Scientists use the term "technosignatures", which you can google for more info. But broadly: radio signals, infrared from megastructures, optical signals like laser pulses.
We haven't put a huge amount of effort in searching for such signatures, but there has been some.
Another possibility is we're looking for the wrong techno signatures, or just haven't conceived what the technosignatures for a 10,000-year technologically advanced civilization are.
We've been a techno-civ for what? Maybe only 200-ish years? Our paradigm is gobble up all the energy and grow at all costs. So extrapolate that out, and the logical conclusion is a dyson megasphere that radiates all over the infrared.
But then again, that paradigm is careening us towards an environmental and ecosystem collapse: the hunger for infinite growth is warming our climate, it's unclear whether our nuclear-armed social structures can handle the coming disruptions and migrations, and if we don't kill ourselves, unclear how big a population all the environmental degradation and pollution can support.
So we can project our cute 200-year-old patterns out to a maybe-discoverable 10,000-year civilization driven by the same motivations and flows, but those extrapolations quickly run up against some pretty existential pragmatic threats.
Maybe the answer is we aren't seeing any of the technosignatures because the techonsignatures on the other side of the Great Filter look very different from the ones we conceive of now.
Thing is, though, it kind of assumes megastructures. AIUI Earth is already getting less radio-noise-y, as fibre-optics take over, and would be difficult for us to detect from the next star (at least to detect the technological civilisation; the biosignatures would be obvious).
Maybe people just don't _actually_ build that many megastructures.
I’m personally not convinced advanced civilizations would necessarily exhibit such technosignatures at all. I even go as far and ask are you sure if an advanced civilization was living and mining in Saturn’s rings we would even notice? If one considers the scales of things and realizes how big the Saturn system is relative to Earth then I doubt they can be so confident we would even notice our neighbors in the solar system yet.
Seems like if you open the "he thinks" image thing at the bottom, and then go back to the "beautiful" result, then it no longer works and the Conclusion heading doesn't get activated. That's how I reproduced it anyway.
It's the classic case of the US being great when you've got a lot of money. Which is why a company full of highly skilled engineers threatening to relocate to the US isn't an empty threat. These are exactly the kinds of people who would have a pretty good life there, so I doubt they'd find any issue bringing many along.
Doesn't have to be the US. Switzerland is also a magnet for top companies and skilled people, especially the German ones, due to language and culture similitudes in some regions but with less taxes and red tape and higher standard of living.
And of course highly skilled people who work hard, want to be in a place that compensates them highly for their efforts, otherwise what's the point of busting your ass for decades if you're gonna be getting the same mediocre quality services as people on minimum wage?
Here's a thought: Does it count as AI written code if you're basically just telling it to fill in a template?
My common use case is basically just writing some code in the style I use. Then I'll tell the LLM, "Do X based on Y using the rest of the methods in Z". The code I would write would look exactly the same. I just the LLM as a shortcut to getting the code written.
Like, I'm not depending on any sort of knowledge within the model. I just use its natural ability to be a smart templater.
If using AI this way counts as AI written code. Then sure, I reckon you could easily get to 90% AI written code in loads of applications. But in terms of developing a product or feature from just plain english prompts alone? Definitely lower, and definitely babysat with someone with software development knowledge.
I call that AI-assisted programming and I think it's a very appropriate way to use this tech - it's effectively a typing assistant, saving you on time spent entering code into a computer.
Lately I’ve done a lot of asking Copilot to do things like write a Provider for a ContainerRequestContext in JAX-RS which turned out the same as if I wrote it myself but I would have spent more time looking up things in the documentation.
I had a bunch of accessibility-related tickets that were mostly about adding aria-attributes to React code involving mainly MUI components and got good answers off the bat with the code changes made but going back and forth with it we found other improvements to make to the markup beyond what was originally asked for.
I've accepted this way of working too. There is some code that I enjoy writing. But what I've found is that I actually enjoy just seeing the thing in my head actually work in the real world. For me, the fun part was finding the right abstractions and putting all these building blocks together.
My general way of working now is, I'll write some of the code in the style I like. I won't trust an LLM to come up with the right design, so I still trust my knowledge and experience to come up with a design which is maintainable and scaleable. But I might just stub out the detail. I'm focusing mostly on the higher level stuff.
Once I've designed the software at a high level, I can point the LLM at this using specific files as context. Maybe some of them have the data structures describing the business logic and a few stubbed out implementations. Then Claude usually does an excellent job at just filling in the blanks.
I've still got to sanity check it. And I still find it doing things which looks like it came right from a junior developer. But I can suggest a better way and it usually gets it right the second or third time. I find it a really productive way of programming.
I don't want to be writing datalayer of my application. It's not fun for me. LLMs handle that for me and lets me focus on what makes my job interesting.
The other thing I've kinda accepted is to just use it or get left behind. You WILL get people who use this and become really productive. It's a tool which enables you to do more. So at some point you've got to suck it up. I just see it as a really impressive code generation tool. It won't replace me, but not using it might.
I'm pretty confident in my ability to write any code in my main language. But AI is still very useful in just filling out boiler plate, or noticing a pattern and filling out the rest of some repetitive code. Or say, I need to write wrapper around a common command-line utility. It's pretty good at generating the code for that.
What I mostly enjoy using it for is just writing bash scripts for me. I hate writing bash but Claude is excellent at writing the scripts I need.
AI isn't writing software features or anything close to that for me at the moment. But what it is great at is just being a really excellent intellisense. Knowing what you're likely to want to do in the next ~5 lines and just filling it out in one button press. Things like intellisense and automatic refactoring tools were big productivity improvements when they became ubiquitous. AI will be the same for most people, an intellisense on steroids.
Also, writing tests. Writing tests can be quite mundane and boring. But I can just type out what I want tested, give it some files as context and it can be pretty good at generating some tests.
Does AI get it right every time? No way. But, as a developer, I'd rather spend 10 minutes trying to coax an AI into generating me 90% useable code for some boring task than spend 20 minutes typing it out myself. Often, I probably could write the code faster than I could prompt an AI, but being lazy and telling something else to do the work feels pretty good and relaxing.
>AI is still very useful in just filling out boiler plate
That's what I tend to find with English writing as well. It's not great. But sometimes you just need decent generic prose for an introduction or an explanation of something. If you know enough to adjust as needed, it can save time for something that readers are probably just skimming anyway. As I've written previously, about a year ago I was working on cleaning up a bunch of reference architectures and I used Google's Bard in that case to give me a rough draft of background intros for some of them which I modified as needed. Nothing miraculous but saved me a bit of time.
The person you're replying to is referring to the GP. The GP asks for an AI that tells them where to put their shopping. Why would anyone pay for THAT? Since we already know where everything goes without needing an AI to tell us. An AI isn't going to speed that up.
Zed's vision is that the editor is free and you're paying basically for Teams-lite.
If you're a big company, you're already using a service like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc.
If you're a small company, then there's free alternatives like Discord.
And say you want to talk to someone other than a programmer, then you'd need something else anyway. Because a project manager wouldn't need an IDE installed.
I feel like this device would be 10x more compelling if it had an actual modem.
Like, the software looks decent, the display is nice, the battery life is good. But why would you use it if you have to carry a separate phone? Surely it wasn't that hard?
I have one. I use it as a replacement for my phone when I am in bed, just for checking email, reading the news, Anki flashcards etc. I also take it out on long bike rides so I can do those same things while sitting in the sun on the beach or something. (Phone screen is pretty much useless in direct sun by comparison.) It's not a big deal to connect to your phone's wifi hotspot briefly to sync. Main point is that you have the phone experience without the eye strain, and if it saves battery on your phone at the same time, bonus. Yeah, you're carrying more stuff, but if you're really going somewhere where carrying two devices is going to be too much weight, then you probably would prefer a regular phone screen over eink anyway.
