It may not involve a webview, but from what I can tell it definitely still is running JavaScript.
Either way it doesn't matter. As someone who has used Windows in a significant way since the 90s, the taskbar and start menu are a buggy mess. The new design is awful, I just want a list of my programs like before.
Margins wouldn't drop because every consumer is going to vibe code their own apps. It's going to bring down the barrier for competition creating natural price pressure in the market. That is of course if all other factors end up equal such as quality, security, performance, etc...
This of course will be software in general imho. It's not that the profession will disappear overnight. There is going to be this tight squeeze until all the margin/excess salaries/etc.. is gone. There is also going to be immense pressure to produce as much as possible and productivity expectations are going to go way up (even if it is unjustified).
Basically, the good days are over. It's going to be a miserable profession.
They measured 16 developers and called it a "study"? That is amusing. Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago, the tools have already changed dramatically.
So just run a new study this year. I do think the tools have improved, but it should show up empirically. The only people for whom the urgency of "right now" is present is for the C-suite and investor class who are fighting to make sure they survive, but it might also be a crisis of their own making. Don't confuse your identity as a worker with the identity of the capitalist class.
I think my employer should buy me a laptop and possibly a monitor or two to help my productivity because I subjectively feel they'd be helpful, and I have the market power to insist on tools that I subjectively feel are helpful. If my CEO announced that monitors are super important and everyone will be tracked on monitor space usage going forwards, I would still want to see evidence that this is going to accomplish something.
Your CEO likewise subjectively feels all of their employees using AI will be helpful, and has the market power to insist that their employees use them.
When engineers demand evidence that AI is productive, but not that having laptops and monitors are productive, it screams confirmation bias. "I'm right, you're wrong" as a default prior.
I wouldn't call it confirmation bias, but you're right that is my prior. If an executive and a line worker disagree about whether a tool is useful, I assume unless presented with evidence to the contrary that the executive is wrong.
I would emphasize that I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the converse either. If an executive is just absolutely convinced that dual monitors are a scam and nobody needs more than their laptop screen, they can run their company that way, and I'm sure there are many successful companies with that philosophy.
> It's like "A study found that parachutes were no more effective than empty backpacks at protecting jumpers from aircraft."
Are you under the impression that we don't bother to empirically prove things that seem obvious, like the safety benefits of parachutes? You don't think parachute manufacturers test their designs and quantify their performance?
There are no randomized controlled trials that parachutes save lives.
This is repeatedly used as an example in the medical community about the limits of randomized controlled trials. This isn't some impression - your impression that such evidence exists is wrong.
There might be some parachute company tests about effective of velocity, etc., but there are no human trials.
> There are no randomized controlled trials that parachutes save lives.
It's a good thing "randomized controlled trials" aren't the only kind of empirical evidence, then.
We know the limits of how fast a human can safely land. Parachute manufactures have to prove that their designs meet the minimum performance specifications to achieve a safe speed. This proof is not invalidated by the fact that it doesn't include throwing some poor bastard with a placebo parachute out of an airplane to demonstrate that he dies on impact.
Also, the answer to your original question is yes. There are numerous studies showing that multiple monitors improve productivity.
Well we’d go back to an era where private capital owns the world. The public would not be able to participate or benefit from the ownership of companies and share in the prosperity.
I should of used the term "equity" instead of "capital". I meant that the worlds largest companies would no longer be able to be owned by public equity and would only be available to those in the exclusive club of private equity.
I mean the average person already barely has any participation at all, and certainly doesn't benefit from it when their money gets dumped down the toilet because of some widespread financial scams and grifts that repeatedly happen over and over again.
And how many of those people are actively making decisions about what companies they are investing in instead of blindly putting money into a black box 401k account because they are financially punished for not doing so?
Not by choice. Stocks are pushed onto Americans (as well as Europeans, and most people in the West) via their pension funds, advanced savings accounts, and sometimes even their salaries (via options). If normal savings accounts in their local credit union would offer adequate interest rates (and if paying in stocks was outlawed by their unions) stock ownership would plummet. I would be surprised if it would even exceed 2%.
That feels like a disadvantage by design. In a different (and more fair) economy, investing in government bonds or a savings account in your local credit union would give you a better deal then leaving your money with a global hedge fund conglomerate which in turn invests your money into all sorts of unethical companies, including oil and weapons companies.
Your government is way more democratic then your hedge fund. And I would wager your are in a massive minority (perhaps among my hypothetical < 2% who would own stocks by choice in my hypothetical economy) if you desire your unused money to be spent by Canadian billionaires to further enrich them selves, instead of your government investing in infrastructure, health care, education, etc. or your local credit union lending it to somebody in your community buying their first house, or opening up a new business which you are likely to shop at.
Even if AI knows everything and is basically sentient, we still need to understand these things to work with it. How can we prompt it reliably without understanding the subject matter for which we are prompting?
If anything I consider fundamentals in STEM (such as Math/CS) to be even more valuable moving forward.
1 chatgpt query is a little misleading though. Let's see an 8 hour full bore claude code agent session. Or maybe running 3 agents for several hours a day.
It also doesn't include the amortized cost of training the models, as far as I can tell. I believe I heard that training the models took more energy than total queries against that model, but I could be mistaken.
I believe training currently costs significantly more than inference to all the current vendors, so I'd be surprised if it doesn't also use more power.
And by the look of it, that'll be the norm pretty much forever - unless something fundamental about how models can be trained/updated, an "older" model loses value as it's knowledge becomes out of date, even if we no longer get improvements from other sources or techniques.
But other things likely change based on "lifetimes" and usage patterns too - e.g. a large battery for an electric car may have a higher upfront energy cost in manufacturing than a small ICE + fuel tank, but presumably there's a mileage that the improved per-mile efficiency overcomes that, and then continues to gain with each additional mile.
Right now with agents this is definitely going to continue to be the case. That said, at the end of the day engineers work with stakeholders to come up with a solution. I see no reason why an agent couldn't perform this role in the future. I say this as someone who is excited but at the same time terrified of this future and what it means to our field.
I don't think we'll get their by scaling current techniques (Dario disagrees, and he's far more qualified albeit biased). I feel that current models are missing critical thinking skills that I feel you need to fully take on this role.
> I see no reason why an agent couldn't perform this role in the future.
Yea, we'll see. I didn't think they'd come this far, but they have. Though, the cracks I still see seem to be more or less just how LLMs work.
It's really hard to accurately assess this given how much I have at stake.
> and he's far more qualified albeit biased
Yea, I think biased is an understatement. And he's working on a very specific product. How much can any one person really understand the entire industry or the scope of all it's work? He's worked at Google and OpenAi. Not exactly examples of your standard line-of-business software building.
> I don't think we'll get their by scaling current techniques (Dario disagrees, and he's far more qualified albeit biased).
If Opus 4.6 had 100M context, 100x higher throughput and latency, and 100x cheaper $/token, we'd be much closer. We'd still need to supervise it, but it could do a whole lot more just by virtue of more I/O.
Of course, whether scaling everything by 100x is possible given current techniques is arguable in itself.
You can trivially enforce that at the AI provider level, which covers 99% of the problem the law is designed to address.
Of course it doesn't cover the issue of foreign state psyop operations but the fact that enforcing laws against organized crime and adversary state actors is hard isn't specific to AI.
Are you not aware of open-weights models and local generation? I think the vast majority of deepfake content is being genned in basements on RTX cards, not on public providers. People already have all this content, and have archives of it, and can run it airgapped. Cat is out of bag.
I would be very surprised if that would be the case. Maybe you mean deepfake content generated by organized crime or state actors, but that surely is a tiny fraction of what's being generated on Grok or other platforms.
I am well aware of them, and I'm well aware that they are very niche as I'm the only one of my surrounding to use one of those. And those very models are being developed by tech giants and VC backed companies, on which regulation have leverage.
The fact that a small black market exists doesn't mean regulating the mainstream market doesn't matters.
Also, most people like you fail to realizes that the EU only has mandate from the member states to regulate the economy. The EU has no business dealing with people using SDXL finetunes on RTX cards in their garage.
No. Again, this regulation is about regulating businesses because that's what the EU is about.
The general use or creation of deepfake for porn, harassment, or election manipulation, is outside of what the EU can regulate as an institution, it is the responsibility of member states. (The same way the EU can impose rules on platform with respect to copyright violations, but cannot enact rules against piracy in general, these are always made by member states).
You don't have to prove anything? You just have to mark the outputs of your slop generator appropriately. "Proving" one way or another is their problem when it comes to enforcement.
Either way it doesn't matter. As someone who has used Windows in a significant way since the 90s, the taskbar and start menu are a buggy mess. The new design is awful, I just want a list of my programs like before.
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