I agree. I think the days of the developer who hated talking to anyone but is still very valuable are over.
I think social skills are much more important today because one person can do so much more but this person needs to talk to many others to know what to build.
And this is why I am likely to leave software. I actually really like people, but I am autistic and not especially good at talking to them, and it's quite drianing to do so.
I will miss coding, but I had a good run. Time to learn a trade. I don't begrudge this fate.
Why would you leave software? Sitting down and working in silence and thinking is still a very rare and valuable skill, the talking part is not so much.
If AI solves all coding and software then we are not going to sit around talking, it will be the time to sit down and do some very complex deep work that needs silence, concentration and understanding.
For you it will be paradise, you can also just point all the people to talk with your agent instead of you.
You can still code the interesting parts. We all need some mental gymnastic to keep up. Leetcode or writing the parts that interests you, it doesn't matter.
Yes I worked, almost for a decade. I know everybody loves talking there, but that was true before AI as well. Good thing is that with AI, big tech is going away. Who needs 5 layers of management when 5 guys can replicate their product.
I'm trying to think of an exception but I find it hard to disagree. Even if you know exactly what to build, it's pretty hard to get any adoption without being aggressively social. Find a good extroverted friend, maybe?
No… the person who's going to do well is the one who doesn't have to ask what to build. The one who has to ask is no better than an AI, except they start out wanting to ask, rather than starting out with no interest whatsoever until they're prompted to have one.
When everything you ask for is instant and valueless, even asking becomes meaningless, and everyone is waiting to see something they'd not thought of.
Then, a thousand thousand copies, immediately… but also, watching that person like a hawk to see if they can do it again. That's the future. A lot of people will just plain become unable to think or intend anything on their own, or even want anything.
Somebody still needs to determine what the company system actually look like, that someone is still probably a programmer, it doesn't matter anymore if that programmer is also a good coder.
I think being anti-data centers is like being anti-nuclear, anti-energy, and pro-deindustrialize stances that gripped Europe over the last 20-30 years.
ScraperAPI and ScrapingDog. The latter also offers Google Search at a fraction of the official Google API price. Wrap their APIs into an agent/MCP tool et voilà.
A year ago, I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown.
Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.
However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?
A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Literally all they'd have to do is release the server executable(s) they already have. The community will do whatever work is necessary to get them running even if they require a cursed stack and client modifications.
It runs into the problem of region locked licensing stepping onto the toes of other regions.
Imagine a Korean company makes a game and sells a license to an American company to publish their game. Eventually the American company shuts down and is now forced to release the playable game.
This version of the game is now going to compete with the Korean version of the game, because nobody will be enforcing the region lock anymore.
Your reaction to this is probably "great, screw region locking!" but judging by how some of these Korean games do in the west it's entirely possible that they will forego a global/American release altogether. They make most of their money from the Korean or Chinese region. Why would they risk that for a smaller global region?
Personally, I wouldn't mind this, but I can certainly see how this could backfire and keep some of the eastern games exclusively eastern.
All that needs to be done is to produce a game that will remain playable if the company shuts down. Simple as that. It doesn't need to phone home anywhere, it doesn't require an internet connection, it just... turns on and plays.
At that point, any company can just fold whenever they'd like without having to do anything in this area, and everyone who bought the game can breathe easily, double-click their icon and start playing while the publisher's employees go look for other jobs.
At least now it’s pretty straight forward for a hobbies group or individual to reverse the protocol and implement something that’s open source along with patches
Reverse engineering the protocol is not the same as reverse engineering the entire server, though. That would be very hard in most cases, especially when you don't have access to the server binary.
> I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown
It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.
Why is this an existential issue? Every game that could be played, on all platforms, from all studios, for decades, met this requirement because they could be played offline right out of the box.
Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.
Permutations of environments are the bane of quality. Designing for offline is easy. Designing for online is easy. Designing for both isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly harder than designing for one or the other.
It's not at all harder on a technical level. Offline is the same as online with only one player. Many games boot up a server automatically when you play singleplayer.
And yet, also for a couple of decades or so, we could play video games that would function just fine offline and could online in multiplayer mode.
This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?
Yeah, it's not that companies "forgot" how to design for offline use.
They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery.
So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.
For the record, I don't at all believe that companies forgot, and I firmly agree with your stance that they'd rather take the path that nets them more money, customer experience be damned.
I'm just surprised that folk on a tech-focused forum are putting forth such short-sighted technical constraints as an example of why this sort of legislation won't work.
They don't have to do anything. They just need to stay the hell out of our way. They don't even need to release anything, we'll do it all ourselves at zero cost to them. Just don't bother us with idiotic lawyer nonsense, that's literally the only thing they have to do.
AI or not: the main idea here is that future developed games under such policy would already be built to go offline/p2p at a moment's notice. It's relatively easy to make the switch if you build for it (or if your engine has tools to support it).
>A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Banktupcy at this scale simply means ownership of the IP and game changes to someone else. So they'd be on the hook if they want to operate in any jurisdiction with such a law.
I think the iOS App Store is going to be in steep decline in a few years. People will generally have a few apps: ChatGPT, Instagram, messaging, and something like a Photos/Camera app.
Everything else will be done in your AI app.
I've been hooking up more and more data and plugins into ChatGPT/Claude. I only want to use it. I don't want to use other apps if I don't have to. For example, research, buy, plan. I prefer not to use other apps.
I think all it takes is for OpenAI to make a phone from the ground up for this and Apple is going to have serious competition.
In some way, yes. The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible. And now they are sad because they lost their way to this status.
When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.
I don’t think it’s a matter of greed. I’d say it’s about incentives. In every field, people want to progress. I don’t think mathematicians are any different, even though we try to admire and idealize higher principles and the pursuit of knowledge. If you don’t publish papers under your name, you won’t progress in your career or receive enough support to work at the frontier. It’s just a general observation.
I don't think so either, so let's stop the charades and Terrence Tao guest blogs about the field being about some kind of understanding and it actually being about just climbing the career ladder and accumulating status by churning out papers to ensure ones resource accumulation.
It may be true in some cases but as a blanket condemnation of the entire field it makes no sense. Moreover, I can't fathom how you could reach this conclusion if you've actually done any reading on "the whole situation." The reality is precisely the opposite of what you're claiming.
Mathematicians are upset partly because AI companies are "scooping" their work. If you had worked on something for years and this happened, you'd be upset, too. The manner in which this happened with Navier-Stokes was unconscionable. The mathematicians who did the work deserve recognition. OpenAI deliberately stole it from them.
More importantly, the purpose of mathematics isn't to produce proofs. It's to produce mathematics and mathematicians. Working through problems helps people find new mathematics -- and makes people mathematicians. A machine that generates proofs destroys that. It breaks the cycle that makes mathematics fruitful, interesting, and not just self-regenerative but self-propagating.
AI companies aren't just clear-cutting the fields of math; they're sowing them with salt -- and they're doing this precisely because of greed and hunger for status and the title of "first."
> The whole situation seems completely grounded in that mathematicians are greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood and publish as many papers as possible
You're gonna get downvoted but this is absolutely true. People who've never been in real professional academia don't understand but this is exactly what most very successful academics are like.
> When you remove this greed and status seeking you might actually end up with a healthy environment.
Nah I think you're just gonna have collapse because you've removed all incentive.
Unhinged and honestly nauseating take. Were you hurt by a mathematician at some point? I don't even know where to begin with how negative and backwards this is. I guess I could start by saying that if you replace "mathematicians" in your comment with literally any other profession you could make the same criticism about greed and clout. With the "writing their names in blood" comment, I have no words. I will weep for the world if it turns out that this is how people see math.
Many other professions are somewhat honest about their motivations.
Quants are open about that they just want to make a shitton of money.
The guys I know who work at OpenAI just want an expensive car and a hot wife to fuck.
Mathematicians(and many academics) however have long been hiding behind the guise of furthering human knowledge, understanding things, etc. Then a model does theorem proofs and suddenly there is chaos and the real incentives and motivations are put on display for the world to see.
This is a deeply cynical (not to mention, a touch misogynistic) take on human motivation. This might be true for your small circle of friends but I think it reflects your thinking a lot more than some deep objective truth about people and their careers.
If that is the case and I am wrong, how come there is a crisis in every math department? Why is Terrence Tao publishing copium guest blogs daily about the meaning of mathematics?
And Williams thoughts are kind of idealistic. "Now the credit is shared across the entire field". This "credit" does not give your department grants or further your own career.
Rather it incentivizes you to be the first one to prompt, and to steal ideas from your peers because you can prompt better and have your name on more discoveries.
I never claimed there isn't a crisis. I think the motivation of mathematicians is a mixture of prestige and genuine curiosity and understanding about these abstract problems. I think recent advances are creating a reckoning on how the community-at-large addresses these incentives. It is highly reductive to argue that the only motivation is as crass as you put it.
"Prestige" is just a nicer way of saying "greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood".
I don't think you disagree with the comment. Maybe it's a cynical way to describe the situation, and it sounds mean, but it doesn't make it untrue.
If mathematicians can't be motivated to understand math and advance human understanding via (for example) reading AI proofs because they can't put their name on new discoveries, then yes we need to figure out the motivations.
> It is highly reductive to argue that the only motivation is as crass as you put it.
"Genuine curiosity and underestanding" is apparently not enough to motivate all mathematicians (I'd even extend this to all researchers in all fields). If AI creates an environment where "prestige" can no longer be assigned to individuals and this creates a crisis in motivation among researchers, well, this is a problem, and accusing researchers as "greedy for status and clout trying to write their name on new discoveries in blood" is a somewhat mean and distasteful description of how we got into the situation. But again, not untrue IMHO.
Note that they didn't say the greed for status is the only motivation. We're adults here. We can see the strawman. I think we're all on the same page. Quit crying over insults.
> The guys I know who work at OpenAI just want an expensive car and a hot wife to fuck.
This goes a fair bit beyond an insult. I'm calling out the frankly reductive and sophomoric frat boy thinking behind this statement.
I think some of it might be nihilism without actually thinking about it more deeply and trying to be constructive. Some of it is just .. well .. shallow thinking perhaps without much life experience, I wouldn't speculate.
They said the same thing for transistor density in new chip nodes. It took 40 years of doubling every 2 years to finally hit a wall.
And although the industry hit a wall in density/area, they switched to scaling in 3D or glueing chiplets together. Moore's Law is still working if you change the definition to transistors/integrated circuit.
Transistors doubled for so long, but pretty much no other technology has come close, so it’s not like going to improve for very long, which is far more common. Transistors only did it due to a quirk in physics, that of electrons being long lasting, super tiny, and fairly controllable. We’re out of such particles to make another set of leaps.
For data bound things, there’s also fundamental laws of information theory, far stronger than physics theories, since they’re theorems about math. And LLMs can only compress knowledge so far, and we’re about at it now.
As many have commented, not really. Shorting is about exact timing as much as knowing the inevitable outcome. Get the timing just a bit wrong and you can be right and broke. The Big Short portrays that quite well.
Credit default swaps. Basically an insurance that pays if a stock/asset value plummets. The problem is that you have to pay for this insurance coverage, and currently the prices are really really high
[1], meaning that the market is expecting a failure soon, especially with interest rates/bonds yields going up.
Yes, the reason I used to root for the US as a power was that they pretended to be ethical with stuff like the FCPA and the USAID. Of course those pretenses have been dropped, it's a wash really. I'm only left to hope for an end to whatever madness this is, since really, it looks like the US has lost to China and that's going to become very clear in the coming decades.
Their strategy is to prevent open models from proliferating, so their massive investments in these AI frauds are not completely unwound.
This makes no sense. It's pretty clear that they want open models to proliferate as a counter to OpenAI and Anthropic dominance.
If the market is concentrated into 2 players, those 2 players will control both the models and the hardware. Both of them already have custom AI chip ambitions.
Nvidia wants open models to matter because it allows them to sell hardware to OpenAI, Anthropic, and any company that wants to run open models.
I think social skills are much more important today because one person can do so much more but this person needs to talk to many others to know what to build.
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