fhd2

But would you argue that it is neither about short term nor long term financial gain? Cause that was my point. It really always is about profit one way or another, in my experience, with barely any exception I can think of.

Well, it's either about "profit now" or "profit later". The latter one can feel a lot like it's not about profit.

Yup, I rather meant to point out that even if all you want to do is sell access to the model on your hardware, you can _still_ do so up until a non-trivial scale.

Unless the total (!) revenue of the provider is under 20 MM USD, eh? Not exactly fully open, but not _that_ harsh.

I'm in Germany, and I usually just find a good option outside Amazon, then look for the best deal, which is rarely Amazon. Thanks to express checkout (Google/Apple Pay or PayPal is almost always an option), it's pretty much zero hassle.

BUT, if I care more about getting something real fast than the quality, or if I don't want to pay 5 EUR for shipping (especially cheap stuff), I'm not aware of any competition Amazon has here. I use it quite a bit still, for these two use cases.

Thought it was funny, might be wrong about that :P

Well, that's today. Also without actions and pull requests.

That's my experience as well. Some folks like to dabble, but for the most part they have other stuff they want to focus on, they don't want to spend the time to ensure it's good and it works.

I'm not saying an agent couldn't make sure it's good and it works, but there are a lot of aspects to that: It's compliant, it's secure, the right data is stored, the right compromises are made for sometimes mutually exclusive business priorities, UX is decent, it's responsive, it scales, hosting is economical, it has the right tests, monitoring for the right risks, and so on and so forth. A lot of devil in the details, and the context required to know what to focus on is rather vast.

If anything, I see this work getting harder, since the discipline around minimal scope is getting weaker, leading to a complexity explosion affecting all of these aspects.

It usually comes down to how successful a business is. Just starting out with little to no funding? They'll want to dabble themselves. But if there's money, it can and will be exchanged for time. Easier prototypes and MVPs means faster business model validation, which means higher willingness to invest. I do see this happening.

Will we always need to know programming languages for doing this? Maybe not, but it doesn't matter. If you make a machine do stuff for a living, you're a programmer. How exactly you do it doesn't affect that in my mind.

Mandatory feature.

That sounds pretty frustrating. I wonder if it wouldn't be a good approach to, say:

1. Make the exam the only thing that determines the grade (or technically, proves that the student learned enough);

2. Give out test assignments students can do, but don't have to;

3. Offer students for the professor to grade their work if they want to get some feedback on how they're doing.

Would that lead to less time wasted by tutors grading AI generated answers? From where I stand, students should be allowed to prepare for exams any way they like, with or without their professor's help. If they managed to learn, they pass.

If you blacklist them just for yourself, the sites don't care, no economic impact. If Google does the same, they'll work around. There's lots of spam-only sites, but they also often cleverly avoid detecting by mixing in content ranked as valuable/legit. SEO also certainly "attacked" otherwise legitimate sites like Reddit, although what GEO is doing there is far worse I imagine.

I interact with plenty of companies - not a statistically relevant amount, but dozens. I'd put this at about 50% right now. I certainly deal with a not insignificant number of meat proxy CEOs, which is highly annoying for the people worrying about the details. But it's not impossible to work with. I just accept the overhead and hope it gets better.

Hang in there. I've yet so see an even modestly successful business that didn't have this or some other bleak problem at one point in time. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't seen one yet :D

My gut says this one can be turned around. Even if 90% of people just happily prefer ChatGPT for this (which I'd doubt), the remaining 10% is still a lot to fund a small venture very well. Just gotta find them effectively.

Even the "giving up" route can be pretty juicy, there's companies that pay decent money for a "distressed asset". And there's also investment firms (like mine) that go for a minority stake and help turn things around.

Just speculating (I use zero automation when recruiting), but automated candidate ranking systems could well still look for signals that were valuable years ago, but no longer are. It's not a given that people using this stuff even understand the criteria under the hood.

Same story as SEO, I presume. Google surely understood their ranking criteria deeply, yet couldn't exactly win that fight.

Nice analysis! I would perhaps add that LLMs are pretty helpful at (2) in my experience, as long as you don't turn your brain off. (As a Google/SO replacement, mainly.)

I have about three modes, working with LLMs:

A) Just use them for (2), do (3) and (4) myself.

B) Just use them for (2) and (3), but with very fine grained instructions - to the point where it barely saves me time.

C) Use them for (2), (3) and (4), but with this workflow, it quickly degrades into slop for me.

I still get the best results with (A), but for a quick PoC, (C) is hard to beat.

What's hilarious (or sad) is that I see a lot of people throw them at (1) as well, which seems to have a high chance of inducing AI psychosis and creating software nobody understands, let alone needs.