuts and fluency related concepts kind of in many ways are not relevant in this paradigm.

The thing is vscode just works, like just works, for nearly all the usecases. In case of emacs, learning it and mastering it takes lots of time in ones career. In case of vscode you don't have to do this, you can straight away work on the project that you want to get done.

emacs is some what like a massive distraction from the actual task you want to achieve. Instead of writing code to build a project, you have to first write code to make emacs work, then use emacs to write the project code. In vscode you just write project code.

kamaal commented on Sequoia backs Zed   zed.dev/blog/sequoia-back... · Posted by u/vquemener
airesQ · 3 days ago
Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative?

This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view

kamaal · 2 days ago
>>Is IntelliJ "bad"?

The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over.

These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.

kamaal commented on Sequoia backs Zed   zed.dev/blog/sequoia-back... · Posted by u/vquemener
awill · 2 days ago
It does look like ST is lost here. They don't know where to go next. But I do like their Sublime Merge product. It's really good.
kamaal · 2 days ago
That no major AI players even bother to announce a ST plugin/package is proof enough, its now just a tool to manage random text copy/paste snippets.

vscode seems to have totally taken over dev mindshare these days.

kamaal commented on Lab-grown salmon hits the menu   smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/bookmtn
bowmessage · 5 days ago
From https://www.wildtypefoods.com/our-salmon :

> "We harvest the cells from our tanks and integrate them with a few plant-based ingredients..."

Gross. This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon, at all.

kamaal · 5 days ago
>>This should not legally be allowed to be marketed as salmon

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their correct name

- Confucius

They need to call this tankcellfillet or something on those lines. Companies must not be allowed to get away to slap the tag healthy on clearly harmful foods and get away.

kamaal commented on Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner   simpleflying.com/airbus-a... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew
Pavilion2095 · 6 days ago
> The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start.

But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. If anything, they abandoned the idea of a new design and introduced 737 MAX as a response to the competition - A320neo.

kamaal · 5 days ago
>>But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years.

Most of Boeing's Ls seem to have come from quality issues, and that seems to come downstream to cutting spending on engineering, testing and in general overall technical ecosystem.

There is no point in making 20 or even 200 new planes, if you don't make them well.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs

kamaal commented on I'm worried it might get bad   danielmiessler.com/blog/i... · Posted by u/conzar
yencabulator · 10 days ago
We have many of those that are perfectly fine. Writing proofs is still quite hard, especially proofs that actually say something about your program.
kamaal · 10 days ago
Proving something is correct is a far harder exercise, than writing a broken but acceptable version of that thing.
kamaal commented on I'm worried it might get bad   danielmiessler.com/blog/i... · Posted by u/conzar
yencabulator · 10 days ago
The proof either passes the SAT solver in a reasonable amount of time, or it doesn't.
kamaal · 10 days ago
Somebody will have to write proof verifier, and that in many ways will be harder than writing some CRUD app that they want proof verifier to validate.

We might even end up increasing the demand and pay for devs if this happens to pass.

kamaal commented on I'm worried it might get bad   danielmiessler.com/blog/i... · Posted by u/conzar
ethbr1 · 10 days ago
Or as the article put it:

>> Most workers, and most work days, are just drudgery. Answering emails. Writing up quarterly plans. Reviewing metrics. Building applications that do something with data.

Yes. Those jobs are going to disappear. If your role's primary value is shuffling paper around an org, or putting minor edits on something before forwarding, your job is going to disappear to AI in the next 1-3 years.

Or AI-initiated human process optimization in the next 2-5 years, which I think is an underappreciated second wave.

To define that: if we 10x or 100x the productivity of certain roles, won't companies look at the remaining unaccelerated human speedbumps and ask "Is it really that important we have a person do that? Because it's now costing us substantial latency and throughput of the process as a whole."

And in many cases they'll likely conclude that no, it's not critical that a human be involved at that point. So poof those jobs as well.

As a result, we'll have many fewer humans being much more productive.

Tbd on whether that produces enough surplus (and equal allocation of it) to balance out the job losses.

kamaal · 10 days ago
If there are no people, there won't be a need for managers to exist either. Who/What are the managers going to manage? The office air?

Eventually whoever that is running the business has to be smart enough to figure out everything, and the margin for error will be small in a economic environment where every one is already poor and can't spend to buy your things.

I remember the days of socialist India. If everyone is poor its impossible to do the good things like research, development, innovation. The reason is simple, with no one having money to buy your things, you will never make profits to invest in them.

u/kamaal

KarmaCake day13583April 15, 2011
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