Which again is ironic, because I've been doing that for most of my career whenever I am introduced to a legacy code base: The first thing I try to do is delete code. I think it's just good engineering practice to try and delete code as much as possible.
To me you are making this sound a lot simpler than it actually is. Corporate takeovers are anything but a guarantee, and companies very often adopt anti-takeover measures, such as poison pills, dramatically increasing the acquisition cost (macaroni defense), and worse case scenario, soliciting another friendlier party to purchase instead (white knight). Also if it is large enough, governments do tend to get involved.
Also, in kind of an uno-reverso, Germany kind of did something simlar being described here, but in a much different fashion with Volkswagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Act which notably traded short term shareholder pressure for long term stability. It's had the unfortunate reality (hindsight of course) of being the very thing that may be leading to Volkswagons current severe economic crisis.
Side tangent, but I have to call uno reverse on the Volkswagen demise (its a lot more complicated than how they organized themselves). I attribute it in large part to the terrible handling of the Euro crisis, where tons of money was printed and given to banks to revitalize the economy, that then gave it to big business, who then looked out their window and saw a bunch of poor people, and consequently bought back their own shares instead of investing in new technology.
To address your point I agree that it is complicated, democracy in general is complicated, but I think its worth it to try.
I also think that the amount of defenses a company needs to have ready to repel a takeover in my opinion strengthens the case for internal shares: if you want to take over, do it from within, convince the people on the ground, instead of rapaciously as an outside force.
Congrats? I used to write one of these every so often in a couple hours when I was learning a new programming language.
Don’t take this as directed at you because I don’t know your background, but I’m starting to wonder if many who called themselves engineers here that have similar takes to this ever knew how to actually program to begin with.
I mean in total it's about 300k lines of code (across all the tools I built for myself). It's a poor metric, but it's not something you put together in a couple of hours.
Oh, and specifically the food logging part: no, you didn't do that in a couple of hours years ago. Taking pictures of food and having estimates grounded in your personal "recipe" library was a major research project until vLLMs came out.
There is still like 20 free versions of these on the market (pre-ai) I am sure yours is barely different. You just wasted time and tokens and pat yourself on the back for it and somehow feel this can be applied generally as "productivity" and "massive imporvements in software"
No not fully fledged and feature complete. But a baseline POC with the core functionality? Isn’t every react tutorial these days a Todo app?
Anyways my point wasn’t to try and make myself out to be some John Henry (I could have done without the snarky "congrats", apologies). It’s that drowned out in the noise of AI based development, we forget that there are amazing software engineers out there (I’m not placing myself in this category) that were incredibly productive in a short amount of time. Quite some time ago, I watched, in awe, a live stream of two prominent Go developers completely rewrite the HTTP package, for example. And this was over the course of a night.
We need a new metric to gauge AI usefulness other than “I built this thing quickly”
It used to be that most programmers were good enough to reimplement a basic database app in a few hours as a way of learning a new language or framework.
The pool of programmers today is many times larger and less trained and so correspondingly most of today's programmers simply aren't very good and are astounded by feats that were once basic learning tasks.
Xbox 360 was pretty great. My favorite game to play online there was fight night round 3. It was an incredible experience. Managed to climb to the top 50 on the leaderboards!
Later revisions fully fixed RRoD. Not to excuse the original issue, but if you get one of the S models (Trinity or early Corona boards), they're extremely reliable in my experience. I even saw a guy pour a whole can of Mountain Dew Voltage into his Halo Reach edition 360 while it was on (not on purpose, can tipped over) and after some time in front of a space heater it was good to go again. The 360 aged like wine and is very worth modding and playing still today.
I have hope we will get there eventually, once all the hype/wealth extraction/boys club giving all their buddies money cycles end, and the specialized tools with real value start to emerge.
These specialized tools already deliver tremendous value. What happens on the backend financially is of no concern to me, as I have no influence over it.
> Then again with social security set to go bankrupt it’s not like we’ll be able to retire
I don't know about you, but my notion that my social security check is all I will need to survive my retirement years died when my father started drafting his own social security in the 2010s, and it was literal peanuts after being a small business owner his entire life (restaurants) and paying more than his fair share in taxes. Do the average folk still have this notion that social security = retirement? Hopefully not, it's certainly misguided now, but it was misguided then, too.
We've been with Apple long enough now to know exactly what their playbook is, and much to the dismay of their competition, they do it well.
They let other tech companies break the ground, release something new and truly innovative and unique -- say a folding phone (it's basically a solidified meme amongst the IT crowd now - "Oh Apple will get all of samsungs features from 2 years ago finally!" -- not realizing that this is intentional), and they will let them front all the risk of whether or not it has staying power -- then they will come in and innovate at the margins and bring it into the Apple ecosystem, which is an advantage in of itself at this point.
Apple has always done that do a degree, that’s not what I’m talking about. iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, etc. I’m talking about the live announcement/delivery of the product.
Would I trust to let an AI, with zero human input or oversight, to diagnose, come up with treatment plan, and ultimately operate on my l5/s1 disc that's been bugging me for the better part of my adult life?
Would I take a novel drug "discovered" by AI (I mean entirely by AI, no human input, remember we are talking AGI) that promises to cure some chronic neurological disorder?
In both of those cases, they are the biggest hell-no's I can emphatically say.
Until I can say hell yes to that question, we aren't close.
Preempting those who say "Well your doctor/drug companies are probably mostly using/going to be using AI to do that" -- not what we are talking about here, and in both cases, not AGI (and I would probably find a new doctor)
Yes, but it means general the way humans are general. Clearly being a general intelligence shouldn’t require being any better at any individual task than the average human, or even the bottom decile of humans.
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