I use AI every day, I feel like it makes me more productive, and generally supportive of it.
But the angst is something else. When nearly every tech related startup seems to be about making FTEs redundant via AI it leaves me with a bad feeling for the future. Same with the impact on students and learning.
Not sure where we go from here. But this feels spot on:
>I think that the best we can hope for is the eventual financial meltdown leaving a few useful islands of things that are actually useful at prices that make sense.
All the angst is 100% manufactured by policy, LLMs wouldn't be hated if it didn't dovetail with the end of ZIRP, Section 174 specifically targeting engineer roles to be tax losers so others could be other tax winners, Macro Economic Uncertainty (which compounds the problems of 174.)
If ours roles hadn't been specifically targeted by government policy for reduction as a way to buoy government revenues and prop up the budgetary bottom line, in the face of decreasing taxes for favored parties.
This is simply policy induced multifactorial collapse.
And LLMs get to take the blame from engineers because that is the excuse being used. Pretty much every old school hacker who has played around with them recognizes that LLMs are impressive and sci-fi, it's like my childhood dream come true for interface design.
I cannot begin to say how fucking stupid the people in charge of these policies are, I'm an old head, I know exactly the type of 80s executives that actively likes to see the nerds suffer because we're all irritating poindexters to them.
The pattern of actively attacking the freedoms and sabotaging incomes of knowledge workers is not remotely a rare pattern, and it's often done this stupidly and at the expense of an countries economic footing and ability to innovate.
I agree that some kind of meltdown/crash would be the best possible thing to happen. There are too many players not adding any value to the ecosystem at this point. MCP is a great example of this - Complexity merchants inventing new markets to operate in. We need something severe to scare off the bullshit artists for a while.
How many civil engineering projects could we have completed ahead of schedule and under budget if we applied the same amount of wild-eyed VC and genius tier attention to the problems at hand?
MCP is now only used by really power users and mostly only in software dev settings but I see them used by users in the future. There is no decent mcp client for non tech savvy users yet. But I think if browsers will have build in better implementation of them they will be used. Think what perplexity comet or browser company dia trying to do. It's still very early for MCP.
I use AI every day, I feel like it makes me more productive, and generally supportive of it.
But the angst is something else. When nearly every tech related startup seems to be about making FTEs redundant via AI it leaves me with a bad feeling for the future. Same with the impact on students and learning.
Not sure where we go from here. But this feels spot on:
>I think that the best we can hope for is the eventual financial meltdown leaving a few useful islands of things that are actually useful at prices that make sense.