> As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
Choose one:
- You spend 30 hours writing a program to manage data for your hobby. You write it on your personal computer.
- You spend one hour generating a program to manage data for your hobby. You have to lease an H200 behind an API to do it.
Which one will you choose?
I know which one I'm choosing.
I choose A.
I know that many others choose A as well.
A wonderful service known as the web has connected people who choose A with others who choose A and of course with a great many who don’t need to make a choice and benefit from the work of others.
I mourn a world in which few will choose A, because for many to choose B seems to lock us all, tragedy of the commons style, into a worse world.
And let's not forget that choosing B is only possible at all because many people chose A before you.
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This is so needlessly combative and performative, which is especially hilarious as you claim the others are the ones being so.
> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.
Where is the 10x (not even 10,000x) revenue? No companies other than those selling the AI itself are seeing it.
> I swear the anti-AI crowd would all be picking to die if you each had a choice between immortality and living to 85.
It really depends on the cost of immortality. At the very least, it would have a psychological impact that some people may feel is undesirable.
> None of you is writing punch card programs.
> None of you are building vaccum tube logic.
Perhaps none of us, but some people certainly do. We are intellectual creatures. Some of us do things out of pure curiosity. Can we create multinational corporations out of it? Almost certainly not. Can we create businesses out of it? People do so all of the time. There is a market for produce from small farms, hand crafts, heck, even vintage computing.
> None of the things we build today are going to last. Your programs will be meaningless in a hundred years. Probably closer to ten years.
Try telling that to people who are trying to retire legacy systems. Sure, most of them have been modernized. Perhaps they have even been modernized to the point where none of the original code exists. Yet the core ideas still exist since it turns out to be incredibly hard to discard things.
The old ways of writing software will continue, even if they are nowhere near as popular. Call that irrational if you want. I call it human.
> AI is better at this than you
Software is better than me at crossword puzzles but that doesn't mean I'm going to optimise my time solving the weekly cryptic
> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.
It's just not though. Plagiarizing some shit it stole off github does not make it intelligent.
Edit: just because it's amusing, here's something I'm literally running into right now with Opus 4.8 on "Max" settings being dumb. I asked it to add some C++ code to an existing C++ project for Unreal Engine. It did half the work, then balked, because "it doesn't have a way to compile C++". I just had to tell it "yes, actually, you just need to run the fricking extremely-standard-already-generated-build-script." If I had a novel build system it'd be one thing, but it already knows I'm working on an Unreal Engine project and that the build is completely standard and it still couldn't piece together that it could just run the compiler.
I would not employ a C++ developer that could not figure out how to invoke the compiler.
> None of the things we build today are going to last.
Exactly, so why do you care how some people build things? It's not that important.
> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it.
No, you're just really, really shit at programming. You just won't admit it.
(AI, in general, is only impressive when you have no clue about the subject domain.)
> AI is better at this than you.
Maybe so, but I am better at this when I engage with AI in a controlled manner.
What if they just like writing code?
> This all feels so damned performative. These are irrational decisions.
Oh, it was meant to be rhetorical. Because everyone thinks like you?
> Get over it. It's not that important.
I don't think you understand what code is. What it does is far less important than how it does it.
Software is bureaucracy and always has been. The discipline is just finally maturing into this role like so many other careers have.
I’m choosing the first option. I’m not sure which one you chose?
Of course, you can use Option B to write the program, and then run it on your own machine...
Option A is fun, whereas option B is miserable. Option A is also cheaper. It's a pretty clear win for option A here.
You're making a really strong case for option A, whereas B sounds really depressing