catdog

Models can ingest up to date documentation, source code and search the web, context windows are big enough these days. Sure at some point retraining will be needed but not every few month and you likely don't have to start at zero every time.

> The fact that we do proves that ICs are equally to blame, because evidently the majority of them love using AI.

Quite true. Although there is a distinction, you definitely can use it as a tool but many indeed just lazily create slop.

There is a difference though. Railway lines and fiber last decades, GPUs will be out of date in a few years and the chips will probably just die at some point anyways. Also datacenters are barely getting finished and GPU clusters sit in storage. They are kind of useless without those datacenters though as they need specialized infrastructure.

The point here is a different one I think. It's not that everyone and their dog will create their own version of things, this will probably not happen at such a huge scale for the reasons you mentioned.

What might change is that the barrier to enter the market is lowered so someone without gigantic investment and years of time could actually come out with e.g. a JIRA competitor ticking all the boxes. This drives the vendors margins down. Also might give the buyer more negotiation power if you can say "then we just do our own version".

There is a lot of vendor lock in the software world just because it's just too hard/risky to do a full featured competitor, that might change and eat into the margins of especially those vendors. For those who also have healthy competition, the relative dynamics probably don't change much, agreed.

> True, with one exception: they do care if people are using the tokens to distill their own models. There is just not that much they can do about it except for clumsy heuristic type protections that will never really work.

Someone stealing from the stealing machine, oh that irony. Also hard to tell if they really have such a huge problem with it as that token spend makes their numbers go up significantly.

> One is competition from "open" models and just the complete lack of any moat for anyone this many years into things, and the second is that if all the software developers who are writing vibe coded clones of commercial software actually do lose their day jobs because the software companies they worked for go under (and if there are no more jobs for them to go to because this is happening everywhere), they eventually won't be able to afford the big lab subscriptions for personal use, so both pools of customers for the AI labs collapse in a related way.

If they hike up prices they kill demand, either because they compete with humans or open weight ... and now it's both actually. If they don't hike up prices they can't pay the bills for their absurd capex and they kill demand long term because there will be no one left to pay for it. Pretty fucked up situation I would say.

On the other hand, we are barely a month in, that thing is still ongoing so it's hard to judge now.

I think this is one of the biggest open questions, not only for cloning software but for "vibe coding" in general. How hard is it actually to turn such things into polished products? Is it even feasiable or are you just drowning in slop at some point?

With that much criminal energy behind it, you might even want to remove the wifi module or ground the antenna at this point.

Maybe, but also, they just hit a few of the largest data centers. Russia simply does not have that many large data centers and it's not so much of a secret where they are located I guess. Such an attack disrupts a lot of things and it's natural that the Russians focus their recovery efforts and the spare capacity they have left elsewhere on more critical services.

There is also the problem, that some OEMs add their own "battery optimizations". If you simply don't run anything its indeed very battery efficient... Forcing push notifications through some central service has minimal benefits at best. Open source variants are forced to publish annoying persistent notifications and ask the user to flip some "battery optimization" toggle deep inside the settings to not get killed, of course this often enough changes with Android versions.

Looking at the amount of RAM phones have nowadays I don't know if this is an issue, desktop Linux runs fine with those amounts. Also Android is not really memory efficient so they needed this workaround.

> That we are finally having a sane pendulum swing towards no copyright is a breath of fresh air.

Might be a short one though if all goes to plan. Just another form of gatekeeping the worlds information and with new gatekeepers replacing the old ones.

> At the same time it's truly baffling going on a site called _hacker_ news and seeing corpo talking points from the 90s/00s regurgitated wholesale. Information wants to be free.

Look at who owns that site, no surprise here.

I'm quite pleased with it. It's also nice that it translates directly to the file system .

Is there money in frontier?

The problem is that the UI speed largely was not kept at that level but considerably slowed down again despite exponentially growing compute power.