In Australia we share the Poms' attitude to failure and success, and have refined it into "Tall Poppy Syndrome". In Australia, it is bad form to boast of your successes too much. You need to have some humility, some awareness of luck and privilege, give credit to others, and don't come over too egotistical, to succeed here.

Obviously in the USA the opposite is true; any failure must be explained away, talk about as much success as possible, and claim all the credit for yourself.

It resulted in a few very strange conversations. I thought most of the US potential co-founders I met were arrogant, boastful, dickheads [0]. I didn't trust that any of their claimed successes were real, I didn't believe they'd done half the things they said they'd done, and I didn't want to work with them. And I'm sure they thought I was a complete loser, incompetent and unable to succeed at anything I tried.

I occasionally hear US VCs and investors complaining about this when they visit Straya; that people here don't celebrate our success, and we're not ambitious enough. I see this as a culture gap that they're not navigating successfully.

As has been said about the US/British relationship; "two countries divided by a common language"

[0] apologies if you were one of them. I'm sure you're not really!

A practical demonstration of how reliant Europe was on Russian gas, by switching it off.

or if he's talking to us from 5 years in the future.

Ignoring the financial aspect, this all makes sense - one LLM is good, 100 is better, 1000 is better still. The whole analogy with the industrial revolution makes sense to me.

> AI firms are currently burning money as fast as possible selling a dollar for 10 cents.

The financial aspect is interesting, but we're dealing with today's numbers, and those numbers have been changing fast over the last few years. I'm a big fan of Ed Zitron's writing, and he makes some really good points, but I think condemning all creative uses of LLMs because of the finances is counterproductive. Working out how to use this technology well, despite the finances not making much sense, is still useful.

How does this make sense? LLMs are doing knowledge work so they face the same coordination problem that humans do, they're not assembly line workers. We have no reason to believe that the lessons of the mythical man month don't apply to LLMs too since the coordination costs, especially when they're touching the same piece of code, are very high.

(My writing style is very dry and to the point, you may have noticed. I looked at my post and thought, "Huh, I should try and emotionally engage with this poster, we seem like we're having a shared experience." And so I figured, heck, I'll throw in an enthusiastic interjection. When I was in college, my friends told me I had "bonsai emotions" and I suppose that still comes through in my writing style...)

I've been a professional software developer for >30 years, and this is the biggest revolution I've seen in the industry. It is going to change everything we do. There will be winners and losers, and we will make a lot of mistakes, as usual, but I'm optimistic about the outcome.

As a complete aside from the question of productivity, these coding tools have reawakened a love of programming in me. I've been coding for long enough that the nitty gritty of everyday programming just feels like a slog - decrypting compiler errors, fixing type checking issues, factoring out helper functions, whatever. With these tools, I get to think about code at a much higher level. I create designs and high level ideas and the AI does all the annoying detail work.

I'm sure there are other people for whom those tasks feel like an interesting and satisfying puzzle, but for me it's been very liberating to escape from them.

Is it possible that the code you are writing isn't good, but you don't know it because you're not an expert?

If you'd like some evidence, I literally just flipped a feature flag to change how we use queues to orchestrate workflows. The bulk of this new feature was introduced in a 1300-line PR, touching at least four different services, written in Golang and Python. It was very much AI agent driven using the flow I described. Enabling the feature worked the first time without a hiccup.

(To forestall the inevitable quibble, I am aware that very large PRs are against best practice and it's preferable to use smaller, stacked PRs. In this case for clarity purposes and atomicity of rollbacks I judged it preferable to use a single large PR.)

Eventually this compounds and gas stations start closing.

That accelerates the switch to EVs because gas becomes hard to find. Which accelerates gas station closures, and so on.

The point at which it becomes impractical to drive a gas-fuelled car is approaching. It will hit different countries at different times, but it's there. 10 years, 30 years, whatever, but it's coming.

Long before that point, a hybrid is just an EV that has to carry around a chunk of useless engine that is hard to fuel.

  Elbil: 31,78 prosent
  Diesel: 31,76 prosent
  Bensin: 23,90 prosent
  Hybrid (not plug-in): 5,38 prosent
  Plug-in hybrid: 7,18 prosent

    Electric: 31.78 percent
    Diesel: 31.76 percent
    Petrol: 23.90 percent
    Hybrid (not plug-in): 5.38 percent 
    Plug-in hybrid: 7.18 percent

In US, gas stations barely make any profit on gas, its all from the convenience store, beer, water, lottery tickets, trinkets, souvenirs, etc. Costco, HEB, Walmart, etc also have gas and can run it as a loss leader for customers to compete with Amazon. As the number of gas consumers go down, gas stations everywhere will start shutting down, except the Costco/HEB/Walmart, because gas stations can't compete with those prices.

The U.S. saw over 210,000 stations in the early 1990s, dropping to around 145,000 by 2022, and potentially as low as 115,000 by 2020, according to various data points. Some estimates suggest a potential 50% reduction in traditional stations by 2050 in some regions: https://boosterusa.com/from-the-experts/the-inevitable-death...

Gas stations are also trying to figure out how charging fits in. While people are expected to charge at home, there will still me some demand for on the road charging. This is a place that hasn't worked out yet (I personally expect people will go for a nicer meal and sit down for an hour charge - but this might be my bias)

As for what would happen with gas station when EV's dominate, what already seems to be in progress here (not due to EV's, but other factors in the market) is that the "traditional" gas station serving stale coffee, snacks, and windshield wiper fluid are on the way out, replaced by either unmanned cold stations with just the pumps, or then by major roads large full-featured mini shopping malls with groceries, half-decent restaurant (sometimes several), and other shops. I think in a future EV world the cold stations would disappear but the higher end service centers would do fine.

We're seeing ever-increasing supply chain attacks. All these bazaar projects are vulnerable to that.

It's going to take some serious funding to get the kind of oversight we actually need to secure this stuff properly.

And the clock's ticking - those maintainers from the 90's are going to retire, and we need to have some way of replacing them

The same person who vets people who approach you as a project maintainer today and offer to participate in maintaining your FOSS project.

That is to say, what I've asked about is not intended to solve security problems, just a lack of exposure / connecting interest-with-need problem.

Shares are a short-term speculative gamble; you buy them in the hope that the price will rise and then you can sell them for a profit. Sometimes the gap between these two events is measured in milliseconds.

So the only thing that matters to Wall St is growth. If the company is growing then its price will probably rise. If it's not, it won't. Current size is unimportant. Current earnings are unimportant (unless they are used to fund growth). Nvidia is sexy, Apple is not, despite all the things you say (which are true).

I spent most of my career working in companies with <50 employees, and only hit a couple of unpleasant founders. The few large companies that I worked in were always bureaucratic nightmares by comparison.

Small companies won't pay FAANG salaries, but they also won't make you feel like a meaningless cog in a vast unsympathetic, unproductive, machine.

I’ve worked for 3 companies like that. It was really great if your views aligned with the founder. If they didn’t, you got fucked.

I really enjoyed when a bunch of juniors were fired the day before Christmas because the founder heard them discussing the latest movies they watched and decided that they had bad opinions and shouldn’t work at his company since he’d be embarrassed if his peers heard their tastes. Not hyperbole, direct statements. We referred to it as the Red Christmas at the time.

I believe you got lucky, I don’t find your advice actionable.

I'm sorry you don't find it actionable. Please continue doing whatever you're doing now that is working for you.

Lol.

It doesn't work out because I don't have leverage, and tried to stand up for what I believe in. I also don't believe it would work for you unless you had views that aligned with the current oligarchical leadership that the entire US industry is operating under.

If you only have a good time when you found the "right" founder, because they will and are capable of harming your career or income when you disagree with them, and the law does effectively nothing to protect you from their ego driven tantrums, then you are a serf at best.

I'd agree with you if it was relatively common that employees who had differences of opinions with founders of companies, weren't forced out, but that is not my experience.

I do not find contentment out of accepting that some assholes are my Betters because they have more money than me.

Labor is the next option above slavery and indenture, and now that slavery and indenture are frowned upon, labor has absorbed that space as well.

If you want to have some control of your environment and destiny, you must be an independent agent, a contractor, entrepreneur, or consultant. A tradesman. You have special skills and expertise, your own tools, and a portfolio of masterpieces at the least.

There is nothing new in this space of human endeavour, it is as it has been, and I suspect will continue to be, for better or for worse. Sacrificing your agency for subservience is going to make you feel at the mercy of your “betters”. If you don’t want that, don’t do that. Labor law and other conventions have made it a little better, but the fundamental relationship is still master and servant.

If we go down this path, what can I say that doesn’t get my account banned and my speech suppressed for what what I would suggest doing to people with your opinion?

It’s not the way I think it -should be- but it is the way that it is. The incentive alignment keeps it at that local minima, and every attempt to move it to a new one so far has introduced so many perverse incentives that it ultimately causes the regression or even complete failure of the economies it is implemented in.

I don’t know what the answer is that maximises human happiness and minimises human misery, but I suspect it lies well outside of the paradigm of conventional market economics.

Within the dominant paradigm, It’s all a matter of risk management. With employment, you are paying your employer with your surplus value to handle the risks that you feel powerless to manage. Market risks, capital risks.

In exchange, you accept risks that your opinions and comfort won’t be prioritised, and in some cases even your physical well being.

In effect, you are betting against yourself being able to balance those risks against the risks posed by pursuing profitability.

The ability to manage risks is intersectional with your ability to manage discomfort and privation. When you run out of money, the house wins by default.

That’s why the foundational step for anyone should be to do whatever they must to obtain a safe fallback position. A place to be. A safety net. This is what enables risk accommodation. Without taking risk, there will be no advancement. If you don’t have a fallback plan, a safe spawn point, do everything in your power to create one, at least for your children.

Just out of curiosity, was it something despicable like them liking Marvel movies? Or more akin to disagreeing whether Eyes Wide Shut could be considered a good Kubrick movie?

If you want to see weird sexual pictures, might as well go all the way with "120 days of Sodom".

Or just go and see one of those documentaries of serial killers from the 70's, like Ted Bundy.