For the latter, the product looks nice and polished on the outside but makes “steaming pile of crap” a gross understatement.

Humans have been building stuff too complex to understand for a long time.

But yeah, AI is going to accelerate this…

Then I finally realized that Professors spend most of their days in meetings and management - not actual research!

It was too easy to assume that an AI would never approach human intelligence and hence would only be used for “boring” jobs like driving.

I’ve long disliked the hype around AI but now see that human intelligence is perhaps slightly overrated, at least in terms of the loftier positions seemingly requiring such.

Claude Opus puts to shame any highly caffeinated “10x” software developer. Not saying it’s perfect, but damn good. It can knock out difficult code analysis/reverse engineering more than 20-40x faster than I can. There was even a time long before AI when people thought the same of me…

Hell, at this point, I’d rather deal with Claude than a low-cost offshore team that puts up crappy implementations with endless go-backs and rewrites. I say this from actual experience, not xenophobia. There likely are some high performing offshore teams, I just wasn’t lucky to have the chance of working with one. Have had a couple of local colleagues that were worse… Claude’s probably much cheaper too.

Unfortunately, the “knowledge worker” jobs historically tended to be higher paid.

On one hand, AI is a major asset to experienced professionals with access.

On the other hand, it robs junior engineers hard-fought experience - much like watching a movie instead of reading the book.

And longer term, I think the entire economic structure of society is going to change. Doctors, lawyers, software developers, engineers — none of these are safe from AI reducing the need for headcount.

Unfortunately, the normal people largely got replaced by 3 year olds that are >5ft tall and look like adults.

They are only qualified to be a CEO.

Grub is more extensively used and has a lot of features. Or boot Linux on UEFI using a UKI executable without any bootloader.

Remember when the standard deduction was half of the current value…?

I played with our AI and it found about 100 real but subtle issues in the codebase. Took less than 30 minutes to find what would have taken a sharp senior months.

I started reviewing the changes manually. They look pretty good but I want to understand each one. Some are design issues and our product needs weren’t spelled out to the AI.

I could blindly put all 100 up for review in half an hour or take a full week to scrutinize them.

So yeah, the process with AI is going to take 100x longer what it could have been.

Except today’s wealthy don’t seem to behave that way at all.

Just like a lot of lesser educated populations, the wealthy are doing a pretty good job at fighting against their own actual interests. They don’t seem to realize what’s actually good for them.

What’s the point of amassing even more ridiculous wealth if it’s destroying society along the way?

Yes, one can have a private island and private plane. But not being able to go places freely, is that living?

Seemed like a lot when I only had 2MB…

My $DAYJOB pushed people to start using AI - frontier models.

I asked it to review our existing code for bugs. Found some, all valid - many that surprised me.

Later I asked it to develop a custom niche thing, that has a strongly unique tooling and environment that we had made. Entire prompt was only 3 or 4 sentences. Had I given a new senior engineer that task with so little context, I’d clearly be an utter asshole.

I really expected the AI to fail. Instead, it did everything pretty much exactly how I would have - and the result worked on the first try. Except it only took a few minutes to do what would have taken me a couple of hours.

The near-term gains are going to be huge.

Long term, this will make the impact of Industrialization seem insignificant by comparison.

The C language should be taken as a warning, not an ideal example!

If the actual encoding of the languages Boolean matters, then the design is WRONG.

Can’t imagine individuals getting patents unless they’re owners of a small business. Even then, don’t see how they’d have sufficient resources for defending them.