Eridrus

Not keen on outing myself by providing evidence, but I think we do generate more revenue by using AI. We launched new products with a small team and also optimized our outcome-pricing based product using AI several times. We also reduced costs by self-hosting more software.

But we're a tiny baby startup, so things like "spin up a new product with 1 engineer and get to $1m in revenue on it" or "reduce our IaaS bill by 300k/yr" is a meaningful contribution for us.

We're also building new AI-enabled software that was not possible before.

The big breakout hits have been AI Infra, but that makes sense from a technological perspective, Cisco made a lot of money well before Google did, but Cisco is not where the money concentrated in the end.

We don't really know what the equivalent of Google as an application business will be in the AI era, but there's a pretty big chance it's not actual Google. But Google still has to do it's best to hold on.

I think this is all fair, but somewhat just semantics.

Most engineers are working in "normal" engineering orgs, but can feel the ground underneath them shifting, and companies believe that if they are caught flat footed, they will be out competed in the marketplace, so they are all trying to make sure they are adopting it at least in a way that lets them keep pace if not accelerate revenue.

If you are not impacted by economic incentives, you can continue to not care about this transitional state, but most people do.

This has been the standard for a while now.

Kimi/GLM/etc basically all have this. They're not doing this out of the kindness of their own hearts.

I think it was obvious that more programmers would be necessary, but if you look at BLS forecasts from 1985, they expected +~250k programmers/computer analysts each over 10 years, which is basically what happened. Secretarial employment was 3m at the time and predicted to stay basically flat, which is basically what happened.

Typists and data entry work cratered, but overall admin support actually went up.

There are hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and about 5 million computing professionals right now. There are 3.5m workers in admin assistant roles.

The growth in computing employment is totally overshadowed by parts of the workforce. BLS' "Management, business and finance" grouping grew by 19m since the early 80s.

Nobody knows what the equivalent to this is going to be until the economy starts reorganizing itself.

> In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from.

I think this is an extremely pollyannaish view of how technological revolutions have happened. In fact, it is always the exact opposite, people always fail to predict where new jobs would come from.

Whether this idea is economically largely depends on how much utilization you can get and how much you can get GPUs for.

I feel like my takeaway here is that things that are not connecting software written by a wide group of people should not rely on the root CAs.

We often use TLS to connect software run by the same organization because it is convenient, but why are we giving random CAs the ability to issue certs for these cases?

Ok, but why were all these higher level services that are not zonal experiencing issues then?

Truly, the wilderness was the best part of the game.

I remember grinding away to a set of black armor, going right to the wilderness and getting immediately crushed and losing it immediately lol.

The "Doorman fallacy" is an argument that replacing them is impossible because of all the other things they do. The fact that the other things are not as valuable indicates that while they do a bunch of other things, the main thing is the main value they provide in most cases.

There will be cases where they stick around (luxury hotels, etc) where the ancillary benefits are the point, but there are many cases where the primary task is the economically valuable thing.

I am breezing past it because it is wrong. You can observe this by the fact that most buildings do not have them. They are, at this point, an NYC luxury oddity.

I live in an apartment without one and I would not pay $150/month for a dedicated doorman so that delivery people have an easier time with the intercom.

And honestly, you are undercounting the cost, you can't get away with 3 doormen for 24/7 coverage and the salary is not the all in cost. It's probably closer the $300/month for 145 apartments.

If you're already paying $10k/month for an apartment, sure, you don't care about the cost and are happy with the fringe benefits. This doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people have an intercom because the main function is solved.

Yes, yes, yes, people say all this. And yet, doormen in apartment buildings are a dying breed because their main function has been replaced.

A substantial amount of NYC apartment buildings still have doormen, people claim to like it. I do not place enough value on a doorman that I would want to live in one where I need to pay for what can be done by an intercom.

Which is to say, it is sometimes a fallacy, but often, it is not. We have far more intercoms and automatic door openers than doormen.

I think the simple argument here is that the ad ecosystem should be rebuilt on the default assumption being that ad creatives should be an image and a link with no support for arbitrary rich content.

It would break the long tail of the ad ecosystem, but a bunch of people think the tradeoff is fine.

Given how much of online advertising is now in walled gardens rather than display ads, I think this shows this is more doable than the people who are part of the open ecosystem want it to be.

I don't even know if they were impacted at this point tbh.

I obviously deeply regret not getting a second opinion.