It seems the intent of my original post was not clear.

Yes I know Libre Office exists, it's the one I use at home. My point was that Big Tech is "all in" on AI across the board, driven by an obvious eagerness to eliminate human software developers from the creation process. They see only the money they can save.

But the consequences of actually achieving such a goal would undermine their own business models. The reason why they would no longer need programmers is the same reason why no one would need their products.

We are still nowhere near that point yet, despite the enthusiasm that they are trying to drum up with stories like this one. Their agents can create a C compiler. Well today I asked cursor to move several methods from a file that had gotten too big out to a separate class, making the methods public and static in the process, and updating references. This entire operation involved a grand total of two code files and barely any "thinking."

It started generating powershell scripts to do batch operations on the files and screwed that up, wiping them out entirely, then tried to retrieve copies from git which wasn't set up for this project, and started showing inner text generation about trying to reconstruct the files just from the content in the chat history, when I stopped it. I had the whole thing backed up because I am no fool and also the Cursor interface gave me an undo button which worked.

So, these AI that are so capable they can create C compilers can't even move a handful of methods from one file to another, without destroying the whole thing.

AI is nowhere near ready to replace us.

When will 16 AI agents be able to code me up a Word processor with features equivalent to Microsoft Word?

Because once they can do that, people can stop buying Office and just vibe up their own versions. So long as the agents can implement standard file formats, the differences in implementations won't matter.

An interesting future is being teased here; one in which the only tech giants remaining will be the makers of AI, and everyone else will just vibe up all the software they now pay through the nose to get.

And people DO like AI, when it is directly serving their needs. AI-powered apps are popular in all markets where they appear. People like asking them questions and getting answers more quickly than if they went spelunking through search results on the Internet. People like chatting with chatbots, and especially people like generating silly art using prompts. This stuff is all over the place!

But people DON'T like paying full price for content that should be high-quality, but is in fact cheap AI slop. Slop is fine as a hobby, but not as a consumer product. All industry leaders WANT people to like this, and will do absolutely everything they can to convince us to like this (including outright forcing it on us whenever they can), because of all the jobs they will be able to cut. But it doesn't change the fact that people still don't like it.

And they don't like losing their jobs to AI either. And they also don't like the impact on electricity bills and environmental quality.

So, as usual, the situation is more complex than "people don't like it." And because of this, something as simple as an advertising push doesn't indicate a bubble pop.

There has never been any point in history, including pre-recorded history, during which humans acted in a fair and reasonable fashion as a group.

Those in power (whether their power be derived from wealth or political influence) are held to a different standard from everyone else. It has always been this way. It was this way when we were hunter-gatherers living in forests and caves. It was this way before we even qualified as humans.

This is not a quirk of culture or circumstance. This is a property of human behavior. More fundamentally than that, this is a property of pack-animal behavior.

So, you can expect to see such injustice continue into the foreseeable future.

I have made quite a lot of money investing in the stock market, and you can too. People who know what they are doing gain the option to retire early.

You don't do it by day-trading or other stupid things. One makes money in the stock market through wise, tried-and-true buy-and hold strategies. It takes many years for the profits to amount to much. That is more than most people can bear. Everyone wants to be an overnight millionaire. Nope, that's not going to happen on the stock market.

Day trading puts you in direct competition against high frequency traders, where you are completely outgunned. It is folly. Buy-and-hold investing yields excellent returns in the long term, but requires discipline, patience, and a proper education in the relevant details.

Christianity has an enormous number of sects. They all disagree with each other on just about everything. That's going to include this point about wealth.

Of key relevance is this: it doesn't matter what the scriptures say. Every sect has their body of beliefs, and if you quote scripture to them they will just tell you that the verse must be interpreted "in the context of" their established doctrines. They will pick other verses that they consider foundational and say that THOSE are the only verses that can be taken literally, and the verse you just quoted is metaphorical or exaggerated for effect or otherwise doesn't mean what it seems to mean.

All Christian sects do this. Some insist that the Bible is their only source of doctrine, and others freely admit to the use of other sources and "tradition" or more plainly "the church is the source of doctrine and the Bible is just a book we study under the church's authority." But even the "sola scriptura" sects will refer to hermeneutics in one form or another to explain why your verse does not mean what it seems to mean.

Your concept of an "unjustified layoff" is, economically speaking, backwards.

Every job costs money, and therefore, paying that money is what requires justification. If the business no longer needs that job done, then keeping the employee on staff is wasting money. How much money the company is making has no bearing on whether or not any given job is justified.

This conversation changes if the labor force is organized by a union that imposes rules intended to protect employee jobs and income against economic conditions that might make them irrelevant. There may also be laws around "right to work" or protected classes that could complicate the matter, and make some layoffs illegal.

But "they make enough money to afford my salary" does not entitle one to a job. Instead "they need my skills" earns one a job.

Well the article doesn't mention you by name. That's only in the summary and it says that your friends did this, not you. Though I can see how this could easily be misinterpreted by a quick skim of the summary.

You seem to be implying that bombs are only evil and can only be used for evil, and that makes them "evil objects."

More generally, "explosives" are the technology that bombs are made of, and they have many non-evil uses in construction, demolition, firework displays, etc.

Even when we wrap an explosive up in a shell and call it a "bomb," it then qualifies as a weapon and has all the non-evil uses that weapons have (which is to say, preventing violence through deterrence, and protecting the innocent by being deployed against those who intend to harm them).

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

Tech is neither good nor evil. All technological devices have potential for evil use, as well as potential for good use. Moral evaluations apply to actions, not objects.

Oh it's a great trick if you can do it. Just ask the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Steam is already saturated by low-quality cheap games. There are multiple strata of indie games, and the lowest stratum is by far the largest.

AI powered tools will make it even easier for the video-game equivalent of "garage bands" to churn out slop and try to make a buck on it on steam. But regardless of what that might mean for our ability to find good games on the platform, it also means that the overwhelming majority of indie game developers won't be able to make a living doing it. They will be lucky to even get close to breaking even.

Meanwhile, huge game studios will be able to pay highly talented creators minimum wage to slave away for 70 hour weeks to spend most of their time using AI-assisted tools to build the AAA titles. And young and naive developers will still be so eager to make games for a living that this will be sustainable.

Thank you for the very clear and concise example of precisely what I was talking about.

You zoomed right in on a very specific thing that humans normally do that the computer didn't do in this case, and then declared that this is exactly computers aren't intelligent. The irony is you were talking about a computer that can write code; people have been saying for decades that computers aren't intelligent precisely because they can't write code! Furthermore, the example you gave only sometimes happens; most of the time when you give an LLM a correction like that, it incorporates your correction just like a human would. Some LLMs are better at this than others.

For clarity, I am not asserting that computers qualify as intelligent. That is not my position. But I am pointing out that your answer as to why they don't qualify is philosophically sloppy and has no scientific basis. You are just latching on to whatever random thing is in front of your face at the moment as an example of behavior that doesn't seem intelligent. The very moment you use a better LLM that can do exactly what this one could not, you would just look harder for some other thing that humans do that it doesn't, and repeat.

When people are speaking "naturally" (which is to say, without scientific or philosophical precision), the word "intelligence" is a vague and sloppy word that rolls in all kinds of mental abilities, including and in particular "conscious experience."

When people say "the LLM doesn't actually understand anything" for the most part they are using the word "understand" to mean "hold the concepts in conscious awareness." For them, intelligence requires consciousness (or just "life") which they expect computers don't have.

So, they will continue to argue that computers aren't intelligence in the "important" sense of the word, no matter how much one might drill them for precision. And this is the primary reason why the definition of "artificial intelligence" remains a perpetual moving target. As has been said before, "artificial intelligence is whatever computers can't do yet." People just jump from one random thing that humans can do, that computers can't, to another, like a skier bouncing from one mogul to the next, because these are just demonstrations of the "core thing" which is nothing more than their own sense of being a conscious being (which they still think computer's aren't).