agent_turtle

> What is a software company worth, if its product can be rebuilt over a weekend?

Has this not been true since forever? I remember in college creating clones of twitter.

I have been part of vendor discussions at my company where the question is "why don't we just build this in house?". The answer to that question is: we don't want to own this, and all the complications that come with owning it. Uptime? Cost? Responsibility? No thank you.

It's why I can technically make a nice table right now in my garage, but I'm going to buy one from a reputable seller instead.

The whole article is worth reading, but this part in particular caught my eye:

"Despite billions of dollars that firms around the globe have invested in AI over the past few years, major returns remain to be seen: 90% of executives say AI efforts have yet to translate to productivity gains at their companies"

the actual answer to this is accreditation. you will see safety standards rise across the board if engineers risk losing their license for shipping unsafe features.

one only needs to open a history book to see that this country used to be much, much more corrupt. while this country has problems, we are far from the first generation to face them.

i'm not sure why this is surprising. the socialist left, the coalition who care about equal access to good and services, is leading the charge against surveillance pricing.

> the socialist left would like nothing better than to have surveillance pricing, so long as it is deployed in the aid of poor people

nothing about this makes sense. i think you're making an argument that the socialist left wants poor people to afford more, and yes that's true. but comparing that to price gouging is where logic left the station.

literally all these things you've listed that you're working on would not be needed if AI didn't exist. which goes back to OP's point about spinning in circles.

what exactly here advances the project?

this overly cynical take is bad and wrong. c-suite does in fact care about customer satisfaction; it's why you get asked about it in surveys all the time. it's why a game will live or die by the review scores.

while it is true that c-suite behavior does not always align with improving customer satisfaction, that's usually because c-suite is dumb and bad at their jobs.

the enshittification we experience on social media, on the other hand, is due to the fact that we are not their customers. we are the product.

i used to be in charge of these sorts of decisions for my team. the thing most people don't think about when it comes to rolling your own software is the upkeep. in other words, you don't _just_ pay for the software. you pay for someone to keep it running so you don't have to wake up at 2am to deal with angry customers.

agreed. i have to assume dead internet theory is at play here with all these comments talking about exponential improvement.

if anything we've slowed down. i have no clue what the acceleration folks are talking about. we've been getting diminishing returns on models; the growth has been in usage and tools.

I don't know how you use search but I often find incredible information that I didn't explicitly search for.

How do you quantify such things? How can you say with a straight face that this magic box gives you more relevant information (which may be wrong!) and that will revolutionize the workforce?

My partner works at MSFT and I can confirm this.

OpenAI is currently being evaluated in terms of hundreds of billions. That’s an insane number for creating a product that “speeds up searching a bit”.

One of the major reasons there’s such a shortage of homes in the US is the extensive permit process required. Pivoting from data centers to home construction is not a straightforward process.

Regarding the economics, the reason it’s a big deal that AI is powering growth numbers is because if the bubble pops, jobs go poof and stock prices with it as everyone tries to salvage their positions. While we still create jobs, on net we’ll be losing them. This has many secondary and tertiary effects, such as less money in the economy, less consumer confidence, less investment, fewer businesses causing fewer jobs, and so on. A resilient economy has multiple growth areas; an unstable one has one or two.

While you could certainly argue that we may already be in rough shape even without the bubble popping, it would undoubtedly get worse for the reasons I listed above,