Readit NewsThe cost issue is completely unrelated to supply or usage, there is a cyclic issue of power companies using their profits for lobbying in order to push through measures that allow them to further increase their rates. It is often far more than is publicly disclosed.
For example, last year in this state my power company made billions of dollars and claims they spent less than a million on political contributions. But if you look at their donations, grants, and development programs there is over a hundred million dollars mostly going to companies and nonprofits owned in part by the same politicians or their family members, as well as the municipalities where the policymakers live.
In my state the combined total of rate increases in the past five years for both electricity and natural gas is >1.5x compared to inflation. Each time it is framed in the press as a good thing "we reached a solid deal, for less than half as much of what they were asking!". Every year the profits exceed their expectations by a few percent, each year more people are having their power shut off.
Is global warming solved? Last time I checked, I was to throw away my repairable ICE vehicle for an expensive unrepairable disposable vehicle in order to save the planet. Just curious how a 42-megawatt gas turbine is helping the planet.
A new Civic going 8,000 miles a years at will produce 2.4 tons. So yeah one new DC is 4,700 cars. Which you’re supposed to replace with electric cars that will be fed with a non-existent power source, which means apparently even more gas turbine power plants.
Most assumptions about renewables don’t account for continuous 24/7 loads. Stuff like storage doesn’t help with that. I have noticed very little talk about AI DCs varying their loads to match renewable generation from solar/wind.
Most places have Google Workspace now. It’s pervasive. Most also have Microsoft 365 in some form or another. People generally want GMail, not Exchange.
Syncing users between Zoom and Google is completely trivial as is automating onboarding and offboarding.
Paying 3 annual accounts is not much different than 1… and is a bonus if it leaves you the option to completely migrate off of on.
(Incidentally a pattern I’m seeing is a place has Google Workspace plus Zoom, and then employees buy their own copy of Microsoft 365.)
You don't need Claude to write it. But you cannot generate solid web forms with the same speed. What usually would have taken you a few hours is now solved in much less time.
I doubt software will get cheaper though, requirements will adapt.
They have been, repeatedly, since the 70s. See dBase, Clipper, Microsoft Access, Hypercard, Ruby on Rails, stretching Wordpress to within an inch of its life, all manner of "no-code" things...
And, honestly, Excel. People do all manner of terrifying things with Excel, and it is unquestionably the most successful, and arguably the _only_ successful, "we can do this thing instead of employing a programmer" tool.
Generally, one of two things has happened. Either (a) the products of such automation become unmaintainable nightmares (common for the more automated approaches like MS Access) or (b) they become complex enough that they tend towards 'normal' programming (common with, say, Rails, where you could get a simple CRUD with basically just DSL, but realistically eventually you're gonna be writing lots of Ruby).
I feel like LLM-produced stuff is probably going to fall into column A.
So what’s interesting is that Copilot is basically useless for this task, as is Gemini. How is Microsoft messing up this badly?
It is true that LLMs make it easier to build these kind of things without having to become a competent programmer first.
From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case.
This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.
The marketplace for software for single-owner shops or 1-5 employee size places does seem to be quite strong, and then there's enterprise software, but small business seems to have a software marketplace that is atrociously bad. Here is the typical thing a prospective customer asks me to fix for them:
- They are using some piece of software that is essential to their business. - There really isn't much good competition for that software, and it would be a large cost to convert to another platform that also has all the same downsides below. - The software vendor used to be great, but seems to have been sold several times. - The vendor has recently switched to a subscription-only model and keeps on raising subscription prices in the 12% or so range every year, and the cost of this has started to become noticeable in their budget. - They were accustomed to software being a capital investment with a modest ongoing cost for support, but now it's becoming just an expense. - Quality has taken a nosedive and in particular new features are buggy. Promised integrations seem quite lacking and new features/integrations feel bolted on. - Support is difficult to get ahold of, and the formerly good telephone support then got replaced by being asked to open tickets/emails and now has been replaced by an AI chatbot frontend before they can even open a ticket. Most issues go unresolved.
There are literally millions of software packages in existence, and the bulk of them by numbers are niche products used by small businesses. (Think of a software package which solely exists to help you write custom enhancements for another software package which is used by a specific sector of the furniture-manufacturing business, to get an example.) The quality of this sector is not improving.
This is a field that is absolutely ripe for improvement. If the cost of building software really were dropping 90%, this would be a very easy field to move into and simply start offering for $6,000 a year the product that your competition is charging $12,000 a year for, for an inferior product. Before you bring up things like vendor lock-in or the pain of migration... why can't you write software to solve those problems, too? After all, the cost of writing a migration tool should be 90% cheaper now, too, right?