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While I agree with your sentiment, maintaining software like postgreSQL is a full time job. But your last sentence seems to apply to everything on the internet

by planb 3y ago

While I agree with your sentiment, maintaining software like postgreSQL is a full time job. But your last sentence seems to apply to everything on the internet lately. People used to do podcasts, create guitar tabs or publish cooking recipes because it was their hobby and they wanted others to participate. Now everything seems about making money.

rglullis 3y ago
People would do these things for free because they had a stable job which guaranteed their material needs. Now every type of job can be automated and done better/cheaper by a machine, people will be forced to "monetize" everything that exists unless we get a literal revolution in how we tax and distribute the produced wealth.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xcrunner529 3y ago
  The jobs we’re talking about here, podcasting, development, etc aren’t jobs where everyone is forced out. Everyone is just more into making money these days and decide they want to make money doing those things rather than just fun. Let’s not try making excuses.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    You are getting at it backwards. People are doing podcasts about investing, cooking, music production, <anything> because even those careers are being automated away and the money that they could be getting working is going away. Even Software Engineers: take all the swaths of engineers who were productive but didn't want / didn't make to a FAANG company and now are having to compete in a world where most companies can replace a lot of the people they don't need a team of 8 engineers because their team of 4 now can have Co-Pilot and most of their "middle management" roles could be effectively replaced by some cheap, off-the-shelf SaaS. I'm literally in this scenario. I'm too old to be interested in competing with someone who is 20 years younger than me but can call themselves a "programmer", and whatever knowledge/experience I have can be had at a fraction of my "cost" by using a commodified service that automates a process. So, what is left for me? Either I need to go downmarket and work for "programmer" jobs (further increasing the supply and lowering salaries) or I need to find someone who is willing to invest in my "idea for a startup" (thus getting into the Silicon-Valley way of life), or I need to find a way to take my unique experience and repackage as something of value - and then get to be called "greedy" by people like you. By the way, may I interest you in becoming a customer of my not-yet VC funded company (https://communick.com https://communick.com) and/or join the people sponsoring me for $4/month for my Fediverse work (https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs)?
    - simion314 3y ago
      I do not believe you can replace a competent developer with an AI, or say you have 2 and replace them with 1 dev and 1 AI. You can't just type in ChatGPT something like "write me GTA5" and you get running code, just seen today an example of someone complaining that he asked soemthing like "Create a website in PHP for a company that does X" and they were expecting that by magic a website will just appear.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        Aside from clueless people on Elance and upwork, no one goes to a developer and says "write me GTA5" or "make a website in PHP that does X", either. What AI will do is leverage productivity of the individuals. Any new story will have its complexity reduced because the developer will be to use the existing codebase and say "hey, our current code is connecting with Foobar via the Zoberg SDK, now we are adding a customer that uses the BazBah platform and they need to change the order flow for 'deliver on payment' to 'deliver on invoice sent'. Show me what changes are needed to make this happen, and please write the integration tests to make sure that we are not breaking things from existing customers" This goes from a one week task that will require three hour-long to something that can be done in an afternoon, reviewed by the developer and (most importantly) cheap to throw away if the original requirements change.
        simion314 3y ago
        Does this work today? I guess it might be able to write tests but does the rest just work? In my experience the AI - uses bad code practices because there is more bad code on the internet then good - hallucinates APIs , so it tells you to use X but X does not exist in the library/framework you asked for - suggests wrong solution - if your language is not precise it gives you the answer to the wrong thing, like you see the answer and you realize it did not understand you In my experience if your developers are 20% more productive you do not fire 20% of them because there always is a big backlog of features or bugs to be handled.
        3y ago
- berniedurfee 3y ago
  It’s less automation and more about cheap labor. Content farms sprung up and flooded the landscape with worthless content to get a micro-slice of the pie. Very discouraging to many content creators when their work is just going to be buried in SEO chaff. Also, the automation wave is just beginning. Soon the human run content farms will be overwhelmed by AI created crap. This is likely to happen in software as well. Every product will need to compete with some AI generated piece of garbage that’s barely passable functionally, but being sold at a fraction of the cost. Fun times!

by planb 3y ago

rglullis 3y ago

People would do these things for free because they had a stable job which guaranteed their material needs. Now every type of job can be automated and done better/cheaper by a machine, people will be forced to "monetize" everything that exists unless we get a literal revolution in how we tax and distribute the produced wealth.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xcrunner529 3y ago
The jobs we’re talking about here, podcasting, development, etc aren’t jobs where everyone is forced out. Everyone is just more into making money these days and decide they want to make money doing those things rather than just fun. Let’s not try making excuses.
- rglullis 3y ago
  You are getting at it backwards. People are doing podcasts about investing, cooking, music production, <anything> because even those careers are being automated away and the money that they could be getting working is going away. Even Software Engineers: take all the swaths of engineers who were productive but didn't want / didn't make to a FAANG company and now are having to compete in a world where most companies can replace a lot of the people they don't need a team of 8 engineers because their team of 4 now can have Co-Pilot and most of their "middle management" roles could be effectively replaced by some cheap, off-the-shelf SaaS. I'm literally in this scenario. I'm too old to be interested in competing with someone who is 20 years younger than me but can call themselves a "programmer", and whatever knowledge/experience I have can be had at a fraction of my "cost" by using a commodified service that automates a process. So, what is left for me? Either I need to go downmarket and work for "programmer" jobs (further increasing the supply and lowering salaries) or I need to find someone who is willing to invest in my "idea for a startup" (thus getting into the Silicon-Valley way of life), or I need to find a way to take my unique experience and repackage as something of value - and then get to be called "greedy" by people like you. By the way, may I interest you in becoming a customer of my not-yet VC funded company (https://communick.com https://communick.com) and/or join the people sponsoring me for $4/month for my Fediverse work (https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs)?
  - simion314 3y ago
    I do not believe you can replace a competent developer with an AI, or say you have 2 and replace them with 1 dev and 1 AI. You can't just type in ChatGPT something like "write me GTA5" and you get running code, just seen today an example of someone complaining that he asked soemthing like "Create a website in PHP for a company that does X" and they were expecting that by magic a website will just appear.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Aside from clueless people on Elance and upwork, no one goes to a developer and says "write me GTA5" or "make a website in PHP that does X", either. What AI will do is leverage productivity of the individuals. Any new story will have its complexity reduced because the developer will be to use the existing codebase and say "hey, our current code is connecting with Foobar via the Zoberg SDK, now we are adding a customer that uses the BazBah platform and they need to change the order flow for 'deliver on payment' to 'deliver on invoice sent'. Show me what changes are needed to make this happen, and please write the integration tests to make sure that we are not breaking things from existing customers" This goes from a one week task that will require three hour-long to something that can be done in an afternoon, reviewed by the developer and (most importantly) cheap to throw away if the original requirements change.
      - simion314 3y ago
        Does this work today? I guess it might be able to write tests but does the rest just work? In my experience the AI - uses bad code practices because there is more bad code on the internet then good - hallucinates APIs , so it tells you to use X but X does not exist in the library/framework you asked for - suggests wrong solution - if your language is not precise it gives you the answer to the wrong thing, like you see the answer and you realize it did not understand you In my experience if your developers are 20% more productive you do not fire 20% of them because there always is a big backlog of features or bugs to be handled.
        3y ago
berniedurfee 3y ago
It’s less automation and more about cheap labor. Content farms sprung up and flooded the landscape with worthless content to get a micro-slice of the pie. Very discouraging to many content creators when their work is just going to be buried in SEO chaff. Also, the automation wave is just beginning. Soon the human run content farms will be overwhelmed by AI created crap. This is likely to happen in software as well. Every product will need to compete with some AI generated piece of garbage that’s barely passable functionally, but being sold at a fraction of the cost. Fun times!