terramauthe's comments

Agreed, this post completely misses how the power dynamics of wealth affect the opinions and 'rationality' of players. It also never mentions how a whole section of society would be unable to take part in this system due to their socioeconomic status.

My guess is the end result of all this "AI" assisted code-generation is that it will have the same impact on the software engineering industry as spreadsheets had on accounting. I also believe that this AI-powered stuff is a bit of a "two-steps forward, one step back" situation and the real innovation will begin when ideas from tools like Louise [1] are integrated into the approach taken in Codex.

When VisiCalc was released departments of 30 accountants were reduced to 5 accountants because of the improvement for individual worker efficiency, however accounting itself remains largely unchanged and accountants are still a respected profession who perform important functions. There's plenty of programming problems in the world that simply aren't being solved because we haven't figured out how to reduce the burden of producing the software; code generation will simply increase the output of an individual software developer.

The same forces behind "no-code" are at work here. In fact I see a future where these two solutions intermingle: where "no-code" becomes synonymous with prompt-driven development. As we all know, however, these solutions will only take you so far -- and essentially only allow you to express problems in domains that are already well-solved. We're just expressing a higher level of program abstraction; programs that generate programs. This is a good thing and it is not a threat to the existence of our industry. Even in Star Trek they still have engineers who fix their computers...

[1] - https://github.com/stassa/louise

I once used a parse expression grammar in a MongoDB load testing and cache warming program I wrote for a major migration project. We had limited hardware and ridiculous access patterns on the dbs; after the first painstakingly planned migration had a 1 minute degradation immediately after cutover, we decided we needed to pre-warm the new instance. MongoDB has a function to load indices into memory caches, except our indices were too big and the memory too small. This also didn't warm Linux page caches the same way. Using a PEG parser I wrote a golang program to tail for find queries from the old instance and make identical queries against the new instance.

This worked very well and I was able to tweak the PEG pretty easily. This article was a great read and reminded me that PEG is great. I'd love to do that again, it was fun and I could really use another PEG.

This is quaint and wholesome. I long for the simpler days when I could agree with this, blissful in my naivety of large scale organizations.

Nowadays, I accept this reality is largely impossible and you must always draw some boundary. This doesn't mean all your developers should use a shared MySQL because nobody knows how to bootstrap the database- but it means you have to consciously decide where you sit on the continuum. Always expecting to run the whole system on your laptop (or even in a cloud) is also an unreasonable expectation, unless you're Netflix and your revenue per employee is into the millions. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but at a high level the work required to make it happen will cost too much and won't be a priority.

I'll quote here from the excellent "Testing Microservices the Sane Way" by Cindy Sridharan:

> asking to boot a cloud on a dev machine is equivalent to becoming multi-substrate, supporting more than one cloud provider, but one of them is the worst you’ve ever seen (a single laptop)

https://copyconstruct.medium.com/testing-microservices-the-s... "Full stack in a box- a cautionary tale"

Of course the rich guys will use human shields to protect themselves as you are indicating. They will demonize this action as the work of jokers who just want to see the world burn. If your pension fund was relying on short selling, you had a terrible pension fund! The only place where blame should lie for any outcomes of this is squarely in the lap of luxury. Any average investors who were burned by this should be pointing their fingers at the hands that promised to feed them and have repeatedly failed to do so.

Can you provide sources for these claims? Thanks!

China relies on the fabs in Taiwan just as much as everyone else though.

I agree that war should be avoided and "the only way to win is not to play"!

However, I think we should also be considering globally how we can act more like Holons [1] for greater resilience from all types of threats to global interdependence. We want loosely coupled systems, we should want loosely coupled government too!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy)

I think you've hit the nail on the head with the founder vision and passion being a key element which cannot be developed in a shop.

Perhaps, rather than a studio, this is why we see incubators like YC; helping a ton of startups grow and finding funding for the best ideas.

Maybe we will see a movement further down the chain: finding entrepreneurs or "proto-founders" - founders before they become founders - and coaching them on idea generation and developing their passions. I suppose an example of this was Thiel's scholarships and the various "founder schools" that we see.

Innovation is hard to teach, but it's not impossible. Perhaps these trends will continue, and I wonder what we will call the organization format that this leads to.

edit: formatting

This experiment reminds me of a rant from Ryan Dahl on software a few years back:

> In the past year I think I have finally come to understand the ideals of Unix: file descriptors and processes orchestrated with C. It's a beautiful idea.

We just keep moving up the stack, it seems :)

Source: https://gist.github.com/cookrn/4015437

(edit: formatting)

From what I can tell, this new facility will be using Lithium Ion storage... anyone have any idea how they managed to get the cost of storage down so low if it's just plain old Li-ion?

Running a business is hard. It takes cash. As others have said (and better) it is likely that they're doing this in the hopes of raising cash. Not because they are jerks, but because they need to. So they can eat. I worry this tactic may kill the golden goose eventually, though! Newcomers may be daunted by this experience, but I'm sure they thought of that and have tested it. Easy enough to pay some college kids for an afternoon. I suspect that SO is enough of a (hacker) "household name" that newcomers will already know the legends with no help from any marketing team. As others have said, primary access is by way of search engine results.

It would be tricky to do it well and proper, but perhaps they could introduce monetary rewards for question. Take a cut of transactions, pass on cash to recipients. Could obfuscate the % of the cut by using tokens or similar.

I've definitely received answers so good I'd have paid for them! I've also had questions that were difficult enough to warrant attaching a real monetary bounty.

Perhaps another angle would be something like CodeMentor. A system where you could pay someone to mentor you, but buying from a user profile backed by the credibility of answering questions on the subject at hand.

Agree with this sentiment - the workflows available in slack for doing this would be clunky. I have a phone but I would rather use a laptop camera for some discussions - e.g.: doing demos.

No...?

Hootsuite | Senior Operations Developer | Vancouver, Canada | ONSITE SALARY | https://hootsuite.com/careers/

Social Media Management software used by 80% of fortune 1000 companies.

We need Senior Developers who are passionate about DevOps to come solve cool operational problems with Terraform, Ansible, Python, Go and whatever else gets the job done. From gritty networking to MongoDB load testing to automating all the things, all from Hootsuite's fun offices in beautiful Vancouver.

Profitable. Cash Positive. Growing Like Crazy.

Process: culture screen - tech screen - tech interviews - offer.

Agreed! I was just thinking about this the other day, advice I would give to myself when I was younger: Being Smart Isn't Enough.

It's often simpler to keep data in a relational DB for reporting, especially if you've got data lake tooling -- it's just easier to get wider insights if your data is stored relationally. I know it's possible to do this without relational DB, but you get it for free with SQL.

As you say though, put it in memory first and write it out to a DB every now and then.

This! Please!

I work at a place that has been trying to undo the damage of having serialized BLOBs for about 3 years. Granted, these are especially nasty things with a custom serialization layer written in Java.

Software companies consist of two assets produced by it's employees: data and algorithms to make the data useful.

Why would you ever lock your data down and make it harder to make cool algorithms to make the data useful?

This is flipping brilliant!

Yes! Me too! I am extremely excited about this. I especially love the "All Patterns" menu that lists different types of components: popups, pagination, CTAs, etc.

Interesting idea, basically a DSL for inline CSS declarations. This is effectively the same thing as using a style tag, but the syntax is more terse.

Might be interesting to run this in Node and have it actually output a CSS sheet of all the selectors you use -- a sort of compilation step to build a sheet of just the stuff you need and to take advantage of the performance benefits of plain-old-CSS.