bgwalter

29 ms·

781.
by bgwalter 1y ago
"Someone can be highly experienced as a software engineer in 2024, but that does not mean they're skilled as a software engineer in 2025, now that AI is here." With that arrogance, my only question is: Where is your own code
782.
by bgwalter 1y ago
Another day, another Substack ad by this "science historian", naturally with a quote by AI shill Simon Willison. The entire world rests on his shoulders.
783.
by bgwalter 1y ago
I'd be interested in the open source repositories that the author of this article created a) before "AI" and b) after "AI". I mean significant work mostly done by him.
784.
by bgwalter 1y ago
For some reason the many obsequious software engineers never suggest democratizing Zuckerberg's island or nationalizing Google. It is always the output of individuals who cannot fight back that is "democratized".
785.
by bgwalter 1y ago
The article is a bit lengthy, which makes it hard to distill any message. Perhaps the vagueness is on purpose, since it ends with the classic "But what about China?" FOMO. Clearly "AI" is plagiarism. There are YouTube vo
786.
by bgwalter 1y ago
If you go that route and throw all conventions overboard, there is no reason why Microsoft and OpenAI shouldn't be nationalized. Without compensation. You, know, for the "benefit of society", as these companies never tire of
787.
by bgwalter 1y ago
> useful (vs. pulling ad money) These are the only motivations? Authors want credit, which is stolen by the robber barons.
788.
by bgwalter 1y ago
Prices are not really down though. Potatoes grow in the US and should have benefited from automation. But the price increase exceeded monetary inflation: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Potatoes/price-inflation
789.
by bgwalter 1y ago
What flavor? Keynesian, Chicago school, Marxist? They all say something different. The one I read called economics the "dismal science" on the first few pages. You do not need a textbook to see that all income of the middle classe
790.
by bgwalter 1y ago
If you want to discuss the "dismal science" in one-liners, you won't get anywhere.
791.
by bgwalter 1y ago
My own experiences, just like you state your personal experiences on your blog, which (unfortunately) other entities like the NYT cite.
792.
by bgwalter 1y ago
I wonder why people reflexively quote a "fallacy" from the year 1891! It wasn't true even back then, as evidenced by the multiple economic crises that followed. Nowadays we have a completely different economy to begin with, s
793.
by bgwalter 1y ago
The tractor analogy is ancient and the economic system is entirely different. Who is going to pay laid off software engineers to spend time on inventing anything? Fortunately, "AI" decreases productivity in software engineering, s
794.
by bgwalter 1y ago
"To OpenAI, these endeavors legitimately contribute to benefiting humanity: building more and more useful AI tools; bringing those tools and the necessary infrastructure to run them to people around the world; drastically increasing th
795.
by bgwalter 1y ago
That would presume that the moderation knows the truth, that a single truth even exists and that the moderation itself is unbiased. It would also presume that an LLM knows the truth, which it does not. Even in technical and mathematical mat
796.
by bgwalter 1y ago
> They are performing close to or in some cases even beating the standard expert-optimized production kernels shipped in PyTorch. The PyTorch code base is NOT written by performance experts in any way. This is the wrong base line. Nothin
797.
by bgwalter 1y ago
Cantrill is partially wrong: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/redis_returns_to_open... "Trollope later justified the shift by saying the SSPL license only really "applies to Amazon and Google&
798.
by bgwalter 1y ago
That's one of the factors. In Europe at least the other factor is high energy prices after the broken turbine theater and subsequent destruction of Nord Stream. Prices and unemployment really started to rise after that. The EU buys ove
799.
by bgwalter 1y ago
Why not use the promised exponential growth of home ownership that led to the catastrophic real estate bubble that burst in 2008 as an example? We are still dealing with the aftereffects, which led to the elimination of any working class re
800.
by bgwalter 1y ago
Even if you apply the quote in a different sense, which would take away all its pithiness, you are still presupposing that "AI" will turn out to be a success. The gross injustices in the original quote were already a fact, which m
801.
by bgwalter 1y ago
Using the Upton Sinclair quote in this context is a sign of not understanding the quote. The original quote means that you ignore gross injustices of your employer in order to stay employed. It was never used in the sense of denigrating pot
802.
by bgwalter 1y ago
The FOMO argument!
803.
by bgwalter 1y ago
There has been an effort to deny all variance in human output or abilities in the last 8 years. It works, because most humans are mediocre (including their managers). So they gang up on the productive part of the population, harness its out
804.
by bgwalter 1y ago
"AI" people are grasping at straws in order to point out old "automation". Piano rolls were popular for a while before the advent of better recording techniques. The artists that recorded them were superstars and all cr
805.
by bgwalter 1y ago
All issues that are implicitly pointed out as novel in the introduction have been discussed for centuries. Not only by scholars and experts. Literally 50% of Internet discussion is about biases, selective facts, spin etc. The problem with &
806.
by bgwalter 1y ago
Adapt to your manager at bigcorp who is hyping the tech because it gives him something to do? No open source project is using the useless LLM shackles.
807.
by bgwalter 1y ago
I want to be neither. I either want to continue being a software engineer who doesn't need a tricycle for the mind, or move to law or medicine; two professions that have successfully defended themselves against extreme versions of the
808.
by bgwalter 1y ago
No, nothing fundamentally new is created. Programmers have always been obsessed with "new" tooling and processes to distract from that fact. "AI" is the latest iteration of snake oil that is foisted upon us by management
809.
by bgwalter 1y ago
No, the alphazero papers used an outdated version of Stockfish for comparison and have always been disputed. Stockfish NNUE was announced to be 80 ELO higher than the default. I don't find it frustrating. NNs excel at detecting pattern
810.
by bgwalter 1y ago
Yet you are working on your own replacement, while your colleagues are taking the prudent approach.

More ›