Israel serves the interest of US imperialism. It is a project of Western imperialism that couldn't exist without its support.
The war against Iran is deeply unpopular in the US so leaders try to blame Israel. They are playing on the anti-semitic tropes of certain groups secretly controlling the government. It is important to not fall into this narrative.
If the US had told Israel that they wouldn't support them if they attacked Iran, this war wouldn't have happened.
What we see is a continuation of US imperialism as it has always been. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. There have never been any morals.
The war against Iran serves the geostrategic interests of US imperialism. It is the only country that dared to oppose them, that dared to criticize the genocide in Palestine, that dares to ally with their rivals.
All y'all's conspiracy theories about Israel are just tiresome, and of course, false. Israel has advanced to the point that it likely could exist, or soon will be able to exist, without support of the U.S. The U.S. military likely relies more on Israeli technology than the other way around, and certainly the U.S. military would get nowhere in the Middle East without the IDF's and Mossad's unparalleled military intelligence and planning. Remember that when Israel attacked Iran last year, the IDF was doing fine and taking out targets until that pendejo plastered with orange makeup in the tackily gilded White House, then still deluded with the idea of receiving a Nobel peace prize, screamed at Netanhayu to stop so he could drop a huge bomb and take credit in the gullible (or now captive) U.S. media that he "ended" the war.
Also worth consideration is that the comment by the boozing, former TV host U.S. secretary "of war" that rules of engagement are "stupid" stands in stark contrast to the IDF's scrupulous use of rules of engagement and resort to teams of lawyers to guide its military activities. Remember that the IDF warns residents of buildings it targets and even sends them texts messages to get out before bombing the buildings. Who else does that?
Also incredibly tiresome and patently false is that Israel committed "genocide" in Gaza -- no matter how many "activists" and misguided Western politicians scream that term. Hamas illegally entered Israel on 7 Oct 2023 and massacred more than a thousand Israeli citizens, and kidnapped hundred more, including babies and octogenarians, to be kept in fetid conditions and used as political pawns (or killed). Hamas even played politics with the bodies of Israelis they killed. Hamas raped and killed one young Israeli woman, then paraded her body around in the back of a technical (pickup) to the enthusiastic cheers of Gazans. For such acts of barbarism, Hamas had an approx. 55 to 60-percent approval rating from Gazans. Hamas purposely hid munitions in hospitals and schools then played the victim when those facilities were bombed. Hamas also forced people to stay in the buildings bombed by the IDF to run up their alleged death toll. This is how those depraved cowards play their game.
Did you ever notice when the Western press dutifully announced the Gaza death toll, the source was the "Gaza Health Ministry"? In other words, Hamas -- which allows NO press freedom of any kind -- is free to make up the death toll that forms the basis for mindless screaming of "genocide."
The irony is that Hamas is deftly playing Western liberals. Consider that Hamas's own charter explicitly calls for the death of all Jews -- genocide, anyone -- along with other non-Muslims (so Christians and nonbelievers are next).
On the other hand, the 7 Oct 2023 Hamas massacre turned out to be the most catastrophic miscalculation in modern military history. Every senior officer from Hamas, Hezbollah, IRGC, Houthi and Iran (Khamenei) now is dead.
the 7 Oct 2023 Hamas massacre turned out to be the most catastrophic miscalculation in modern military history.
I'm genuinely unclear on what the calculation was supposed to reveal. What did they think the outcome was going to be?
I'm put in mind of the 9/11 attacks on the US -- arguably, an even bigger miscalculation. At the time, everybody expected there to be follow-ups, and there were none.
The US certainly managed to tie itself up in knots of security theater, but al Qaeda painted a massive target on its own back. I cannot imagine what they thought was going to happen.
As for Gaza, as best I can judge, it was Iran's idea to sacrifice plenty of Gazans in the hopes that Israel would overreact and isolate itself even further from the world. Which is what they got, but that's really a lot of cost for not much benefit. Israel was already quite isolated; it just made the news for a while.
Wow this is the worst hasbara attempt I have seen in a long time.
The irony is that I was actually defending Israel in a sense as I don't make it solely responsible for the Iran war. But you would rather agree with literal antisemites than admit any weakness of the oh so superior people of Israel.
You are completely delusional. Do you really think the Arab states would play ball with with Israel if daddy US didn't force them? The people of the world hate Israel for its crimes against humanity.
You couldn't even defeat Hamas. You had to seek an armistice that only one sides respects: Hamas. You have broken it nearly every day. You still refuse to sent basic aid into Gaza.
> Did you ever notice when the Western press dutifully announced the Gaza death toll, the source was the "Gaza Health Ministry"? In other words, Hamas -- which allows NO press freedom of any kind -- is free to make up the death toll that forms the basis for mindless screaming of "genocide."
uhm
> Israeli officials appeared to accept that some 70,000 Palestinians have died in the war in Gaza. Israel had long disputed the figures from Gaza's health ministry, saying the agency was run by Hamas.
> Consider that Hamas's own charter explicitly calls for the death of all Jews -- genocide, anyone -- along with other non-Muslims (so Christians and nonbelievers are next).
Oh yeah, it says such horrible things like:
> The Palestinian people are one people, made up of all Palestinians, inside and outside of Palestine, irrespective of their religion, culture or political affiliation.
or
> Hamas believes that the message of Islam upholds the values of truth, justice, freedom and dignity and prohibits all forms of injustice and incriminates oppressors irrespective of their religion, race, gender or nationality. Islam is against all forms of religious, ethnic or sectarian extremism and bigotry.
or
> Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
I know you were not referring to the charter of 2017 but of 1988 because why play fair. But what you said is even a gross misrepresentation of the charter of 1988.
I sadly don't have time to debunk all the other lies that have been debunked thousands of times already.
The day will come when those that commit crimes against humanity will face the consequences.
First, "Palestinians" is a flexible term. When Jews returned in the early 20th century to what now is Israel, the land was called Palestine and they, too, were Palestinians. "Palestinians," at least as it refers to mostly Jordanian descendants who copped the term "Palestinian" for political reasons mid-last century as part of a language to discredit Israel, will NEVER be free, as "freedom" is defined in the West, under their own leadership. That's why I have to laugh at all those westerners who enjoy freedom of speech and press defending a society that has an absolute ban on same. And to LGBTQ+ who support "Palestinians"? I say, buy a one-way ticket to Gaza and enjoy the "rooftop party" that will be prepared in your honor. The Arabs who live in Israel know exactly how "free" their brethren under Hamas rule are, and they also know that they enjoy far greater personal freedoms and rights under the Israeli government than they would in any Arab-run country in the Middle East. How many Israeli Arabs do you see desiring to emigrate to Gaza? Or the "West Bank"? Or try Arab-controlled nations? Why might that be? Could it be that under allegedly "apartheid" Israel, they know they have it much better (e.g. 1/3 of the doctors in Israel are Palestinian? how would that happen under "apartheid")?
As to any "acceptance" of 70,000 dead in Gaza: First, how is any particular number "proof" of genocide? How many of the alleged 70,000 were combatants? I'll bet the Hamas "Health Ministry" hasn't released that little gem, and even if they did, would you actually believe them? How many were civilians? How many of those civilians were used as human shields while their leaders demonstrated their cowardice by partying in luxury apartments in Doha rather than standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their so-called fighters? IOW, to the extent there were civilian casualties, what portion of the death count consisted of civilians whom Hamas's cowardly leadership forced to remain in buildings that were bombed? That statistic, too, I do not expect to hear from Hamas. Also, why is the number of dead in Gaza so important as to get daily news coverage in the Western media, animating those falsely screaming "genocide," when Russia is busily bombing and killing Ukranians, yet we're not treated to the same sort of breathless daily tally? Where are the screams of "GENOCIDE!" against Russia? Hmmm.
I love this: "You are completely delusional. Do you really think the Arab states would play ball with with Israel if daddy US didn't force them?" First, I love the personal attack. Keep up the good work. Second, while the U.S. may have given normalization between Israel and Morocco, UAE and Sudan a push (or more?), those ties have strengthened on their own. You may not wish to recognize that Israel is a research and technology powerhouse. However, for example, Israel and Morocco have developed ties with interchanges of science and technology in the areas of agriculture and defense, among others, much of which occurred when Biden, not Trump, was president. These ties strengthened because the nations considered it beneficial to engage in the interchanges based on the merits of what each nation had to offer. Israel also now is assisting Sudan with water-management technology and has joint ventures with UAE in defense. If you can produce any evidence that "big daddy forced" these ventures and technology exchanges, go for it. Finally, Israel was developing diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia in 2023. No doubt this development freaked out Iran, which has been funding Hamas for decades. But I'll bet you've convinced yourself that the timing of the barbaric and cowardly 7 Oct 2023 attack was mere coincidence!
As to which Hamas charter to cite, Hamas leaders when commenting on the 2017 charter "fell short of formally repudiating the original 1988 charter," sayeth Wikipedia. Again, feel free to produce evidence that Hamas explicitly repudiated the portion of the 1988 charter that calls for wiping out ALL Jews and other non-Islam believers. The 7 Oct 2023 attack is clear evidence that they did not repudiate that cause. Why else would they kill and kidnap and torture and rape and parade and /or withhold the dead bodies of Jewish civilians, instead of focusing on the IDF? They their hatred (and specific targeting) of Jews and their depravity by celebrating and cheering the murders, kidnappings and rapes.
Also: when chanting "from the river to the sea," as western protesters are wont to do, do these geniuses understand that they are calling for the very sort of genocide that is baked into Hamas's 1988 charter? Does no one get the irony of accusing a nation of "genocide," then parading through the streets and yelling for the genocide of the people of that nation?
True, the IDF did not "defeat" Hamas. All you can do with an enemy like that is set it back, which the IDF did succeed in doing. Hamas not only is a band of cowards, incompetents and criminals, but it is a band of irrational true believers, making them all the more difficult to eradicate completely. To their credit they are master manipulators (until debunked - remember the claimed hospital bombing incident quickly blamed on Israel until it was shown that the pendejos killed their own people with their own ill-fired missile?), but they sure as hell suck at governing. Like true welfare queens they depend on mass funds from Arab nations, Europe and, ironically, U.S. taxpayers and instead of investing those funds in the betterment of the people of Gaza, they built hundreds of KM of terror tunnels (where they hide like rats and held the living and dead of those civilians they kidnapped), acquired all manner of weaponry to be used in hopes of wiping out Israel, and fired a never-ending stream of missiles at civilian targets in Israel. Though the IDF gave them a boost, it would be up to the people of Gaza to "defeat" Hamas, they leadership they chose in the first place. It is a sad that they cannot pull together the will to do so and pick leaders that will actually govern with even a modicum of competency.
If you worked at Microsoft and had access to the Windows source code you probably should not be contributing to WINE or similar projects as there would be legal risk.
So for this case, not much different legally. Of course there is the practical difference just like there is between me seeing you with my own eyes and me taking a picture of you.
"Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaphor. Its confusing the save icon with an actual floppy disk.
I can say I "trained" my printer to print copyrighted material by feeding it bits but that that would be pure sophism.
Problem is that law hasn't really caught up the our brave new AI future yet so lots of decisions are up in the air. Plus governments incentivized to look the other way regarding copyright abuses when it comes to AI as they think that having competitive AI is of strategic importance.
> "Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaphor. Its confusing the save icon with an actual floppy disk.
Maybe? But the design of the floppy disk is for data storage and retrieval per se. It can't give you your bits in a novel order like an LLM does (by design). From what I can tell in this case, the output is significantly differentiated from the source code.
Touch typing is a useful skill for everyone to have and doesn't take long to acquire.
Not to mention even the light of the display should be enough for you to be able to read the key caps if you really need to. Keyboard backlight seems like a gimmick with limited use to me. I always thought it was purely aesthetic.
You're sitting back in a chair watching YouTube in the dark. Hit F for fullscreen. (OK, that was the easy level because of the key bump.) Now hit L to skip 10 seconds forward. Now hit < and > to adjust speed.
The backlighting is useful. But no, it's not for typing, for most people.
Also I don't understand what would be hard about your challenge. My hands automatically move to the home row, feel the key bumps and I instantly know where every key is. I never need to look at my keyboard. Not to mention having to move my eyes down from the displays would be annoying.
I mean people like backlight keyboards. So if it fits your use case great. Still makes sense to not include in a base model. I actually actively avoid keyboards with any lightning.
The fact that one in ten million people is annoyed by one of the softest lights ever invented by mankind is not a good reason to not include said feature in a product my guy.
Most people don’t have the touch typing skill and do not care to learn it. It literally matters zero per cent if they would benefit from learning that.
They advertise local LLMs which will be servery limited with 16GD of RAM. Plus the GPU could in theory provide decent gaming performance but again might suffer from the RAM limit.
Most people can totally live with 16gigs but it is kind of a waste for the horsepower. They know what they are doing. Apple is a master in upselling.
Though personally I don't mid the aggressive upsellign as long as the quality is there. Problem is, the hardware quality is great but the software side is severely lacking and getting worse.
Apple is one of the very few companies committed to (hardware) quality. They make sure their entry level models are very decent. You can't buy a apple product that is complete shite.
Yes, the software side is getting worse in recent years but is it at least slightly better than the competition for average consumers.
Plus being a tech monopolist they can offer a whole ecosystem of software and hardware that works great with each other. So the value proposition is greater than the sum of its parts.
That is the problem with OpenAI, they have only one thing. Google can bleed money all day long and they don't need to care because they have other profitable business ventures.
The way to make money with LLMs is to either be technically superior which only works short term until the competition catches up or create a monopoly. The second option is dead in the water with the advent of the Chinese models. I guess they can lobby to have them banned and create a cartel with their other US based competitors. Otherwise they are screwed. That is why they are allowing military use of their model now. They need that sweet government money to survive. Also they keep talking about AGI so the government gets scared about the Chinese reaching it first and supports them. Complete scam.
Not that I condone any form of gambling but I would rather play actual slot machines instead of spending hundreds of dollars on tokens in hopes that the AI blesses me with anything useful.
That also shows the delusion of some people that believe their vibe coded projects have any value.
If generative AI improves at the rate that is promised then all your "promting skills" or whatever you believe you had will be obsolete. You might think you will be an "AI engineer" or whatever and that it is other people that will lose their job, that you are safe because you have the magic skills to use the new tech. You believe the tech overlords will reward you for your faith.
Nope. You are just training your replacement.
No one will buy your game that you vibe coded. If the tech were good enough to create games that are actually fun then they would just generate their own games. Oh your skill? Yeah, a dog can do it.
Yes people will cope by saying but oh the whole initial prompt and setting it all up was still hard but yeah currently. The tech will improve and it will get more accessible. So enjoy the few months you are still relevant.
Of course there is reason to believe that you can't scale up LLMs endlessly and bigger models hit diminishing returns. In fact we might already be seeing this. So there is an upside but then again when the AI bubble pops and the economy crashes you will be out of a job all the same.
Sounds great to me. Software devs might lose their jobs but billions of people will be empowered to spin up whatever software they need on demand. This is the future I dreamed of when I was a kid, and I'm not so cynical as to let the dying of a trade sour me to this objectively incredible technology.
Nobody gives a damn about the dying of a trade. People don’t want their house foreclosed on when they lose their income, or their cancer to kill them when they lose their health insurance, to move an elderly parent into a cheap shitty old folks home because they can’t afford home health care, or not be able to pay for their kid to go on that school field trip.
This would all be pretty fucking swell if the fundamental problems this could cause were even considered before hitting the gas. Instead, you’re going to have a shitload of people with ruined lives, but as a consolation prize, they can vibe code stuff! Wowee!
This very forum was founded by a VC who had great success recruiting 22 year olds with fancy diplomas to automate away the job of the guy who copied the numbers from the TPS report pdf attachment into excel.
I didn't see people on here ranting and taking up the flag of revolution for the TPS report excel paster guy's job that they were automating away with their web2 SaaS startup.
But wait- that guy himself was automating away the job of the lady who used to physically Xerox the TPS report and put it in the filing cabinet down the hall, but that lady was automating the job of the secretary who used to re-type all those TPS reports.
It's automatic filing cabinets all the way down, and ranting because your little slice of the filing cabinet automation machine has been made redundant is a bit silly.
You act as if this is the first time in history technology has wiped out a trade and made people scramble to sort out their lives. No, this has been happening over and over again throughout history and at a rapidly accelerating pace since the industrial revolution. Why should we ask it to slow down on behalf of programmers, when it never did for anybody else? Don't pretend you didn't know this was a possibility when you got into tech in the first place. You might have to downsize your life but humanity as a whole will be better off.
The industrial revolution resulted in children being worked to literal death. Of people toiling 16 hours ad day and living in cramped up spaces without any windows and barely any hygiene. It brought suffering on a scale never seen before.
Organized labor movements managed to fight back and improve conditions somewhat but will we be able to do it this time?
Humanity will not profit from generative AI, tech billionaires will. It is based on the theft of human labor of millions of programmer, artists and writers without any compensation. If left unchecked it will destroy the environment, any form of democracy, our mental health. It will cause mass unemployment at a grand scale.
Could it be in theory used for good? Maybe. As the current political situation stands it will cause massive suffering for the majority of people.
> You might have to downsize your life but humanity as a whole will be better off
This assumes that there will be other jobs to get. If AI replaces a large enough segment of office jobs then huge portions of the population will be unable to afford essentials like food and healthcare.
Walk into a staffing agency, ask for a job. They'll give you a list, pick the one that sounds the least disagreeable. Show up on time, every day, for at least two or three months and you'll convert the temp position into a full time job.
It's literally that easy, showing up reliably is a super power that puts you in the 90th percentile of workers these days. The job probably won't be as comfortable as sitting on a comfortable chair in an air-conditioning office wiggling your fingers at a computer, but so what? Other people make it work, so can you. Man up.
sorry, no jobs at the staffing agency, those are AI. Feel free to walk into a burger king, show up everyday, and flip those fries for minimum wage until you die. Man up brother, other people make it work. Sleeping on the street, well half the year its not even snowing.
The last study I know of that measured the conversion rate from temp to perm employees showed about 15%-30% success… and that was well before the gig economy really took hold. So you’re looking at 4 or 5 temp placements to reliably get a probably underpaying job when very few white collar workers could survive long enough to make the end of a lease, or sell their house, while on a temp job salary. It’s a viable option for a 25 year old that could couch surf for a few months, but not for a mid-late career professional, or anyone with a family.
You can give any complex problem a simple answer if you ignore enough factors.
Your glib dismissal of the real effects of those technological upheavals shows you haven’t actually looked into this. You should probably tamp down that smugness until you find out.
Did you think about it before you got into the tech industry? You should have, technology has been wiping out jobs since forever but you got into tech anyway. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Except you needn't actually die, just walk into a staffing agency and ask for a new job. I have done so before, and will do so again. I have prepared for what is to come, saw it coming 20 years ago and saw the imminence of it when GPT-2 was released. I have sympathy for other kinds of white collar professionals who never could have anticipated these kind of developments, but technologists? Give me a break. You knew, or should have known, that technological developments in this domain were likely.
Please stop pretending that this is only going to replace "tech workers". Do accountants "live by the sword"? Whose jobs did they replace? What about analysts, journalists, radiologists (one day, if not quite yet)?
And even within the realm of "tech", it's kinda bonkers to expect e.g. a firmware engineer to have some deep understanding of trends in ML/AI.
Altogether your #1 priority seems to be "bashing workers", the justification just being a matter of convenience.
Please stop pretending to read comments before replying to them:
> I have sympathy for other kinds of white collar professionals who never could have anticipated these kind of developments, but technologists? Give me a break.
I’m not in the tech industry anymore because in the battle of people who wanted to solve problems with software and money grubbing MBAs, the money grubbing MBAs have won. Now I’m a union machinist, and believe it or not, I’m concerned about the wellbeing of others. In manufacturing, companies are starting to face the consequences of shortsightedly selling out their workforce and are frantically clamoring to use the agonal breaths of its existing manufacturing industry knowledge base to breathe life into a new generation of workers. China becoming a manufacturing powerhouse wasn’t a foregone conclusion: we gave it to them in exchange for short-term profits. Our economy, national security, and the financial viability of a robust middle class is paying the price for their greed and arrogance.
The people running the tech industry can’t see the world past the end of this quarter, so they’ll never learn the lessons our society has learned many times over. Good luck. Unless you’re running a company, you’re going to need it. The soft, arrogant, whiny, maladroit white collar workers coming into the trades are pathetically ill-equipped to do actual work.
You've already done all that I can advise others here do, so congrats, I have nothing to criticize there. You've done it better than me actually, since you're unionized. As for soft white collar wimps washing out, people at the first job I had out of tech were taking bets if I'd show up for the second day, so don't think I don't know what you're talking about. I know it, I did it, and other people can do it too.
The problem with exporting manufacturing to China was this country lost the ability to make shit. I don't think this maps at all to white collar jobs getting gutted by AI; the people who actually make things aren't the white collar workers who should be sweating. Societies paper pushers would effectively be a parasite class leeching off the hard labor of people who actually work, if not for the part where white collar workers are (or have been) necessary to organize the logistics of everything that allows the people who actually do the work to actually do the work. We are on the precipice of dramatic change, and I think we're going to see a radical revaluing across society.
None of this is even new. Computers and other business machines already came for the clerks and secretary pools before most people ITT were born. The loss of these careers was not even remotely a problem for society at large, completely unlike offshoring manufacturing.
> This is the future I dreamed of when I was a kid, and I'm not so cynical as to let the dying of a trade sour me to this objectively incredible technology.
I feel that you should take a longer-term view of things...
If an AI can vibe code from the requirements of the average white-collar worker, we're not talking about the death of a trade. Or even two trades. We're talking about the death of almost all white-collar jobs.
Development paid a lot more than other white-collar work because it was harder, and fewer people could actually do it. How fast do you think the easier work will get replaced if the hardest one is replaced? For the remaining white-collar roles that consist solely of skills achievable by a border collie, how much do you think they'd pay?
Yeah this is one of the most perplexing things about this "dying of a trade" narrative.
Software development isn't just the act of producing a deliverable that is being gate kept by people who use their own body. Software development has become specialized enough that it is often highly domain specific. To replace the "trade" you need to automate the software part and the domain knowledge part. If you can do both, you've automated every single white collar job in existence.
Since it is possible to write software for machine learning, which is used to solve problems that classical algorithms failed to solve, the amount of problems that cannot be solved using software is shrinking rapidly. If you can write software for any domain, you can solve any domain by using said software.
General purpose software generation can be reduced to AGI completeness. In a way, it is the last job that can be automated.
> Billions of people will be empowered to spin up whatever software they need on demand.
… so long as they have the money, and the power grid survives the overtaxation.
After all, why bother encouraging a culture where people are genuinely empowered to tweak and create their tools? Why encourage a culture of exploration, of playful cleverness? What use is there to being a hacker, of sharing knowledge?
It’s definitely much easier, more sustainable, and more fulfilling to have server farms adjacent nuclear reactors make your calculator app for you.
Hardware will get better, local models will get better, it won't be very long until running a coding agent off a few solar panels on your roof is viable. And if this isn't true, then the future I envision probably isn't going to happen and you lot can stop worrying about your jobs.
The way I see it is either it will work (which I doubt, but whatever) and I'm out of a job, or it doesn't work and the economy comes crashing down harder than ever seen in history and I'm out of a job.
The bubble popping is a guarantee even if AI does end up working. The internet certainly works but that didn't stop the dotcom bubble from crashing. Live frugally below your means to save up as much extra money as you can, and do whatever else you think prudent to keep your ass covered.
I’m not worried in the slightest about jobs. A world where acceptable slop is created on demand is one where people lose their curiosity and drive. Why bother practicing drawing if you can prompt an acceptable facsimile of your image to life? Why bother learning to program if you can prompt an acceptable slop program onto your machine?
Killing the drive to learn and explore is not empowering; it is fundamentally disempowering.
>billions of people will be empowered to spin up whatever software they need on demand
As long as:
1. They have access to a computer
2. They have affordable access to a capable language model
3. Someone will actually care about using their output instead of simply spinning up their own custom version of whatever idea they have
The number 3 is something many people miss, especially on HN: Why would I want to use YOUR software if it's easy for me to cook up my own? Perhaps out of efficiency or lack of time, in the same way I order pizza instead of baking my own when I'm tired or can't be bothered to bake pizza.
Then the software becomes truly throwaway, in the same way takeaway is, and everything is a greenfield project because rewrites are literally easier and faster to make than patching up existing stuff.
> Why would I want to use YOUR software if it's easy for me to cook up my own?
You're still in the mindset of thinking about software as something you sell to other people. Forget that crap. Software will be something you summon on demand to solve a specific problem you have. As long as people have problems that computers are good at solving, they'll keep using computers. What likely won't continue is computer programming as a career, but so what?
Everybody keeps parroting stuff along these lines but never take into consideration:
1. the stark, obvious reality is that most people don't know how to actually use computers! They know what 10 steps they need to take on a computer, in a specific sequence, to complete their task, but anything beyond that is too much.. and they need taught those 10 steps (as well as have it documented somewhere) for it to ever stick
2. not only not know how to use, but simply don't use computers at all! They've got phones and tablets and smart TVs and talk to their Bluetooth speakers and shit but they aren't sitting down at a desk with a keyboard and mouse and using a computer. I'd wager that of the percentage of people who do, an overwhelming majority is doing this primarily at their job to complete work tasks
3. companies with more than 10 employees are absolutely not going to be running to Claude to spin up custom programs to do their work. It's just not happening. Not to mention you can rarely even install unapproved, AAA-quality software on company-issued MDM'd hardware, let alone something generated out of thin air that has a ton of dependencies, no installer, no packaging, not code-signed, etc
4. that pizza you're ordering? You'd never order again if it was a roll of the dice with regards to what you receive. When you pay for two extra large thin crust pies with everything and are delivered some cheesy bread, a 2-liter of Coke and some brownies, your wig will completely and fully split and you'll never patronize that establishment again. Claude absolutely can make you exactly what you order, if you know what to order, and why, but most people don't
5. consistency and determinism matter to businesses, and to people -- both home users and professionals. Most people get stymied by the simplest tasks on a computer, tasks that have deep, instantly-available answers available with a single Google search or ChatGPT session. Guess what they do instead? Give up, and then ask IT or "a tech friend" for help ... how am I going to help you troubleshoot software I've never seen before? That NOBODY has ever seen before? That I can't even install because it only exists as a dev build in a single folder on your hard drive? How are you going to take that program with you when you upgrade your laptop? What if they didn't use git and their computer dies? Ask Claude to remake it? Will it be the same? Do they even know what git is? Do they even know where the folder on their computer that holds the files is located? Or what, you had Claude build a hosted product? Where's it hosted? How much does it cost every month? What if it gets hacked? I could go until my head explodes with all the hypotheticals
6. professionals pay for convenience and predictability, as well as to offload risk and unnecessary labor onto third parties. This will never change. Companies have been worrying about and hedging against "the bus problem" for decades, and vibe-coded software creates the ultimate bus problem: not only are you the only one likely to be in possession of the program in question, you're the only one who has ever seen it, know how to use it (which is different than knowing how it works), and it dies with you. Fine for a personal gadget, but a non-starter for a tool that a business or professional relies on to make their real money
I could go on and on, but you probably get the point. Takeaway food is both throwaway in a different sense than vibe-coded software, and infinitely more accessible to the average human. People are still going to pay for SaaS, still going to buy software, and still going to build software. In fact, I'm starting to think we'll see less open-source contributions and more closed-source, for-profit software released than ever before as a result of Claude and Codex, rather than a complete flattening and decimation of this industry. I think people in software will try to become more entrepreneurial as a result of corporate job loss. I also think that a byproduct of this coming tsunami of new commercial products is that the overwhelming majority will be low quality noise, and the proportionality of signal -> noise will remain largely unchanged. I'd use social media as an example (a staggering amount of people show up and try to break through, a very small percentage actually do) but IMO you see it in any industry: there can only be a few outsized successes in anything at any given moment in time (but also a not-insignificant amount of medium-sized success that flies under the mainstream radar)
I dunno. Maybe I'm full of shit, but I still think it's absolutely bonkers to think that the software industry is over because every person will just become sovereign groundskeepers of all of their own bespoke software. We can't all be our own bank, lawyer, doctor, mechanic, fitness trainer, software developer, chef and bodyguard, while also dealing with the other stuff that are our primary responsibilities! And that means that as long as society doesn't fully collapse into widespread economic ruin, and we aren't all unemployed, desperate, violent marauders trying to survive in District 9, there will be plenty of opportunities out there in the software space. They might just look a little different than they used to, and you'll have to go out and get them
sure, a bunch of people will lose jobs, but at that trade off everyones dog can vibe code Royal Frog, a 4 level unwinnable game where play as king frog, eating peasant flies.
Yeah, I lost all interest in the ladybird project now that it is AI slop.
No one wants to work with this generated, ugly, unidiomatic ball of Rust. Other than other people using AI. So you dependency AI grows and grows. It is a vicious trap.
Mattermost works great plus you can self host it. Can only recommend it.
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