timkam

Indeed. Also, companies with a genuine and socially at least somewhat useful business model prefer focusing on customers buying their actual products as the main revenue source. The state- and EU-driven funding ecosystem is so convoluted that one either mostly ignores it in favor of value-creating work, or specializes in exploiting it, unfortunately.

What would be a balanced perspective? Perhaps that oAI may now be another "boring" startup in that it is no longer primarily about moving the technology frontier, but about further scaling while keeping churn low, with margins (in the broader sense, i.e. for now prospective margins) becoming increasingly important?

Couldn't one interpret "magical systems thinking" as a fallacy that people may commit when applying systems thinking? More broadly, I find some of the comments here rather harsh, also considering that many observations in the article are intuitively true for anyone whose ever been exposed to bureaucracy on the meta-level.

They do not allow this any more. So _that_ problem has actually been addressed.

> That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.

I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone... So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.

It is well-known that top-conferences had and still have many problems. Some examples: There used to be the problem with authors adding new co-authors after acceptance, aka "selling seats". There is a debate about how many papers one should be allowed to submit, as some people with money and influence are heavily franchising. It is unclear to what extent there is implicit and explicit reviewer collusion. Even double-blind reviews don't really solve the problem.

If we don't admit that there are fundamental problems that affect all of us (academics) and instead pretend it is only the lesser people who f things up, we'll all be screwed sooner or later.

This is an interesting perspective, and I assume your definition is the technically correct one. Still, many SEs receive substantial compensation in RSUs, direct stocks, shares in startups, et cetera. So also from this perspective, there are many non-working class SEs. Another aspect is that culturally, the perception has been that SEs don't necessarily sell their work by the hour, but instead sell knowledge that scales tremendously, in exchange for a comfortable upper middle-to-lower upper class life.

Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.

The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.

Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely enough to keep the narrative alive.

Why is it a terrible take? You first have to understand a community in order to reform it. You can't just say "I actually have no idea how to do research in this field, have not contributed anything substantial, have no money or soft power, but let me tell y'all how to do better science according to my subjective and very limited understanding."

You are introducing a straw-man argument here (that obviously ignores basic facts about population sizes of Sweden and China, so it's wrong on both meta- and object-level). But following that line of reasoning, Sweden is not an ethnostate because the Swedish population is ethnically diverse. E.g., more than a third of the population are either foreign-born or have at least one foreign-born parent. At the same time, the current borders of Sweden cover more than the traditional homeland of your preferred "Swedes". So apparently, you are actually arguing for a racist empire. Demographic reality is not your friend, though. Perhaps you will have more success some generations down the road. Try to sell the same story to the ethnically substantially different group of people who will consider themselves "Swedes" then.

In the ethno-nationalistic sense, Sweden is not a nation state. In its current reality, Sweden is ethnically diverse and it (partially) covers the homelands of several peoples/"nations" in the ethno-nationalistic sense. The latter issue could, e.g., be solved by giving up most of what the Swedes in the South call Norrland. This would deplete "Sweden" of natural resources and make it even more dependent on high-skilled immigration to ensure that at least the tech industry industry in the somewhat larger cities keeps running.

The historic reality begs to differ: Sweden covers large parts of the traditional homelands of non-Swedish people. Current reality differs as well, obviously. No matter how you twist it and turn it, the argument can only make sense for a hypothetical, geographically smaller Sweden that does not exist.