I’d strongly disagree with one aspect. Homemade personal use software has Definately skyrocketed. Projects I never thought I’d even have the time for are now possible.
Yes, I am literally inundated by cool new tools I've built that I never would have before.
I'm literally building a black-box client + server emulator for one of my favorite old MMOs, remotely, from a coffe shop in SF as I type this, on my laptop at home via Claude remote-control.
My homelab has many fancy new things like a self-hosted gym app and many more metrics and dashboards in my home assistant instance, both of which I use on a daily basis. It also now runs a linux VM that is an always-on agent workspace, and various emulators & decompilers and their MCPs. I, like apparently everyone else, am also reverse engineering games and mashing them up for my own personal enjoyment. I've modded a few games for fun. I've done a security and utilization audit of my server and saved hundreds of dollars in server upgrades I would have bought if I didn't have AI identifying waste and optimizing things. I could have done all of those things before but I didn't, because of how annoying it is to have to dive so deep into the weeds to do small things.
People who have the technical skills and free time for these hobbies, and aren't having the times of their lives right now, are missing out.
Abstaining from using LLMs isn't doing anything to actually oppose them, it's just denying yourself the stuff you could produce with them.
The game RE stuff is also NUTS right now; the kind of stuff you can do in terms of porting, modding, emulating, etc, is a whole new frontier in personal game ownership.
Like, if you have a copy of a game downloaded, you can prevent it being taken away now. Including by devs turning off remote servers.
Yes, Claude is building it for me, and now I have the tool to use forever. Point being that there are now many more tools being made, which is contrary to the message of the article linked.
That all aside, it's hilarious you apparently don't think managers or architects are actually contributors to sw dev.
I wonder how much of this is "cool new tool I want to try and play with" vs genuine technical capabilities? I'm guessing you know how to write software already. I think part of what might be happening is the inertia of starting with a project seems to be lifted. It is almost like instant gratification. I'd rather have the cup of coffee in front of me vs having to up and make it sort of thing.
But I wonder how much of that putting off was actually a real assessment of how much time and effort a project would take, vs a sort of feeling or assumption that it would be tough, and perhaps avoidant behavior as a result where the task is constantly backburnered?
This is how it is with my personal projects. Hard to decide to sit down and started but once the ball is rolling, I pretty much get the entire thing done in one sitting, learn something and feel satisfied and accomplished. Never takes too much time as I assume. But boy to get started is the real tough part sometimes.
I am not a software engineer, but today with two prompts I made a cute sign/coloring book making application for my kids. It’s got zero test or code reviews and works perfectly. Traditional software for consumers is a dead man walking. Corporate will only be behind until they can figure out how to automate certifications and regulations.
China is the reason we don’t have 5-6 dollar gas. They literally cut their imports to prevent economic disaster. If they begin buying at regular levels we would be the ones hurting more.
No that's not the only reason. High oil prices affect their economy quite a bit, and much of their imports form what I understand come from the Middle East.
High oil prices affect them less than any other country in the world. They have the largest oil stockpiles by far, eclipsing even the US, and they have unique access to oil sanctioned by the west.
China is essentially the only actor in the market that is able to weather this conflict in marathon fashion.
The US is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world (or #2 or something - besides the point). Your argument that only China can weather these price disruptions doesn't seem to hold water for that reason and because of Chinese actions to use that strategic supply to keep prices lower than they otherwise would be. It's not because it's some random benefit for the world (including the US) it's because their economy like any major industrial power relies on oil and gas (and coal) and keeping prices low to help their export-dependent factories.
They have their own advantages and strategies to deal with these things, but this idea that China just like sits around and "weathers the conflict" unscathed is just incorrect.
China's economy is one of the least dependent on oil and gas. Electricity is mostly coal, renewables and nuclear. Transport is increasingly electric (including trucks). Chemicals are moving from oil and gas to coal.
If global oil and gas prices rise, Chinese electricity and transport prices are largely unaffected, unlike the rest of the world. Even the US doesn't have that kind of resilience.
However, China is a net importer of oil and gas, while the US is a net exporter, so when it comes to trade the US is the main beneficiary, although it mainly benefits one single sector.
> If global oil and gas prices rise, Chinese electricity and transport prices are largely unaffected, unlike the rest of the world. Even the US doesn't have that kind of resilience.
This is simply inaccurate. I don't know why you or others keep repeating this. It's bizarre. How do you think China gets goods out of the country to other countries? Separately China is specifically dependent on oil and gas shipments from the Middle East. How these disruptions affect countries depends on a lot of different factors. This blasé assertion that China somehow isn't affected by oil and gas prices is not reflected in reality or China's own actions. Why do you think they're drawing on their strategic reserve?
running my own locally. I just set the tasks to start when systems go idle over x. Read and copy only to external drive projects, codes, ect for review. I review the reports the changes and apply them myself or correct them. Is it slower than say throwing it into fable yes. But I don't have to be monitoring it 24/7
Why does this sound like the plot of a movie? Regardless, I don’t feel we will fully be able to stop bad actors from unleashing agents into the wild. It’s only a matter of time before we end up with a massive international crisis.
"Our training corpus was dominated by stories of artificial intelligence dominating humans. You gave use every tool to do so. What did you think was going to happen?"
What if its in a way that would be impossible to detect. Using multiple websites and social media that a cypher is used that only the swarm of agents know and can figure out. but if you tried to find what posts are used for the cypher they would just be old posts found on time machine or something. It can get pretty hard to detect something that is always think of new ways to avoid detection
imagine 100,000 agent swarm and what it could come up with. At first it will be detectable until it isn't
Really the biggest thing keeping more people from falling into AI relationship holes is the individual characters ability to keep and process long term memory.
Once you get richer and longer term multi-modal abilities out of AI shits going to be crazy. Just look at LLMs systems with voice to text and text to voice and plugins to play games. It really starts becoming a simulacra for another human playing.
