I just sat all night and finished the work of 4 weeks in 5 hours. It's the first time I actually took the back seat to my Jetbrains AI setup and let "him" do 95%+ of the work. I didn't even have to look up API stuff or search the official docs - which are premium grade - of the toolkit or state management I'm using. I just asked him to do things.

I've now got a 5 hour coherent and comprehensive commented chat log to revise and completely understand the intrinsics of an async render queue issue we ran into along the way which alone would've probably taken me 20 hours to get to the bottom of if it weren't for AI. The AI made 2 or 3 minor type mismatch mistakes and fixed those in 20 seconds when I told him what my dev setup was erroring on the issue. He restructured objects on my behalf to match the new model and pointed out sequencing mistakes in the literal strings meant solely for human consumption and corrected them. The AI predicted what I was up to and offered me meaningful, premeditated options on what to aim for next.

I'm a senior webdev earning 50k and a 120 Euro annual subscription to AI quotas has turned me into a team of seniors proficient in every stack I would ever want to use.

Bottom line: If your doing human knowledge work on a digital device and AI doesn't significantly increase your productivity, then your employees are reaping the gains themselves by chilling 50%+ of the time (very likely) or they weren't all that productive in the first place (not that unlikely either).

This CEO talk could also just be propaganda to prevent a panic or someting.

Either way, prepare for incoming. And watch this 10 year old video if you haven't yet. You're welcome.

Last year, Trump was in power. If you meant two years ago, that was when all big US IT firms had their post-covid hiring freezes..

You don't buy cables in big box electronics stores they have ~1000% markup. You need to buy online or in the early 2000s in small electronics store, or hobby electronics stores. If he was paying close to the cheapest option in Best Buy he was still paying 10x more than he should.

Boomers are children of the 1960s - they are the people who introduced weed to UK. Your idea does not hold water.

And I don't see why geographical proximity to other pubs plays a role at all. Fact: a pub can no longer survive only selling drink, unless all the customers live within walking distance. Drinking and driving do not mix. Geographical proximity to customers is more important than geographical proximity to other pubs.

However, round here lots of pubs are doing well if they effectively become restaurants. Good chef, big car park, nice location - and you are on a winner.

You need gatekeepers, planers and people talking to other people in businesses. Not _all_ of those will be replaced by AI. However, it is really not that unlikely that seasoned senior developers - like, f.i. me - actually _will_ be out of a job in 18 months. I've been mentally and emotionally preparing for this possiblity since early last year.

What I find very interesting to experience and hadn't consciously anticipated was the speed of transition. In hindsight it's perfectly logical, but I wasn't ready for this. When a bot closes in on your coding skills and surpases them it's not that your salary goes down a bit or you shift your focus-area a little bit. No. You're out of an effing job. Like, basically instantaniously. Society might not notice right away and you might have a few months or perhaps a year do prepare for the inevitable, but your job will just dissolve into a pink cloud of logic. Quite literally actually.

What's also interesting is that the world won't really care if us IT nerds lose our lofty throne. We are one in a few hundred or perhaps even thousands. Nobody cares. The real party starts when the robots come and take regular peoples jobs. That's what I'm really scared about.

"AI agents don't sit in chairs, and they don't need licences."

I wouldn't be surprised if the juiciest days of SaaS rent seeking are behind us(if nothing else, SaaS vendor numbers were starting to look less promising prior to the 'AI' craze; arguably one of the reasons why they all jumped on it like rabid animals hoping that it would salvage their growth); but this premise seems deeply and obviously flawed. Per-seat licensing has never involved chairs; and (especially when you are dealing with software contracts high value enough that you can litigate, rather than relying purely on DRM) you can make whatever you want need a license.

There's obviously no completely ironclad way to stop your customers from using a scraper to hide their activities; just as you can't entirely prevent account sharing between employees who should be licensed separately; but there's nothing about 'agents' that is any harder to require a license for.

So Apple integrating the RAM into their M-processors was just forward thinking!

When an AI can do everything a human software engineer can do, it will be able to do anything a human can do.

Doing what a human software engineer can do requires knowledge of real life, the ability to learn new things like a human does, the ability to see the big picture based on living a real life.

Wrong. The best code and progging AI will never dance Tango as good as I do. It doesn't have a body. It also won't have my priorities and motivations.

_But_ it is very close that it will be better at progging than I or any other human ever could ever be. I already experience AI helping me out daily on a scale that is just about beyond any single humans knowability. Which shouldn't be much of a surprise. I or any other human can only take one course for an API at a time and learning it properly takes me weeks or months. An AI can do the same but with tens or hundreds of APIs at a time and learn everything there is to know about those in minutes or hours. It can also learn from mistakes and experiences of any other AI within seconds. And if can test new assumptions within seconds as well.

If you look at the current pace of AI, LLMs, ML bots or whatever you want to call them and still think that AI will not coding circles around entire teams of seasoned professional developers any time soon, your being silly or are (blissfully?) unaware of what's happening right now. Especially since AI is already doing that in quite a few places.

Prepare for incoming. And believe me, that's what you want to do.

Is anyone else vastly more concerned about the unspecified 'AI' that definitely-securely handles deciding what to hide than they are about someone shoulder surfing them?

Realistically the greatest risk to your phone's privacy lives behind the screen not in front of it.

Correct. And while we are at it, there is no such thing as a "Donald trump and john f kenedy center for performing arts". As that institution can only be renamed by congress.

But it sure as fuck ainy stopping them from cosplaying it/

That's why I tagged that bit as the part that Marx would not have expected; and a historical period that (while it unfortunately has the look of having been an anomaly) ran counter to his thesis. To the best of my understanding he essentially considered the sort of welfare state/regulated capitalism stuff that gets called 'socialism' as either irrelevant or antagonistic to 'Socialism' as he had it in mind(though, admittedly, he was a much more interesting critic of capitalism than theorist of what would come after it, as a fair few of the people who tried to build post-revolutionary economies found out the hard way).

As I understand it; Marx's thesis was that the market value of unskilled labor would decline to more or less match its cost of production(very orthodox position on what a commodity in a competitive market will do) and that industrialization was steadily replacing jobs that were formerly artisanal and small business that was petit bourgeoise with capital intensive operations that required only unskilled labor; and sooner or later something would have to give because having your salary reduced to your cost of production is exceptionally miserable. He was either unimpressed by the likelihood, or saw as not ameliorating the 'alienated labor' concerns, any sort of welfare state/regulated capitalism arrangement that runs more or less straight capitalist economics but skims some of the (considerable, as he noted) productivity to ameliorate the plight of the laborers.

The post-WWII period was essentially one where precisely that happened; for some mixture of genuine cultural reasons and fear that, with actual communists about, it would be a terrible value to squeeze labor to the breaking point when the (very real) productivity advantages of industrial capitalism meant that you could offer them enough to keep them happy and get still get rich; along with enough fairly rapid technological changes that the ranks of 'artisan' labor were steadily refreshed with various white collar and skilled trades jobs that were not immediately amenable to automation.

I'm certainly not an economic historian; but it seems like the post-WWII period was a genuine anomaly in terms of labor relations and distribution of wealth, at least for the US; though seemingly one that was already starting to show cracks within a generation or two(though any 'marxist' analysis of it gets complicated by the fact that some of the cracking involved the substantial removal of the US industrial base; and I don't think Marx did nearly as much writing about service-sector economies with offshored industry, since that wasn't really a thing at the time).

Go read some history, you'll find these same articles.

I just completely automated most of our IC2 and IC3 network engineering processes with GPT agents.

Not redid; the AI executes the same workflows and tools better, cheaper, and faster. Compressing months of work to two weeks.

It's real.

I suspect that he would and he wouldn't. The specifics of commodities used for popular light entertainment suddenly becoming an ultra-hot item as an ingredient in the means of production would probably come as a surprise: as though readers of penny-dreadfuls were suddenly rioting because mill owners switched to building factory equipment out of paper pulp.

The broad-strokes realization by formerly skilled laborers and petit bourgeoise that they are actually moving downward toward 'proletariat' status, rather than being the respectable junior partners of capital, though, seems very much in line with his expectations; and (depending on where you stand on what 'AI' is doing to programming and various sorts of white-ish collar data munging) may very much be what plays out.

The development that Marx didn't seem to have suspected(though, in the slightly-a-cop-out 'sufficiently long term', wouldn't necessarily view as relevant); is arguably the post-WWII period of backsliding on industrial revolution era labor relations. It certainly wasn't all roses; but out of some combination of genuine conviction and (ironically) competitive market pressure from more or less authentic capital-'C'-"Communists" there was a period where people where being GI Bill-ed into education in huge numbers, Western Europe was urgently Marshall Planned out of the ashes, state tolerated or even encouraged labor unions made industrial jobs at least steady lower middle class livings, and it was generally seen as a bad strategy, potentially even a bad thing, to say "fuck you, I've got mine" too loudly.

Wasn't really until the early '70s that the old ways reasserted themselves, wage/productivity numbers started to decouple, executive vs. worker compensation ratios started flying up, the various planned economies that had once had people running scared either collapsed into basket cases or turned into authoritarian market-capitalist operations; and so on.

I doubt Karl Marx ever envisioned that come the revolution, the agents of revolutionary terror that upend the old order and drag the billionares to the wall would be Gamers infuriated that the tech bros AI fantasies deprived them of their new gaming consoles.

"Gamers of the world, you have nothing to lose except your potato pc and possibly your virginity".

Yeah thats my observation.

Give it a react web interface, or maybe a wordpress template, and it'll do fantastically. Its eaten every website on the planet, it knows what that looks like.

Ask it to optimize a lockless high throughput low latency kafka pipeline that needs to maintain an optimal memory pressure across all core counts, without race conditions or i/o contention, and its going to shit the bed and not know where to start. Actually, so will the first year uni graduate. But at least he can *learn*.