After 35 years in the industry in various capacities (from architect, engineer, VP, and different products, small and large companies, ...) I can heartily confirm this.
A company with a good culture is like a good football or soccer team. They work with each other to win, they know each other (enough for the job at least).
I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software.
If management trusts you do to your job and has your back, then you trust the management and will naturally do a better job. Now there are always a few people who are exceptions to this, and part of good culture to identify those and remove them.
> I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software.
This is so true. We have figured out how to use an endless list of software tools. Hardly anyone is as prepared to use the new tools as software engineers.
It's rather interesting that Apple (and Arm) are blazing the trail while Intel is seemingly left in the dust. Maybe not entirely on raw performance, but definitely on performance per watt.
Intel has been making pretty good progress on efficiency the last year and efficiency is the name of the game, you basically can't do performance without it.
My less-than-one-year-old Core Ultra 9 275HX was supposed to be much more power-efficient than previous generations, but I’m not impressed with it at all. Yes, it’s a gaming laptop, but why does it need 70 watts just to idle? And when playing Factorio with a CPU-heavy save, the PC uses 170 watts, while my M5 uses 50 watts on the exact same save. I don’t know how much the CPU alone is to blame for this, but I’m tired of x86 and Intel. My Linux laptop/server with Ubuntu and an AMD CPU is somewhat better (Also a gaming laptop), though. It’s only drawing 25 watts while idle while hosting six web services. So, if I were to go by just my anecdotal experience, having used about 10 different laptops over the last five years, Macs are just in another league when it comes to efficiency. However, the AMD/Linux combination is getting somewhat better at a slow pace, while Windows/Intel is stuck with terrible efficiency.
We knew about this all since the 1980's. Carl Sagan testified before congress in 1985 [1]. That's over 40 years ago.
Yet, we continue to burn more and fossil fuels; solar, wind, EVs, etc, non-withstanding. And right now some governments are actively spending money to work against renewable energy.
At this point I am afraid that we humans will only act when the alternative is unaffordable, when the forest is already on fire. I hope by that time it won't be too late.
Those of us who have been saying this all along won't even get the hollow satisfaction of an "I told you so!", because we'll be too busy surviving.
Vote, drive less (combustion engines), fly less, use public transportation, check your utility mix (and demand a larger renewable fraction), install solar, lobby, buy more local (where possible), consume less, support those with jobs displaced by renewables, accept some loss on your fossil stocks, ...
I think it's more a mix of anxiety, frustration, and exploration.
Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.
Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?
Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.
The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.
More on the frustration: this person with no real world experience is hired and all of a sudden sending me six page articles they themselves couldn't fathom writing and they're lauded by founders and celebrated as pioneers of the company. Nobody in that chain could pick out a race condition from a lineup of cat feces. And I'm the "bad guy" for poking holes in all of the Groundbreaking Computer Science being done.
In my experience human design -> agent code -> agent review -> release -> agent observer, does not (at all!) work. One absolutely has to be understand what is going on, how the system works, how the H/W works, etc, to catch agent errors.
The proposition of us losing those skills is terrifying.
Maybe AI will get better and we truly won't need a human in the loop. Then please also have all PRs signed by whatever model wrote them, and do not come to me for trouble-shooting.
While there are things less than ideal in the US, this is absolutely not the case.
The "Rule of Law" applies to everybody, including the President (recent decisions of the supreme court not withstanding - though they are very unfortunate).
You have provisions for the freedom of press, freedom of speech, to be free from unreasonable searches, a reliable court system, etc, etc.
Searches at the border are murky legal territory, and I think that there is a problem here. You may also argue that the president and senate have too much power, or that gerrymandering is a serious problem (which it is). But from these you cannot conclude a general lawlessness.
(I'm from North-Western Europe, living in the US for a few decades now, so I feel that I have at least some data to compare.)
As a physics layman I find it fascinating how quantum mechanics are tied to information theory.
For example, take quantum decoherence (which, IMHO, is the most logical explanation for the collapse of the wave-function - by saying it does not actually collapse). Quantum decoherence is almost like a giant constraint resolution system - once a particle randomly interacts with another they become entangled and both now have fewer degrees of freedom. When it interacts with many particles, like any macro-effect it has essentially no degrees of freedom anymore. It's all about who knew about what and when. The experiments around this fascinating. (Note that there are other theories, like the many-worlds interpretation, that also explain the collapse of the wave function)
This seems to be another example of this. Anyway, as I said, just a layman.
If quantum probability is a wave function, and interaction introduces a phase shift, this alone is enough to lead to decoherence through the same mechanics as classical optical (de)coherence.
In the same circumstances a light beam stops producing an interference pattern in the Young experiment, quantum wave functions do as well. This is pretty easy to derive, just introduce a random phase shift term, and average across it, and the interference pattern disappears and a bell curve emerges instead.
Doesn't entanglement mean that entangled particles just cannot have same state of the entangled quantum property at the same time, but they can still achieve all states, essentially preserving their degrees of freedom
A state is entangled when it isn’t a product state.
Two spin (1/2) particles in a singlet state have the kind of “they have opposite states” thing going on that you describe, and is a specific way that two particles can be entangled.
OK, so instead of having all states (00, 01, 10, 11) available in entangled state they only have 01 and 10 available because they have to be opposite of each other, but even with that these particles individually are able to have both states right? I'm not knowledgeable in this field, I just have interest.
00, 01, 10, 11 are separable states, meaning that a pair of particles in one of those states can be described as two separate one-particle systems. For example, 01 means that the first particle is in the state 0 and the second particle is is in the state 1.
A state like (01 + 10) is not separable, so by definition it's an entangled state. "Separability" is a straightforward algebraic fact that follows from the definition of a vector and the tensor product. You can see what this means in the following Google answer
(01 + 10) means that if I measure the first particle and get 0, then the second particle is now in the state 1. If I measure the first particle and get 1, then the second particle is now in the state 0.
The state you describe, sqrt(1/2) ( |01> + |10>) is an entangled state, but not all entangled states are like that.
The state sqrt(1/2) ( |00> + |11> ) is also possible, and is also an entangled state, but doesn’t have the two particles in opposite states.
By contrast, the state (1/2) (|00> - |01> + |10> - |11>) is (while a valid state) not an entangled state, because it is equal to (1/2) (|0> + |1>) (|0> - |1>) .
Having my name on a bunch of software patents - and, yes, I tried to get my name off them, but was not allowed - I can fairly confidently say: There is not A single worthy software patent out there. You know, one that is "not obvious to someone skilled in the art" and that actually protects a monetary investment.
Software patent are a scourge of the software industry. Patents are designed to protect costly research; simply having an idea is not costly (but it makes in medical research for example). All that software patents do is creating a minefield that hinders competition.
For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.
I’m happy for the author, but I feel like that blog post kind of supports parent commenter’s argument. It sounds like Slug would’ve been created even if patents were not a thing. They had their own use case for it, and that usecase alone was enough for the R&D investment. So patents did not encourage innovation in this case.
In e.g. medicine, not having patents could arguably mean that companies don’t do as much R&D.
Seems the author made it public domain not because that'd be the best for the software industry at large, but because "holding on to it any longer benefits nobody", which means the amount they earn from it monetarily is today minuscule compared to what it was.
Parents point seems to be about that if this author of Slug wouldn't have patent it in the first place, then in general that work would have had an larger impact in the software industry, compared to this situation where the author did patent it.
Case(s) in point: all the comments on HN who independently came up with the same algorithm but couldn't publish it as FOSS because they found a patent covering it.
I'd argue that how they should have been, but the reality is quite the opposite. The patent framework is all about novel ideas rather than costly research, even though ideas aren't any valuable anymore - the easy stuff that is cheap to reproduce once the idea is known is already discovered.
Multimedia codecs and similar stuff are pretty patent-worthy (costly research) but their value is an exponential function of their adoption, and hence the unencumbered one always wins. Same with basically everything else.
A friend that has a degree in engineering and law who works as a patent lawyer had this to say.
Interesting physical real world problems are NP hard. That's why we have patents. Software? You can work backwards from the requirements to multiple solutions almost always. Which is why patents on software are stupid.
Copyrights are originally to protect authors because an author might create a few dozen works over a lifetime. Of which a few mich actually be worth anything. Copyrights were to protect his income and allow him to leave an inheritance behind.
Copyrights for software is stupid because most of it is mechanically generated and it goes old like last weeks fish. Quote: The source code for Windows 3.1 who cares.
I wouldn't want to abolish software copyright completely, but we would all benefit if the copyright duration was much shorter for software. Something like 20 years. That would keep source code leaks of current software toxic, but make it possible to build on top of old software (like say the leaked Windows XP source)
Anyone who has ever taken part in a software patent litigation ... or in the creation of a software patent, knows intimately that its a bunch of bullshit.
The boogieman that software patent advocates raise is that IP theft and free riding will destroy America if we don't have patents. But literally nobody is creating software to get a patent on it, and software patents don't stop anyone from replicating software.
Instead software patents are just a way for mediocre lawyers to live parasitically off the tech industry.
Imagine a world where we were so worried about bullying that we created a department to monitor all speech on the Internet, and you had to run your speech past lawyers for approval before saying anything. And you could be sued for saying anything by anyone if you didn't get lawyer approval. That would be a world with dramatically less bullying than the Internet today. AND a much worse world with much less communication. AND in that alternate world, the lawyers would argue that there would be more bullying if we put that ridiculous system to an end. And they would be right that there would be some more bullying, AND it would also be right that that degree of bullying would be worth it to have free speech.
Similarly with patents. Yeah, on the margins there might be more IP theft. SO WHAT. This system right now sucks.
It feels more like an arms-race to me. Where I work we patent stuff for defensive purposes only, so we have something when we get sued (and we have been).
Maybe that's just another boogieman, but it seems unless everybody stops nobody can.
China has basically no domestic patent litigation. The way you stop the litigation is to just remove the legal rights associated with patents. Let everything become a free for all. China is just lapping everyone else right now. The lack of strong IP rights is not hurting them. Companies over there are not suffering due to not being able to invest in technology. They invest despite not having strong IP protections. Not because they have strong IP protections. And they know they can't get a monopoly with a piece of paperwork ... a patent. So they continue to innovate at a breakneck pace just to stay ahead of everyone else.
America needs to learn how to evolve our system of industrial production. Our society of lawyers and paperpushers is going to get annihilated in the next ten years at this rate.
If it's really for defense you don't have to go to the expense of patenting stuff, disclosure is enough. IBM used to publish Technical Disclosure Bulletins (TDB) - I assume for patent defence.
A teammate put my name on a patent proposal he filed with our legal team. I immediately demanded to have my name taken off of it. No way I would accept having my name associated with that trash. I'm sorry you weren't able to get out of it.
I'm skeptical of non-software patents as well. So much R&D are funded by taxpayer money yet private companies monopolize the profits. Patents are supposed to keep valuable knowledge public, yet that's not what happens because the primary motivation for patent applicants is to squash competition and they have an incentive to keep key information out. It seems all patents are doing is to make lives harder for the common people.
From a laymans perspective they also don't seem to work. Apple's multitouch felt like something brand new to consumers and yet other device manufacturers copied it anyway. Facebook entire product line is dependent on ripping off competitors unique features. What's the point?
I think the point is more that the patent office has been too broad with issuing software patents. I'm sure some are reasonable, but many are "obvious to someone skilled in the art" and should not have been issued.
You make an argument for patents not existing then, certainly they should not exist for more than 5 years, you should have exploited your discovery by then and competition is fine.
>For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.
But this is minimally protectable, and you can copy the idea just not the exact implementation. Copyright does not have a 'doctrine of equivalents' equivalent. It also supports independent creation. Copyright also does not cover functional elements. You cannot copyright an idea, only the expression. So maybe you can elaborate more on why your point makes sense?
Yes. And that was exactly my point. If an idea is just an idea that anyone can have under the shower, there is no value to society in granting a monopoly to that idea. There was no cost to said idea. In that case is better for society to grant a monopoly on a particular expression of that idea (an implementation).
If that idea had cost (say) a billion dollars (like in some medical research or physical research), there absolutely is value in granting a temporary monopoly in order to encourage such research in the future.
Are you saying Mistral didn't invest a lot of money in discovering the invention this patent covers? I'd bet they'd say otherwise. How is the patent office supposed to tell the difference?
I don't think a "pay-to-play" system works. There's already trade secrets that allow corporations to invest lots of money in protecting things that aren't even inventions. You just seem like you're trying to figure which patents are good or bad. But if a patent is widely infringed, by the same kind of logic, it must have tremendous value as an invention.
Beyond that, it's a trivial batching pattern. Any remotely competent systems engineer developing an agent would immediately reach for it, it's the most basic tool in the toolbox to deal with latency. If Mistral "invested a lot of money in discovering" this, man I'm in the wrong line of work.
You are still missing my point. It does not matter - at all - whether an idea has "value as an invention".
All that matter is whether it cost a lot of money to come to that invention and whether that cost is worth is worth protection to encourage further research.
I've said this before, but if we look critically, we would realize copyright is an inappropriate legal protection mechanism for software. Indeed, copyright protection for software is a historical hack because people didn’t want to figure out an appropriate legal framework from scratch. You “wrote” books, you "wrote" code, let’s shoehorn software into copyright and go get lunch!
However this completely overlooks the fact that the true value of software, and theoretically what we should protect, is not the code, but the functionality it provides. Copyright explicitly does not cover functional elements -- that is the realm of patents -- and really only covers code to the extent that it has "expressive elements." Technical creativity (novel algorithms, data structures, architecture etc.) is expressly excluded.
One non-obvious and absurd implication of this is that any code that can be shown to be purely dictated by technical constraints is not protected -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction%E2%80%93filtration... via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates_Internatio.... -- yet a simple rewrite using equivalent code constructs, like using a while-loop instead of a for-loop, can be enough to keep a snippet of code from infringing the original. (I'm oversimplifying of course, but principally this is how the law is.)
If you look back at significant copyright-related cases for software now (e.g. CA vs Altai above or Oracle vs Google), you'll realize they have twisted themselves into knots trying to apply laws intended for expressive creativity to issues that were essentially about technical creativity.
So copyright covers pretty much the literal code, and the compiled software as a "derivative work", and nothing more. Things only happened to work so far because reverse engineering and re-implementation was expensive.
But as comments in this thread are pointing it out, AI is making it very stark that the code itself matters very little. We're just now realizing how ineffective copyright has always been for code.
I have no hopes that we will figure out an appropriate IP framework for software, so I expect people will move towards other things like patents, trade secrets and trademarks. Which have their own problems, but at least they already exist and are more suitable than copyright, especially in the age of AI.
Disclaimer: I use AI at work and for some projects at home and find it really useful (as long as you know when and how to use it)
With that said... It's funny how we went from "vibe coding" to review burden, sloppy contributions, copyright issues, unclear ownership (as in: who will fix bugs), needlessly verbose code, etc, etc. Several projects have banned AI contributions now and counting.
As I said, I use AI to help architect and write code and really like it; still, I cannot even count the times anymore where the model (we use multiple of the frontier ones) has completely gone down the primrose path.
I always make sure I make it my code, every line is reviewed and understood, maybe I rewrite the AI output here and there, I understand the tests and testing strategy, etc, etc.
So I wonder where this is all going. We are past "vibe" coding already, and so far monetization of AI has been "patchy". On top of that local AI is becoming more and more viable.
The problem is primarily social. When code is cheap and entry barriers don't exist, how do you filter what is valuable?
For private projects, being able to code things quickly is a godsent. Also for professional environments with clear rules and mutual respect, this can be solved. But on the internet, with people you don't know? You must have some hard barriers.
2. Non-professional users, people that need software to just get X done.
I am focusing on non-professionals.
If you look at phones you find apps to book flight, book hotels, exercise, meditate and whatever. Almost anything without a social aspect can be redone with AI.
Why redo with AI? Because it's personal.
I don't need 55 filters when renting an apartment on a business trips: i always want a terrace and good internet, show me price ranges, something close to where i will go to work. And after 10 times i use the app with AI, it should start to know what i like, and after 100 it should better do it.
I want my flights never to arrive in the evening because if it delays i don't want to be stuck in the airport.
I don't really exercise, but i really want to so my app does does need to have 80 exercises, it needs to have 2 basic ones and to use each dark pattern to make me do it.
I love movies, so i want to know when it's coming out.
Lots of this can be done with a simple chatbot, that goes out and find planes or whatever. Yes that is going to be ALSO how we use AI.
The distance between app and chatbot is somewhat of a grey area.
An app is a specific personal tool. An app has an interface, that makes it more reliable, it persists things i like, history and personalizations. An app "I built with AI" likely has some IKEA effect. And much more.
Overall, it's simpler, i know where buttons are because i told AI where to put it and they are big buttons, and if tomorrow i want my personal rent-a-car app to never ever propose company X that just gave me a shitty car, it will do it.
If i want to see the address in can ask AI, but i can also just open the app, no AI, no internet, etc.
I actually built some of those apps, for fun. We are not fully there for a non coder, but not too far.
In terms of security and code, etc, run them in a sandbox, do not put personal data, send to website for actual purchases/actions, zero inbound network connections ....
I am hand-waving, but i don't feel like i am bullshitting if say that the right security tradeoff will be found, no?
In any case I tried to give you an example of how coding AI can mean a sort of paradigm shift for software. I do not mean it in a prescriptive sense, "this is exactly what the future will look like", it's just feel ready to be surprised by how this will develop.
A company with a good culture is like a good football or soccer team. They work with each other to win, they know each other (enough for the job at least).
I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software.
If management trusts you do to your job and has your back, then you trust the management and will naturally do a better job. Now there are always a few people who are exceptions to this, and part of good culture to identify those and remove them.