tarsinge

It goes beyond this, the job is to understand the underlying need. When a clients asks for a button to be bigger, what's in their head is they fear it's not visible enough. Many times the client was happy when I implemented something unrelated but that solved the issue, like changing the colours to increase the contrast between the background and the button, adding space around, etc. so that it pops out more.

An exploit is already in the wild. What seems irresponsible is not adapting to a new reality.

But what is discussed here is not banning far right parties but a specific one that goes further than what should be allowed legally. From what I’ve read AfD goes way beyond what say Le Pen or Meloni parties propose.

Progress in AI definitely makes the question of economic planification at a state level relevant again, at least for parts of the economy, be it for the disruption it causes to market economy (that was already showing lot of cracks btw) or the capabilities it gives to handle beyond human level complex systems.

I’m not following robotics closely but last time I checked we were still far from “human level ability”, it was PR lies notably from Tesla that play on the confusion with the progress in AI.

> People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming.

It is known since the 80s as the Moravec paradox that coginition is not the hard part in robotics.

Automation is coming for manual jobs that are repetitive in a controlled environment, like warehouse logistics. But automation for jobs that require fine hand dexterity, constant adaption to new environments and human interactions (trades, healthcare, etc.) is not on the horizon.

My even biggest concern is the US will support Russia in a hybrid war as they are currently doing in Ukraine, from disabling Starlink, convenient trade obligations/restrictions, to grounding F-35s.

> On the other hand the capability of systems in just the last two months has improved so much that it feels like the average hype undersells what's happening right now but that knowledge is extremely unequally distributed as the greatest capabilities are most familiar to software engineers that have fully embraced agentic coding, which even earlier this year was still somewhat questionable but now is too highly productive to avoid.

I've been hearing this for years now, and it's not my experience so my conclusion is that it's only true for a subset of software engineering that is overly represented on internet forums like here. I imagine if you work in the tech industry on a software product the latest capabilities are game changing. But for the majority like me who work in non tech industries where code was never the hard part of projects to begin with there has been little evolution in the job in one year. Sonnet 4.5 one year ago could already write the code. Most of the job is working out with other humans on the client/business side. To progress beyond that not only would AI need to have a human level cognitive/world model to understand all the dynamics, but also have access to all the information that only people have in their head, as what is written and in specs is only a tiny part of how a business works day to day in reality.

Not saying there is no disruption. Just giving the perspective that in software outside the tech industry there is no vertical acceleration happening, much less in day to day operations outside of software. The tech industry is a big part of the economy, but not all.

To derive the tradeoffs and interpret product requirements you need interacting with humans and understand the underlying motivations and politics of the project and the organisation behind it. The specs the customer gives you is not what is really needed to meet the underlying objectives, you have to iterate with humans that know the business in the loop. Not saying we'll not reach that, but at this point it means the AI has a deep world model and nobody has intellectual work anymore because the whole organisation is AI.

I have been coding professionally for 15 years, and while I like coding I was always more passionate about the product design side and the end result, be it business apps or video games, I like what it does, not specifically how it's done. Either at my small agency or for hobby projects not writing code by hand anymore is not a loss a for me, code is just a mean to an end. I get some people are more passionate about the tooling and the code itself, but it's not because someone doesn't share that it's not a real perspective.

I think there is too much confusion between AGI and consciousness. Consciousness seems to exist without human level intelligence, as we can see in other mammals. On the other hand LLMs have already reached "AGI" as others commenters have pointed out. I don't get the semantic debate on AGI, nor why consciousness is used to move the goalpost.

Despite this I agree with your last paragraph, computationally a GPU rendering a video game or doing inference is similar so I don't think consciousness emerges from the order of mathematical operations like some magical formula. And as said above LLMs capabilities vastly surpass those of other animals than humans that appear to be conscious and don't even have language.

So in fact I think it's the opposite, LLMs are actually proving consciousness doesn't emerge from computation. I find it very interesting philosophically because it challenges what historically was considered special about humans, that high level consciousness is a prerequisite for reasoning and language abilities. But kind of obvious in retrospect when doing mindfulness and being able to be conscious without thoughts.

I feel like the opposite, it seems like people desperately want it to be a miracle drug and are irrationally hostile to discussion or research on side effects. Kind of the same thing happened with cannabis and the downplay on mental health disorders. Given how much money is at stake maybe there is also a big marketing push.

Edit: also regarding the moral/discipline thing, to many people me included the larger issue is absolutely not this, it’s obviously a good thing if people can improve their health. It’s that we are unhappy that the answer to food designed to be addictive and that is poisoning people is having to research a drug and having the whole population take it to protect themselves. I have a hard time celebrating such a waste of resource and a supposed market "innovation" hiding yet another government failure at regulation. When people were poisoning themselves with lead pipes, the answer was not having the whole population take a drug to manage the effects of lead poisoning. Even if there was absolutely 0 side effect I would be happy for the individuals losing weight, but unhappy with the larger picture.

From my experience in big and medium sized companies or even startups I would say that this was already the state of things before AI. Most leaders and top management were following internal committees, that were following consultants recommendations, that were themselves recommending what others were doing and was hype and/or following Gartner like "studies". The motivation was equally dubious, and many developers already had problem with management and product direction, but many didn’t bother to question it. AI just makes it obvious.

Nike has Nike SB for skateboard and they are (were?) awesome, the last two pairs I bought lasted more than 5 years being worn everyday. For comparison Vans last at best 6 months for me.

I think the parent is talking about quality stuff, and is specifically addressing that in contrast spam is increasing. It’s especially true in video games, more games then ever are released, but the amount of actually enjoyable quality game has barely increased. Last time I checked SoA models were still very lacking at game design, let alone capable of creating a finished original and fun game.

Europe explicitly does not provide security guarantees to Taiwan. A large majority of Europeans would not support an intervention. Seen from here sure it would be a loss for Democracy, but there are bigger problems today like climate change and global stability. War for and democracy at all costs narratives doesn’t work like in the US.