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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Being able to just cut off access to the application means a customer has little choice.

    For a competitor to pass them, they first have to catch up. To catch up, the customer needs to be able to extract the data from the application to give competition a chance. If they get closer to catching up, they tend to be bought out. Lot of speedbumps to discourage competition. Also, to get funding those competitors have to pretty much promise investors they will also do “as a service”.

    For assets versus expense, I see a pendulum, largely based on how appreciation/depreciation pans out versus acquisition cost and loan interest rates, as well as uncertain start up versus steady business. I’m not sure software is giving enough choice in the matter the let that swing.


  • While “any” is a bit much, I do anticipate a rather dramatic decline.

    One is that there are a large chunk of programming jobs that I do think LLM can displace. Think of those dumb unimaginative mobile games that bleed out a few dollars a week from folks. I think LLM has a good chance at cranking those out. If you’ve seen companies that have utterly trivial yet somehow subtly unique internal applications, LLMs can probably crank out a lot of those to. There’s a lot of stupid trivial stuff that has been done a million times before that still gets done by people.

    Another is that a lot of software teams have overhired anyway. Business folk think more developers mean better results, so they want to hire up to success, as long as their funding permits. This isn’t how programming really works, but explanations that fewer people can do more than more people in some cases can’t crack through how counter-intuitive that is. AI offers a rationalization for a lot of those folks to finally arrive at the efficient conclusion.

    Finally, the software industry has significantly converted transactional purchases to subscription. With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers. Often with effective lock-in of the customers data to make it extra hard or impossible for them to jump to a competitor, even if competitors could reverse-engineer your proprietary formats, the customer might not even be able to download their actual data files. So a company that acheived “good enough” with subscription might severely curtail investment because it makes no difference to their bottom line if they are delivering awesome new capability or just same old same old. Anticipate a log of stagnation as they shuffle around things like design language to give a feeling of progress while things just kinda plateau out.


  • I think AI is a component of the decline.

    For decades, companies have operated under the misunderstanding that more software developers equals more success, despite countless works explaining that’s not how it works. As a result many of these companies have employed an order of magnitude more than they probably should have and got worse results than they would have. However the fact they got subpar results with 10x a good number just convinced them that they didn’t hire enough. Smaller team produce better results made zero sense.

    So now the AI companies come along and give a plausible rationalization to decrease team size. Even if the LLM hypothetically does zero to provide direct value, the reduced teams start yielding better results, because of mitigating the problems of “make sure everyone is utilized, make sure these cheap unqualified offshored programmers are giving you value, communicate and plan, reach consensus along a set up people who might all have viable approaches, but devolved into arguments over which way to go”.

    AI gives then a rationalization to do what they should have done from the onset.









  • He mentions creating more problems than we’ve solved, which like you I disagree, but on the other hand he asked if the world was, presumably on average, “happier”.

    I think that could be a tougher call. On the one hand, the average life experience is by any rational consideration better now, but as communication has advanced now everyone gets to know about the most miserable news that they would have previously been completely oblivious to.

    So while atrocities always were happening, 50 miles away people would have no idea. Now any such event on the other side of the world has instant awareness.

    So we get exposed to harsh realities constantly and if we have any shred of empathy we get burdened with that. Those realities may be smaller compared to the population than before, but their emotional impact is far broader.




  • As bad as his victory was, it wasn’t even vaguely questionable.

    Of the people that turned out, more of them voted for Trump, plain and simple, even by the popular vote without having to complain about the electoral college.

    The only objective fact that gives an asterisk is he didn’t manage to get over 50% of the popular vote, but he still had the most of any candidate.

    I’ve seen the mentions of “inconsistencies” and “Musk manipulated the votes” but a read of them seems about as credible as 2020 election denials.


  • I’d say that those details that vary tend not to vary within a language and ecosystem, so a fairly dumb correlative relationship is enough to generally be fine. There’s no way to use logic to infer that it’s obvious that in language X you need to do mylist.join(string) but in language Y you need to do string.join(mylist), but it’s super easy to recognize tokens that suggest those things and a correlation to the vocabulary that matches the context.

    Rinse and repeat for things like do I need to specify type and what is the vocabulary for the best type for a numeric value, This variable that makes sense is missing a declaration, does this look to actually be a new distinct variable or just a typo of one that was declared.

    But again, I’m thinking mostly in what kind of sort of can work, my experience personally is that it’s wrong so often as to be annoying and get in the way of more traditional completion behaviors that play it safe, though with less help particularly for languages like python or javascript.



  • To your point, at least for third party voters, only two states had enough third party participation to even theoretically move the end result: Michigan and Wisconsin. So even if every person that voted third party instead voted for Harris, she would have still lost 287:251 (though she would have won the symbolic victory of popular vote).

    Of course, there’s more than just a single election in the country, so more important to keep active in down ballot races.

    The biggest potential complaint of consequence would be non-voters/people who boycotted the election, but no way of knowing anything about it.

    Still it is utterly obnoxious when someone seems to act all high and mighty that they didn’t vote for the lesser of two evils.