forgetfulness

This would have hit harder ten years ago, TeX ornamentation was a beautiful craft in all senses of the word.

This is still pretty neat, but it's just not the same as carrying the tradition of Donald Knuth.

> On the one hand, I think this is an accurate depiction of the future. There is no meritocracy here. Some people have access to the best AIs and can speak a sentence and get great results, and the rest of us don't have access and so we're the poors. The happy presentation doesn't match the way I'm feeling.

It will probably still have some veneers of meritocracy.

These will be very well-credentialed people, who went to top schools and will know all the right people, to whom they can tell all the right words, and it's not access to AI that will be the determining factor, but the fact that they're entrusted with capital and authority to direct small teams of people who also went to top schools and can speak corporate jargon at a bot.

It will just exacerbate dynamics that are already there. Why do people need bachelor's degrees to send emails, today? For the same reason someone will need a PhD or a master's degree from a prestigious school to do it tomorrow.

And the rest, well, you know, some of the remaining journalists will write op-eds describing how they are beyond help, too angry, too dirty, too much of an other.

I simply don't believe that there is an infinite demand for the kinds of things that can be done by generating text.

How many insurance policies does anyone need to contract, how much legal advice does anyone need to hear, how many movies does anyone need to watch, and how much software does must support that demand, so that everyone can stay employed in an AI accelerated service sector?

The new opportunities could well be that labor costs go down so much that the minimum wage is lowered and sweatshops return to developed countries.

I'm sure some aspiring sweatshop owners could be excited by that possibility, I don't think a lot of software developers or TV show writers are eager to be sewing sneakers for a pittance.

For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a hard time.

I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.

It's hard to imagine how making insurance sales cheaper for the brokers, churning out astrology apps faster, AI boyfriend bots or running ad campaigns with fewer and lower paid designers is going to drive 10% GDP growth in developed and middle income countries, that's the sort of figures you see when very poor countries finish rolling out electrification, sanitation and transportation.

Also what constitutes ownership here? Couldn't some Enterprising Individuals open 100 shell companies, pool together resources and form the Legalize Asbestos Consortium, the Consortium buys a plot of land and then each stakeholder of the Consortium counts as an owner of the plot of land?

Also a lot of middle managers. Many organizations enthusiastically adopting AI are doing so because they want to appeal to the authority of the bots and bludgeon colleagues with it.

LLMs are very easy to pick up, the point of them for their makers is to commoditize skill and knowledge, you can't be left behind in learning to use them, AI providers don't have economic incentives to make them into anything other than appliances.

The people more at risk of being left behind are the ones that don't learn when not to trust their output.

Right, bridging the gap of knowledge by getting closer to that of the clerical workers of the company, because pure software knowledge is no longer as valuable. That will probably make your salary closer to theirs, and that'll be a pretty big adjustment.

Lots of organizations don't want to accept that their velocity issues are quality issues. It's often a view held by an old guard that was there when the business experienced growth by adding features, while not having to bear any maintenance burden. The people who remain are either also oblivious to this, or simply have stopped caring.

LLM-generated code hits all the right notes, it's done fast, in great volumes, and it even features what the naysayers were asking for. Each PR has 20 pages of documentation and adds some bulk to the stuff in the tests folder, that can sit there looking pretty. How wonderful! Hell, you can even do now that "code review" that some nerd was always complaining about, just ask the bot to review it and hit that merge button.

Then you ask the bot to generate the commands again for the deploy (what CI pipeline?) and bam! New features customers will love. And maybe data corruption.

My uncle leads IT support teams, the org is measuring AI use in writing reports and tickets. The org has very poorly structured and obsolete processes (he's trying to straighten them up as he goes), AI will probably amplify the lack of structure, by making it easier for the work to _look_ as if someone carefully reviewed the issues and followed procedure.

A friend is a team lead in an org that's mandating vibecoding via "Devin", a lesser known player an "architect" chose after shallow review. The company also has endemic process issues and simply can't do deployments reliably, it's behind the times in methodology in every other respect. Higher ups are placing their trust in a B-list agentic tool instead of fixing the problems.

Anyway, I wouldn't be caught dead working at either of those two shops even before the AI rollout, but this is what's going on in the IT underworld.

I'm behind the times! That's what it used to be until Windows XP, the last Windows version I used on a daily basis was Windows 2000 up to 2005.

It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.

Plenty of people will tell you that they enjoy solving business problems.

Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines.

I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.

Many countries were also "biased" against Apartheid South Africa, the bias was disapproval of apartheid, much like the one enacted on the West Bank and Gaza.