askmike

There has always been some level of misalignment between the (beauty of high) quality of products made by craftsmen and the value of these products by whoever consumes them.

If you zoom out and look at other industries, we've seen this before many many times: Fast food completely commoditized the food industry. There are still extremely skilled people making the "highest quality" food. For example those at michelin star restaurants, these businesses typically don't make money by selling food anymore, they stay around for other reasons (hotel needs a fancy restaurant with a famous chef). We've seen the same when it comes to many other products: toys, furniture, most electronics, etc.

Nobody can swim against the forces of capitalism here, just not enough people care about high quality hand crafted software (the only people that really do are people right here in this thread hand crafting software). Sure there will be some corners of the economy where people doing everything by hand will keep their head above the water.

Think of it this way: back when people were sending letters to each others and responses took weeks, people (non professional writers) put a lot of thought into writing these letters. I'm sure if you show these people the average (non AI) emails we've been sending each other the last few decades they will complain about all the slop too (including how we all converse to each other right here). But you can definitely argue that this exponentially increased communication and sharing of ideas has outweighed our decreased ability to write properly (in self defense: I'm not a native english speaker).

This obviously sucks for those who care about high quality hand crafted software, but this is going to open the floodgates in terms of the accessibility of software development. And it's yet to be seen whether this is going to take all our jobs away or not. What's very much true (like the article says) is that the future job of software dev is going to look different, and the change is coming fast.

The more we measure, the better we get at separating the false positive cases from the serious ones. Especially in a world where AI plays a bigger role in the development of the medial sciences.

Going forward into the future and not measuring more accurately because we are worried about false positives in our current limited understanding is a very conservative take.

They are quants with a deep experience in trading that started to develop general LLMs as a side business, that does not mean their experience is baked into their models.

I think most comments miss the point on why many small businesses don't have websites:

It's not about it being hard to create and manage a website, it's that the vast majority of customers use social media platforms (as well as platforms like google maps) to find out about shops and F&B. For many businesses having an Instagram page will draw a lot more people than having a random website.

> Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?

This is definitely an interesting way of looking at it. If your blog ends up in pre-training data, it will become part of the AI. Or if not, an AI might still fetch it when a user asks something specific. It reminds me of voting in a democracy, which many people consider a right and a duty - but in reality a single vote is hardly going to swing any election.

> But then I stopped because I had no return from it. > The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.

I can definitely relate, and find this true as well. While a (monetary) return has never a big focus for me. It's still hard to keep going over time with motivations around self improvement, accountability, etc.

To summarize the current Dutch personal income system: besides income from salary and income from own business (these are taxed quite high), income from investments (stocks, passive investments, real estate excluding your first home) is taxed quite low. The amount is simply a percentage based on the value (as per the start of the year) of your investments.

So in the Dutch tax system there is no difference between realized and unrealized gain. As such it doesn't matter when you buy/sell your investments. It doesn't impact your tax burden. The effect you get is that everyone's wealth just slowly erodes away, just like with inflation (unless your yield outpaces that).

But with this new law that all might change.