But you only $200/month for the productivity of what used to cost monthly salary for 10 software engineers. Doesn't this democratize software construction?
The resources to learn how to construct software are already free. However learning requires effort, which made learning to build software an opportunity to climb the ladder and build a better life through skill.
This is democratization.
Now the skill needed to build software is starting to approach zero. However as you say you can throw money at an AI corporation to get some amount of software built. So the differentiator is capital, which can buy software rather cheaply. The dependency on skill is lessened greatly and software is becoming worthless, so another avenue to escape poverty through skill closes.
You might be right but it's common to see that take as short sighted since there is zero evidence it's ever happened before. The common example is the loom. The loom didn't democritize cloth making, it put all the weavers out of business. But it did democritize everything that needed cloth because cloth became cheap. 1000s more jobs were created by making cloth cheap. In a similar way, 1000s of different jobs might be created by making software creation cheap, but just like cloth makers, software makers have no purpose when making software is easy.
I think the combinatorial space is just too much. When I did web dev it was mostly transforming HTML/JSON from well-defined type A to well-defined type B. Everything is in text. There's nothing to reason about besides what is in the prompt itself. But constructing and maintaining a mental model of a chip and all of its instructions and all of the empirical data from profiling is just too much for SOTA to handle reliably.
Put some money on the line. I'm not an economist but you could structure a market where you cannot just take up mental space in the job market for practically nil. That's the current malincentive, that companies put up job listings they have no intention of filling, even when candidates who are qualified by their own criteria apply. The current job market maladies are a perverse incentive of the price of posting a job and applying for a job are effectively nil, the spread is too big for anyone to make the trade.
Yeah something like that. A breakup fee between the job board company and the hiring company: “if you don’t hire someone within 90 days we keep half of the salary.” But there’s not much incentive for the hiring side to do this!
Yes, but how many people have tried to enter the field since then? Is the economy that supports current number of tech workers really better than one that supports 10x?
I think this is one of the weaknesses of rationalism and effective altruism, is that it tries to make a clean break from the common law legal reasoning that the government, and thus corporations, operate on. While I find rationalism to be a useful lens, the fact is that the common law legal framework is totally dominant, and so these deontological arguments made rationally collapse very quickly when translated to the dominant framework.
To be fair, common law and the current system are totally fucking dumb. Everyone that has come up with it and perpetuates it should be ashamed of themselves.
And in that case you begin to wonder why use Python at all? The language struggles to give developers the granularity needed to finely manage threads like C++, and it doesn't have the actor model first class like Erlang. I love Python, but I love Fortran and Lisp too. They've all served their purpose and it's time to move on, even though there is already incredible momentum behind it.
No. Age verification law is not a partisan or ideological thing. It's a global trend. This law is sponsored by both parties: https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab... , and Texas has a newer law (App Store Accountability Act) that requires app stores to verify user ages and obtain parental consent for minors.
There are already "App Store Accountability Act"s present in Texas and Utah. I believe South Dakota is the other state that has one in their House right now. So no, this isn't California being a nanny state. Actually, California's is a lot better than the ones found in other states since literally you're allowed self-attestation of your age bracket (i.e. you don't have to supply an ID or some other such mechanism for independent verification). It's literally the equivalent of what they used to do with porn sites back in the day when they would ask you if you were over 18 -- and if you said yes, well, we tried! (Gold stars for everybody!)
In all seriousness, though, this is the only way where politicians get to pretend they did something and the rest of us get to avoid getting royally screwed. If parents were given dumbed-down versions of the tools that already exist to manage corporate-owned cell phones and laptops then there'd be a lot less for people to complain about (not that it would stop perpetually incompetent parents from pointing the finger at everyone but themselves for their own failings, of course, but at least the vast majority who AREN'T those people would be satisfied).
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