byoung2

currently AI is replacing specific tasks, not entire roles. a SWE does some coding, some reviewing, some architecture, and lots of communicating with leadership. So far AI is good (not great) at coding but not great at the other stuff.

Remember in Jurassic Park where the dinosaur DNA was extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber? That wasn't necessarily the best DNA, just the easiest to extract. The best writing might be love letters or high school term papers or PRDs meant for internal distribution, and these never get put online to be fed into LLM training sets. Instead we have 20 years of StackOverflow and Reddit posts saying "it's not a bug, it's a feature" or "Die Hard isn't an action flick, it's a Christmas movie" with 10k upvotes and LLMs learned that's how you get the biggest reaction with the least amount of words. It's not a bug, it's a...you get the point

That’s why humans need to be part of the process. Otherwise we get SkyNet

I feel like this centaur age could unlock a lot of embedded device programming which would greatly increase the demand for AI-assisted software engineers for at least a few decades. Humans have the intuition to know what to build, and how devices should interact with people, while AI will know the lower level code to run on hardware that isn't a smartphone or computer, but is more sophisticated than an ASIC or FPGA. There's going to be a lot of software required to make devices smarter, to run more AI locally, and to connect to remote AI. Centaurs will be plenty busy for a long time to come

If you describe your MVP using the following pattern:

[customer profile] has [problem] so I built [solution]

Then you should have an idea of who the product is for and then you can figure out where to find them. For example:

Boat owners who store their boats at home don't have a convenient way to move their trailers around so I built a motorized trailer puller that is controllable using a smartphone so they can move their boats without using their vehicle.

So I need to reach people who have boats on trailers. They are easy to find down at any boat ramp or marina. I could go down there and set up a prototype and show them how it works, get feedback, and maybe show them a QR code to join a mailing list. I could also go to boat shows, FB groups, subreddits, YouTube, etc.

Do you have a customer profile you could share, and maybe people can offer suggestions for how to reach them?

I suppose if you look short term, Russia and Canada have already experienced tangible benefits, like Russia's new ability to use shipping routes that were previously frozen, and Canada experiencing an increase in the land area available for farming that was previously a wintry wasteland. I'm not sure how long these benefits will last. Finland, Norway, and Sweden have experienced lower winter fuel demand due to milder winters.

I learned programming when it was a dark art, a decade before Stackoverflow was a thing. It was fun to learn and at a time when companies like Google were new and Facebook and Uber didn't exist. Now with AI it is both easier to learn, but for many use cases, unnecessary. There used to be a need to learn programming to build or maintain your personal website (the original reason I learned Perl), but there's tools for that now so you don't need to touch code. So to start fresh, I'd probably choose another field

It guessed Sarah Connor correctly in 32 questions

I would imagine it is similar to running an AirBnB and answering a guest's message during work hours. Just don't be obvious about it and don't let it interfere with your main job.

As with most technological revolutions, some jobs will be lost, and many more will be created. The invention of the automobile killed the horse and buggy profession, but it created car manufacturing, road construction, petroleum, motels, long haul trucking, etc. There is potential for AI to enable people to do jobs they could not do before. There are millions of people who could say this sentence: I would love to do X job but it requires Y skill that I don't have, so I do Z job instead. AI is quickly allowing everyone to do Y skill, so it is unlocking a lot of X jobs for people currently stuck doing Z jobs (or no job).

I'm old enough to remember similar talk of the internet destroying jobs. Phone information operators will be out of business because websites can give you better info, faster. Print media would disappear. Travel agents and realtors would be replaced by websites. Some of that happened, but many jobs were created. Web developers, cybersecurity, content creators, and hundreds more jobs that no one dreamed of now exist because of the internet.

In some ways that “problem” is an escape hatch for Disney. Other studios have to write off huge losses for underperforming movies (and Disney definitely does this too). But even a flop can drive Disney+ subscriptions, park visits, merchandise purchases, hotel stays, cruise bookings, etc. Star Wars is an excellent example, even though many of the Disney era movies underperformed (it’s hard to say flop), Disney has made back more than the purchase price of Lucasfilm, the budgets of all movies and shows, and construction costs of 2 Galaxy’s Edge lands and turned a profit. They’re like Costco in that way where the food court doesn’t need to profit as long as they sell memberships.

I recently left Disney after working there for almost 5 years. It's much worse on the inside than people realize. Very sad indeed.

I haven't read the new book yet, but I'd be interested in your take on Disney's trajectory over the last, say, 2 decades. It seems to have strayed pretty far from Walt's original vision, largely due to the actions of Bob Iger. He took what used to be a company that was fueled by creativity and turned it into a machine that strip mines IP and extracts value. Iger purchased IP (Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Fox) as a risk mitigation strategy since you get an established brand you can exploit on day 1. But in doing so he killed the soul of Disney, which was built on big creative bets (literally sell the car to make a movie, mortgage the house to build a park).

Yeah I remember the "X for Y" format being encouraged [1]. But X was always an example of a successful startup that was a leader in one category/audience, and you were saying you would be the X for a different category or audience.

PG's examples here were AirBnB as the "Ebay for space" or Viaweb as "the Microsoft Word of Ecommerce".

I'm not rewriting history when I say that the X has changed from a representative example of a successful company to a lazy broad technology like "AI agent for insurance" or "AI native recruiting". Here is a current YC batch startup: Manicule - AI Native Developer Relations. I have no Idea what that is. Does it talk to devs using my product like in a chatbot? Does it help them write code using AI? If they said "HubSpot for developer content" or "Vercel for developer relations" I would get it right away. But better than the X for Y formula would be just to describe the startup: we provide an AI-native developer relations team that owns documentation and technical content end-to-end so you don't have to hire someone for $300k.

  1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866822

My exact wording was "fully automated". Yes actively replaced, but cashiers have not been fully automated. That would mean no more cashiers at any grocery store, convenience store, because all they have are self checkout machines. That has not happened except at Amazon Go, and they closed all those stores. So my claim is accurate.