Silly premise. Perhaps we haven't done a superb job of making the world more artificially simple while maintaining its select powerful and intriguing qualities that any particular beholder wants to focus on. With that I can agree there's a loooooong way to go. But the real world, real nature, is so complex it can make you puke when you try hard to conceive of it.
Yeah, I've felt like it has converted my job from "writing software" to "babysitting interns".
There are things that I think are very cool; there are lots of projects that I've sort of wanted to do for the last decade that I have pushed off because they're reasonably high effort and I don't want them that much, so being able to have a pretend intern write it for me has been great.
On the other hand, I do think that using Claude/Codex to do all the coding at work has become a little soul sucking. Now instead of being paid to do fun software work, a lot of my work still boils down to babysitting interns.
When I do get to work on projects that are interesting, it's still fun because I can justify writing TLA+, and using that as a guiding spec for my projects. The problem is that most work really isn't that interesting; a lot of it is glorified SQL queries, or CRUD, or "put thing into Kafka in one place, and take it out in another place". Those jobs can be tedious, but they aren't interesting, and now instead of even getting that, I yell at Codex to do it and I awkwardly sit and wait.
I didn't think I'd miss writing stupid CRUD apps, but here we are.
I'm convinced Claude Code and Codex are not the future. The cap seems to be a 3-500 line file so I just use ChatGPT and/or my own front end to APIs on OpenAI and others including local. Much beyond that it will not do what I want. Too many expert details to get right.
When it was just ChatGPT, I actually really enjoyed it. I still had to do a lot of the work, but I could use ChatGPT to explain arcane logs and help me diagnose errors. It didn't feel like babysitting interns, it felt more like "smarter google".
Codex and Claude have been a bit soul sucking. I feel like I'm doing less of the planning and the like. I acknowledge that most code that makes it into production doesn't have to be amazing, but I would still take some level of pride when I would figure out an interesting optimization, even for a simple CRUD app, and now I am somewhat deprived of that kind of stuff.
"Yet like Musk the ouster wounded his ego". So the journalist believes that reacting to rejection with emotions like a biological person makes him like Musk. Err okay.
Ppl don't understand Commercialization is not incidental to the Western system, it's why we beat out Communism. Commercialization incentivizes ppl to build, bc ownership and control.
The FSF was not an attack on commercialization, it was about giving users more freedom with their own copy.
AI commercialization is why we will always be a few steps ahead in AI.
The Chinese and Russians are free to join us. It's a pickup game.
This is both true and insightful, but the "its us capitalists vs. communists" framing obscures some very important details.
For one, "Communism" is presented as a single monolith, but it's not: it's socialism PLUS despotism. The despotism part is really important! China/Russia/etc. fail because they try and control things top-down, instead of letting the market decide.
However, you can have socialism without despotism! Tons of European countries are far more socialist, but no less democratic than America (many are more democratic).
So yes, America vs. Russia/China and Capitalist vs. Communist are relevant frames ... but don't let them obscure the fact that you can have a successful, democratic country .. without doing what America does (and giving all control to corporations).
They're not independent. They are the systematic consequences of a naive intelligentsia pressing their ideals that are not grounded in precedent. They are susceptible to manipulative despotic takeover. The pattern keeps repeating. Across geographies large and small.
This would be an interesting article 4 years ago. Now I think it's old news and we've got the War Department spending $50bn on a new autonomous warfare wing.
Cook was a steward of Apple as an offshored manufacturing behemoth. I'm looking forward to where this reset goes. Hopefully better and American made products.
The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.
Pricing is based on customer value and restriction of customer options.
If we're paying $1000 for a Chinese phone that we'd pay $2000 for, we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world. As we get closer to that point, the urgency to onshore is increasing.
Exploitation when we can get away with it is in our social nature as humans. So this isn't about the Chinese, or any other culture. It's just necessary for this to be onshored because it's critical.
> we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world
What does this look like, in practice? Once China and India and Vietnam "starve the professional capability to compete" (presumably in the manufacture of smart phones) from the US, what would actually change and why?
This would be a world where the top talent and training capability for that talent lives there. Our universities would have deteriorated, our professional class at this top level would have died off or relocated over there. Probably an example I can think of is the once great textile industry of Britain that is now in Asia.
I can only speak to corporate use, but the most common issues I saw were battery life, charging port issues, and speaker failures, in that order. I managed about 1200 for about 2 years and I'd get 1-3 of those issues a week. I'd say 25% of the time it required a replacement. Average age 2.5 years.
That’s repairable for cheaper that buying a new one, isn’t it? Perhaps the rationale is that it’s cheaper because the resell price offset the repair price?
Yeah you get a few bucks back from recyclers or your carrier but also having to inventory phones and track them is a pain in the ass and requires staff to manage. Much easier to just toss it and send em a new one next day.
VCs are middlemen. It's not their money. As long as they can find a narrative to raise money, make a commission and do damage control on their reputation after the fallout, then their side pieces will never want for nothing.
Yes. Before AI the source was a demonstration of your substance. Users would be encouraged to reach out to maintainers to pay for upgrades or custom tweaks or training. Or indirectly pay for advertising while reading docs. After AI those revenue streams have collapsed. Now you have to withdraw enough of the work to make it hard for an individual to recreate with an LLM. The open source needs to be restricted to a rich interaction layer. Cloudflare just announced they are using that model with their services which were already closed source but now they are exposing them through new APIs. So they can capitalize on existing services that were not ripe enough for SaaS before AI, that had to be handled by their in-house professionals services folks. With this move they are using AI to expand/automate their white glove professional services business to smaller customers.
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