somekyle2

In what sense is Taco Bell not food?

yeah, we always joked among my left-leaning friends who were cool with any sort of gender expression or style, pierced and tatted, didn't really judge drug use or aggressive music, didn't value respect for authority that our kids were do their edgelord rebellion phase by being regressive conservatives, and I don't doubt that happens. Ultimately, "what will make people like my mom unreasonably mad?" is a compelling thing for some young people (and some older! I know boomers who seem to like MAGA in part because it pisses people off who they view as stuffy and stuck up).

I respect "we're going to try not to add features until we have to and have a plan that we like" as an approach to a practical language, vs "we're going to plan to support everything normal modern languages have". It isn't the best approach to language design in theory, but they did try to build a language that isn't impossible to change, and to be fair the mix of language features they chose didn't have any good more successful examples to borrow from, so waiting for enough practical experience to make the relevant trade-offs on practical grounds isn't the bare naivety that some people seem to take it as.

We seemingly have very different experiences with rent. All rent I've paid was agreed upon prior to me being charged it, and guns were never involved. The people I rented from did the work of owning/managing the building and providing it for my use. Maybe this isn't a noble way to earn money, but I found it to be a really useful service, and it seems not dramatically different than most services I pay for (how much incremental work is Netflix doing for my behalf? what work is the bank doing to earn my loan?).

It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.

100%. I think there are some clear distinctions between AI training and human learning in practice that compound this. Humans learning requires individual investment and doesn't scale that efficiently. If someone invests the time to consume all of my published work and learn from it, I feel good about that. That feels like impact, especially if we interact and even more if I help them. They can perhaps reproduce anything I could've done, and that's cool.

If someone trains a machine on my work and it means you can get the benefit of my labor without knowing me, interacting with my work or understanding it, or really any effort beyond some GPUs, that feels bad. And, it's much more of a risk to me, if that means anything.

If it doesn't work, it's an annoyance and you have to argue with it. If it does work, it's one more case where maybe with the right MCP plumbing and/or a slightly better model you might not be needed as part of this process. Feels a bit lose-lose.

Certainly not my intention. Some of my post is projection: I don't like the implications of the AI enthusiast stance, and I know I want "actually, AI can't fully take over the task of programming" to be true even though my recent experience with uses it to handle even moderately complex implementation has been quite successful. I've also seen the opposition narrow in scope but not firmness over the last year from some coworkers while watching others outsource nearly all of their actual code interaction, and I think some of the difference is how invested they are in the craft of programming vs being able to ship something. So, if you like the part AI is expected to take over and see it as part of your value, it makes sense that your threshold are higher for accepting that outcome as accurate. Seems like typical psychology rather than an attack.

I suspect that lots of developers who are sour on relying on AI significantly _would_ agree with most of this, but see the result of that logic leading to (as the article notes) "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated" and really don't like that outcome so they try to find a way to reject it.

"The skillset you've spend decades developing and expected to continue having a career selling? The parts of it that aren't high level product management and systems architecture are quickly becoming irrelevant, and it's your job to speed that process along" isn't an easy pill to swallow.

"force" seems a bit strong, as I remember it.

I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on social media and enables cheating on school projects. But, sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I probably have a biased sample of people who don't really try to make productive use of AI.

Anecdotally, lots of people in SF tech hate AI too. _Most_ people out of tech do. But, enough of the people in tech have their future tied to AI that there are lot of vocal boosters.

Yeah, it makes sense that going from a decade or so where SWE was one of the best possible career paths if you have any aptitude to a period where tech cos were staffing up aggressively (I recall reading ~60% growth), there's gonna be a hangover. The educational pipeline probably still has a few years of oversupply to work through, and all of the people laid off post covid still need to work. Even in a world where AI being able to automate some of the key skills required for SWE has no negative impact on employment, we'd expect a few more years of rough job prospects.

Even 15 years ago or so when Guido was still there I recall being told "we aren't supposed to write any new services in Python. It starts easy, then things get messy and end up needing to be rewritten." I recall it mostly being perf and tooling support, but also lack of typing, which has changed since then, so maybe they've gotten more accepting.