rewgs

> the .com days...

Oh, you mean the period that is colloquially referred to as "the .com bubble?

> One could also argue this is a temporary condition - driving the world to better, more efficient power-supplies in the long term (like nuclear).

This is a massive and dangerous assumption. Given that humanity could not have picked a worse time to double-down on ever increasing its emissions, we're going to need to do a lot better than "this massive increase in energy usage _could_ be temporary, despite all evidence to the contrary."

> It also allows engineers to more quickly arrive at efficient solutions for their problems - enabling more efficient systems being deployed earlier - possibly saving energy in the long run.

I'd have to be a _damn_ slow programmer for your average prompt session to be more energy efficient than my laptop running Vim.

I find the rest of your argument to be equally unconvincing, but you could have just stopped here, because no other points are remotely as important as AI's impact on climate change.

A situation where there’s one seller (USA) in a world of buyers (Europe, Japan) is by definition an abberation.

It may have been good (for the US), but that definitely doesn’t make it normal, and unfortunately I don’t see how such a situation occurs again without similar circumstances. I’d love to be wrong, though.

Very glib, but you're missing my point.

> there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.

Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.

> TV shows and podcasts are both competing for the same audience.

If by "audience" you mean "people," sure, but I don't think that's particularly meaninful. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that podcasts and TV shows aren't even kind of comparable or able to replace one another.

This is such a narrow take. "Understanding" does not exist in a vacuum.

I'm completely with you. It's baffling that this isn't totally self evident to devs everywhere.

The point is that these are not separate. They cannot be separate.

Deep understanding, taste, aesthetic, sensitivity to nuance, and so on...none of that can be developed without intimate involvement with the process, with the thing itself.

Your example of poisonous paint vs buying it in tubes is a fallacy, because that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about _actually painting_ vs just...telling someone else to paint.

I just don't get how you can properly reason about the code if you're not involved in writing it, though.

I keep giving AI-assisted programming a serious try, but time and time I land in the exact same place: reading the code is more exhausting than writing the code, _and_ I end up with a far worse understanding of what is being built than if I had just written it myself. The fact that LLMs tend to write _way_ too much code certainly doesn't help.

And what makes me sad is that, if you follow this line of inquiry, you eventually realize that capital isn't challenging the value of humans _writing_ the code, but rather the value of humans _understanding_ the code. Because, as I've experienced many times when talking to those how have completely bought in on the hype, the answer is always to just "let the AI handle that." AI writing too much code? Have it summarize it for you. Your understanding of the code is worse than if you wrote it yourself? If it works, who cares!

And yes, I think we are well on our way to becoming Markdown jockeys.

I've been thinking about this a lot, as I'm sure we all have been.

3Brown1Blue recently posted an excellent video on how he's thinking about AI's impact on math, which of course is in a similar position as programming. One of the points he made was that machines' abilities to lift heavy things has no bearing on the value of exercise -- which is to say that, just because AI can now code/do math extremely well, that has no bearing on the positive effects (the "mental exercise") one gets from programming/doing math "the old way;" the same can be said about one's enjoyment.

The problem here, though, is that I used to get the enjoyment/"exercise"/upskilling/etc from the same 8 hours that paid for my life. Now, I have to squeeze that in _outside_ of those 8 hours. So AI has, very clearly and simply, reduced my downtime outside of work -- I literally have less time for non-programming hobbies and activities because of AI.

What an unbelievably ironic username.

Thinking out loud here:

This announcement, plus the prospect of Thunderbird Enterprise, makes me wonder if perhaps Mozilla could begin to position itself as a kind of competitor to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Proton Suite. They're perhaps the only company I can envision nailing the feature set of the first two, with the privacy and security of the latter.

If I could pay for a bundle that includes a hardened browser, a solid email/calendar client, a VPN, and email/calendar/cloud file storage (this of course is the thing that Mozilla is lacking), with all of it tied around my preferred browser, I'd certainly consider moving my company over.

Yes, that is definitely just your bubble. I suppose the word “everyone” is doing an awful lot of lifting here, but I fail to understand how anyone could see the level of bullshit in companies declining.

Snow Crash. A few decades late, but man am I loving it.