Right. And Flash wouldn't end until Jobs won't come out on stage and say that Flash is eating the battery and Apple won't support Flash in their next iPhone, then Flash just ceased to exist. Apparently nobody needed innovative frontends anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There is no break pedal on this stuff, it just rolls down the hill until eventually it doesn't. It's a runaway process that feeds itself.
Very interesting, i didn't know that frontend developers experienced deskilling before. I thought that slop was the usual way of doing things in frontend (or backend).
Apparently deskilled people are making it look like this is normal and it supposed to be so.
But i can relate to that. Another examples of deskilling would be, of course, Java, and a more modern example - Rust.
That said, i don't think deskilling is solving mass-production problem. It was already solved with open-source software, or with a software as is.
Software is information and there is little to no cost of copying information. So mass-production isn't the problem that is being solved here.
IMO the problem being solved is that business need unskilled labor, that is slop.
You would think that if business is producing slop, it will be replaced with another business producing quality stuff. If that was so, over time, there won't be any slop on the market, but if you open your app store, you are welcomed by all kinds of slop.
Because slop is what they buy. Supply is only following the demand, business need to produce slop because people are buying it.
How many of you guys have Claude subscription? Do you know that 5 years ago i would be asking "How many of you guy have GitHub Copilot subscription"?
This is what people buy, so it is deskilling, but not a mass-production, it's just slop revolution, slop is the new norm.
Everyone had a chance to learn vanilla js from the mozilla docs but using jquery was much much simpler. Concede that jquery is more difficult than prompting. The issue for me is that prompting a front end and everything looks exactly the same. More cookie cutter than what wordpress and wix offered
Right. So we are stuck with the jquery and wordpress forever. Because this is THE cookie cutter and it's good enough.
But situation was exactly the same before the AI. You would still get your wordpress, your React frontend and Java Spring backend.
AI doesn't change anything, it just takes the job of a poor slopper who made a living by coding React frontends. Anthropic just took their job, that's it, and you don't see the difference.
Oh don't me wrong, it's bad and we're going to suffer through terrible web apps for the foreseeable future spat out in the 1000s per day. Like all slop songs, images, videos and articles. Hardly a reward for building something artisanal in the digital space
No, it isn't sustainable. There is a paper called "The AI Layoff Trap"[1], it says that it is a prisoner's dilemma and this is why this dude feels like he's in an arms race.
On the other front, people are saying that NVidia can't deliver stable drivers for like 15 months and they don't want to take software updates at all, they are more happy with last year's drivers.
I think this is a black swan event in the industry. A lot of people already suffered and more people will suffer still. Industry is going to change for sure, but probably not in a way that you would expect. Black swan simply doesn't work that way, it doesn't change industry in a good way, hence black swan.
black swan is not a reference to the badness of blackness but the unlikelihood of something contradicting volumes of previous data.
Thus it can change industry in a good way or a bad way, because the black swan is unprecedented and unpredicted, its consequences and their nature is unsettled.
Traditionally in economics black swan is an unpredictable negative event.
The only thing that is unsettled here still is how many more people will lose their jobs and how much cumulative loss prisoner's dilemma will generate.
I saw random people on Internet suggesting to piggyback this disaster and dip into the crazy money that it is "generating", but in a zero-sum game somebody has to lose.
As a general rule in human history unpredictable events seem negative when they happen, the greater the unpredictability the greater the negativeness seems to people when it happens because unpredictability tends to destabilize systems set up to deal with predictable things, this however does not mean that the later consequences will remain negative for ever and ever.
All that said however, probably the greatest black swan in terms of unpredictability in human history was that there were two freaking big continents in between Europe and Asia when you try to circumnavigate the globe.
on edit: probably should be "the greater the unpredictability and the more things the unpredictable event connects to the greater the negativeness seems to be", because obviously the platypus while completely unexpected affected basically nothing at all.
Unpredictable positive events usually just don't get attention. Something good just happened, okay, that's good. People just don't pay attention.
Technically black swan might not be negative, but for all practical reasons, "black swan event" is what people call impactful unpredictable negative events and they expect those events to be negative. In other words, it is a synonym for "a disaster" of sorts, only "economical".
they do get attention, but generally people don't dwell on how unpredictable they were. Operation Warp Speed got covid vaccines out within ~1 year. Initial predictions were more in the >= 5 years time range. Fast covid vaccines were very much a "white swan" event, but reporting around it wasn't "this is so unlikely to have worked out" etc.
The description I remember is the idea of holding the belief “all swans are white” until one encounters a black swan, and having to update their beliefs accordingly. What does this mean about swans?
But maybe that’s not the intended meaning either? It’s an interesting expression.
I guess at this point it is safe to say that whenever you see "rewrite in Rust", it simply means there is no one to maintain the software anymore. They are saying this pretty openly that they weren't able to patch xfwm4.
I only fear that this is manifestation of a wider phenomenon when new software developers are unable to maintain software created by old software developers. If that is so, they will try to simplify the software to what they can actually maintain and rewrite it into a form in which they can maintain it.
If i assume this is true, then all of this is annoying, but actually makes sense: Wayland is simpler than X11, so people will tend to maintain Wayland-related software rather than X11-related. Rust won't let unskilled coders to make some mistakes, so from their point of view it is going to be simpler to rewrite something in Rust.
Although, goodbye network-transparency, goodbye performance, goodbye stability. Oh well, but it's that time of the year.
There is no break pedal on this stuff, it just rolls down the hill until eventually it doesn't. It's a runaway process that feeds itself.
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