Or, Cellular iPad. Stays off the network, and doesn't infect anything else.

60k fired from Microsoft

Today Cisco announcing 1 engineer using AI to try to replace/improve 98% of Cisco's code

Goog just lost $475B in value

These are not random disparate events. This is the industry changing to business as usual with less humans.

Note that people laid off are not able to find jobs for more than 9 months. This is a very serious situation.

It is not easy to buy a house in the US that is not controlled by an HOA. A lot of houses are in an HOA and you really have to go out of your way to avoid it. If you're looking in a suburb, exurb, it's 100% going to be an HOA. It's by design:

HOAs are tightly connected to racial segregation, racially restrictive housing, and redlining. Read up on those and it will make you sick to your stomach.

Controlling what homeowners can do to the exterior of their houses has been the main theme of many HOAs. Combined with this, racist policies and architectural uniformity were historically intertwined. They were both done for the same reason: protecting property values.

Are you angry yet?

Some HOAs do OK and are kind of like a collective: They form their own street cleaning, street light installation and electricity bills, snow plow, garbage pickup, lawn mowing all for a deeply discounted monthly fee of sometimes just a few $10s a month.

It's a book. It's meant for the masses to consume and read. And so a computer read it and add it to it's intelligence that everyone else can access. What's the big deal?

I don't think there is such a thing as copyright, patent or intellectual property rights in the AI world. What is the point of one human making another human pay to access the works of another human? There is no point but just accumulating wealth and superiority. Are we really going to sit here and ignore that maybe the professors had privileged lives and their parents or their ancestors enriched themselves on the backs of poor people.

Either way, whatever the arguments, democratize this knowledge. It sure as hell beats paying $300 for a textbook and requiring that for 1500 students every year. Give it all to the people. All of it. Let the people train open weight and smaller models that even more people can access. I'm all for this.

The issue with most enterprise size workplaces is that the core teams that are actually working on revenue producing stuff is very small. The rest are support staff. I worked for a large bank and we had over 100 mobile software developers. Think about that for a second. A mobile application with over 100 people. That does not even include other teams that these 100 people depend on.

But you have to truly ask the difficult question: are all 100 people actually working on revenue producing work? The answer is that easily 60-80% are not. In fact, we had teams in the east coast that was the bulk of the 100 folks who did nothing but write documentation, guard their networking and data frameworks vehemently, and the rest of the time was spent fighting mundane software tasks.

That team could have been effective with at most 5 folks. In the world of AI coding, 5 folks would be an absolute force.

A lot of large workplaces are seeing these changes, because they simply got fat. Even Apple, which historically has been praised for weathering the layoffs has recently laid off many middle managers and employees working on useless things. It's part of Ternus' shake up. And it's not because of some evil corporate strategy to treat people like crap, it's really not. Strategically you have to ask yourself if you are truly being productive and truly a core member of a core team. If you are not, and simply wrangling JIRA and stuck in back to back meetings all day thinking you're a decision maker. Sorry but you're on the layoff list.

The bank wasn't the only example, I've worked in mid-large workplaces and with just a bit of introspection you knew immediately if you were a core member on a core team. And if you weren't, it was always in your best interest to constantly keep yourself ready for the next thing.

But, hey, when we interview them for a job lets be sure to spend 2 weeks sending them take home projects, reverse a string on the white board, reject them and talk about how they can't code, right? /rant

On an entirely different note. Just wow. I know a lot of people who don't "do online" finance anything. And this kind of stuff is terrifying, because they would not even know that someone else had setup an account using their PII.

We had a discussion yesterday, and I will repeat it again today. There is no profit for Chinese billionaires to be making these models. So then what is their purpose?

Seems kind of pointless? Wouldn't anyone in the US/western world simply use the chinese models in their own inference? That would not strengthen the Chinese position because the models got downloaded for free off HuggingFace, and then cloud inference bills would just put money into US companies.

The issue with dealing with a country whose culture is more transparent (US) than closed doors hush secrecy (China) is that stuff like this comes out and people have opinions about it. China on the other hand keeps quiet about this stuff and instead spreads propaganda about how great their country is.

Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.

I am perfectly comfortable prompting AI and then seeing the end result and not questioning any of the code. I've looked at code for nearly 20 years or longer, I can't even keep track how long anymore. Started with QBasic and DOS scripts. I just always accepted it as an annoying necessity, and then the world changed two times. Once when they started paying us good of money for it.

A second time when programmers became an insufferable bunch. It wasn't about the art of the product anymore. It wasn't about working with the other parts of business to understand the customer's needs and building to that. It became this weird gatekeeping bullshit where we turned on each other and started asking people to reverse binary trees and implementing search on a white board after 2 weeks of interviewing. And then rejecting them because "culture fit". Add in all the other misogynistic racist stuff, and yeah, this industry is messed up and it's rotten from the inside.

Ever software is a "I don't know what those previous engineers were doing, it's poop, so we have to refactor and rebuild with this new tech", and repeat endlessly. And quite honestly, every piece of code (mine especially) is garbage.

So I think this is great. Programming was a means to an end. It became over glorified. Now it's dying. I'm here for it and I support it. Now anyone can build an application no matter how complex, and the only thing that really decides success from failure is the actual business around it.