If the business can get rid of their engineers, then why can't the user get rid of the business providing the software?
A lot of businesses are the only users of their own software. They write and use software in-house in order to accomplish business tasks. If they could get rid of their engineers, they would, since then they'd only have to pay the other employees who use the software.
They're much less likely to get rid of the user employees because those folks don't command engineer salaries.
So instead of paying a human that "commands an engineer salary" then they'll be forced to pay whatever Anthropic or OpenAI commands to use their LLMs? I don't see how that's a better proposition: the LLM generates a huge volume of code that the product team (or whoever) cannot maintain themselves. Therefore, they're locked-in and need to hope the LLM can solve whatever issues they have, and if it can't, hope that whatever mess it generated can be fixed by an actual engineer without costing too much money.
Also, code is only a small piece and you still need to handle your hosting environment, permissions, deployment pipelines, etc. which LLMs / agentic workflows will never be able to handle IMO. Security would be a nightmare with teams putting all their faith into the LLM and not being able to audit anything themselves.
I don't doubt that some businesses will try this, but on paper it sounds like a money pit and you'd be better off just hiring a person.
Having knowledge isn't the same as knowing. I can hold a stack of physics papers in my hand but that doesn't make me a physics professor.
LLMs possess and can retrieve knowledge but they don't understand it, and when people try to get them to do that it's like talking to a non-expert who has been coached to smalltalk with experts. I remember reading about a guy who did this with his wife so she could have fun when travelling to conferences with him!
I love all of these stories of writing new software for Classic Macs. There is something really special about maintaining the usefulness of an old tool that most people have forgotten. Farmers who restore and run vintage tractors know this feeling well. They have built communities around this intersection of hobby and real work.
I have a Mac Classic given to me by my uncle. Last I checked (a few years ago) it booted up just fine. I need to crack it open before trying again because I’m afraid of leaky caps or batteries. Just need to find the time.
What's nice is the ability to do some of these things is becoming a lot more pleasant with cross-compilers and using a fancy modern IDE on your ultrawide monitor.
And the access to information -- trying to find specs and API calls for these devices when they were current was a nightmare.
Here “much of” is doing the heavy lifting. Are you willing to commit to a percentage or a range?
I work at an insurance company and I can’t see AI replacing even 10% of the employees here. Too much of what we do is locked up in decades-old proprietary databases that cannot be replaced for legal reasons. We still rely on paper mail for a huge amount of communication with policyholders. The decisions we make on a daily basis can’t be trusted to AI for legal reasons. If AI caused even a 1% increase in false rejections of claims it would be an enormous liability issue.
Yes, absolutely willing to commit. I can't find a single reliable source, but from what I gather, over 70% of people in the West do "pure knowledge work", which doesn't include any embodied actuvities. I am happy to put my money that these jobs will start being fully taken over by AI rapidly soon (if they aren't already), and that by 2035, less than 50% of us will have a job that doesn't require "being there".
And regarding your example of an insurance company, I'm not sure about that industry, but seeing the transformation of banking over the last decade to fully digital providers like Revolut, I would expect similar disruption there.
I would easily take the other side of this bet. It just reminds me when everyone was sure back in 2010 that we’d have self driving cars within 10 years and human drivers would be obsolete. Today replacing human drivers fully is still about 10 years away.
Yes, getting the timelines right is near impossible, but the trajectory is clear to me, both on AI taking over pure knowledge work and on self-driving cars replacing human drivers. For the latter, there's a lot of inertia and legalities to overcome, and scaling physical things is hard in general, but Waymo alone crossed 450,000 weekly paid rides last month [0], and now that it's self-driving on highways too, and is slated to launch in London and Tokyo this year, it seems to me that there's no serious remaining technical barrier to it replacing human drivers.
As for a bet, yes, I'd really be happy to put my money where my mouth is, if you're familiar with any long bets platform that accepts pseudonymous users.
You're still being stimulated by the act of the barber cutting your hair. Sitting in a chair doing nothing alone in a silent room is a different story.
Discord isn’t just used for tech support forums and discussions. There are loads of completely private communities on there. Discord opening up API access for LLM vendors to train on people’s private conversations is a gross violation of privacy. That would not go down well.
If your dishwasher has a 5G antenna + modem built-in and connects to the manufacturer’s own wireless account then your router doesn’t enter the picture. The dishwasher can happily serve you ads and conduct routine surveillance all day long and the only thing you can do is cut power to the device (until they start including a battery backup for that stuff).
True, but the dishwasher should have its own firewall regardless, and assuming it'll be on IPv4 behind a firewalled NAT is by itself an implementation error.
My point is that you don't control what network the dishwasher is on, the manufacturer does. The dishwasher connects to its own cellular network so that you cannot block any of its ads or prevent it from spying on you.
Central servers are useful for more than just NAT hole-punching. They’re also great as a centralized database of records and statistics as well as a host for anti-cheating services and community standards enforcement.
Peer to Peer games with no central authority would be so rife with cheating that you’d only ever want to play with friends, not strangers. That sucks!
> Peer to Peer games with no central authority would be so rife with cheating that you’d only ever want to play with friends, not strangers. That sucks!
Back in the the day RtCW had a server anyone could run and you could give out the address:
If you can run your own server then that's still a central server. That still lets a community of people work with a central authority. It's just a different authority from the game's publisher.
In that sense, Mastodon is a centralized service because it's on someone's computer. That's not really what people mean by central. They mean we're increasingly reliant on game companies for networking infrastructure.
Is that all IPV4s fault? I don't think so. But it complicates things
I think you're muddling things up more than they need to be. A peer-to-peer game is one in which players connect directly to each other but neither is the host and there is no dedicated server. Game state is maintained separately on each player's computer and kept in sync by the netcode. Since there is no single source of truth for the game-state, so players are free to cheat by modifying the game's code to lie on their behalf. There is also the side issue of bugs in the game code causing the game-states to become irreparably desynchronized.
All of these issues are solved by having a central server for both players to connect to. Whether that server is owned by the game's publisher or by an open-source community is irrelevant from a technology standpoint. However, the prevalence of IPv4 networks and stateful NAT firewalls is relevant because it privileges those central servers over true peer-to-peer connections.
I don't disagree with you, I just read your comment as deriding people who think hosting their own game servers is meaningful, because it's similar to a company server. Sounds like you didn't mean it that way.
Don't put words into my mouth! I never said I didn't care about peer to peer networking and peer to peer gaming. I said it sucks if your only option to avoid cheating is to play with friends.
If you only care about gaming with friends, then peer to peer is an excellent way to do that (assuming the game doesn't have any synchronization issues, which some peer to peer games do).
They could design the fuel tank to be symmetrical about the axis parallel to the car’s axels. This would let it be flipped during installation at the factory to have the refueling port facing either side. Then the only difference would be the body panel and little door that covers the gas cap.
Many (mostly European and North American) manufacturers can’t even be bothered flipping the indicator and light controls around, there’s no way they’d flip the whole fuel tank.
They could but there are downstream packaging compromises that would cause. It is easier to design the vehicle without imposing that design constraint on yourself
The problem with "new entrant" is that only revolutionary features convince users to switch en mass.
Tabs/stability (Firefox vs IE). V8 (Chrome vs Firefox).
Anything else is a battle of attrition, where the deepest pocketed competitor in terms of advertising spend wins. Or Google, because it flood all its own advertising channels.
So what do you want another chromium based browser? The whole point of Ladybird is to kinda prove that a completely independent browser engine is feasible. Also, they are not doing everything from scratch for example it will use the same graphics library that chromium uses (Skia) and also now firefox. You should probably read the FAQ on their homepage:
> So what do you want another chromium based browser?
I want something free of Google code, which sounds like they aren’t doing if Skia is anyway involved.
Instead they’re wasting resources where it’s less needed. Like building a JS engine instead of starting off with something like SpiderMonkey, JSCore, or QuickJS.
A lot of businesses are the only users of their own software. They write and use software in-house in order to accomplish business tasks. If they could get rid of their engineers, they would, since then they'd only have to pay the other employees who use the software.
They're much less likely to get rid of the user employees because those folks don't command engineer salaries.
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