The downside is that since everyone can do it, without understanding the "it" properly, security issues will be boundless and not understood, being rooted will be commonplace, and what you thought was safe and secure will be widly broadcast.
For most people, though, prompting your own software is beyond the realm, since they have day jobs to attend to, groceries to buy, children to herd, and lawns to mow, and they will be oblivious to the scams, fakes, and charlatans who have vibed up something to look useful but only aimed at getting hold of personal info and credit card details.
>security issues will be boundless and not understood
Again with the optimistic take, but I do not think this will be an intractable problem. LLMs are becoming good at finding security vulnerabilities.
This would certainly be a radical change in how the software ecosystem operates. But I think you are ignoring the advantages of more flexible, abundant, customized software.
sorry you mean the upside is that selling software is dead? I really find it optimistic to think everyone even whats to "prompt" their own software. That seems like a nightmare compared to quality software developed by experts that you can trust instead of inshallah and AI
> I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of for-sale software.
We're seeing the end of "simple" for-sale software. Like OPs CRUD app, a UI front-end on-top of a database, of which there are a gazillion examples so some AI can easily synthesize some approximation of whatever requested variation.
The selling of software was always in the "moat", not how fast you were able to churn out CRUD apps. We used offshore that to a more viable economy, but now we're offshoring that to an automated process.
We're not seeing the end of for-sale software, we're seeing the beginning of the end-to-end solo founder.
we're already there. When apple announced the iphone, the price of software went from can-make-a-profit-$39.99 on a PC to $4.99 and then $0.99 for a phone app. Which became "that's too expensive" at some point, and then reset to free.
I posted more or less the same thing in a comment over on lobste.rs[1] - being able to create your own bespoke software tools, without any developer experience is (mostly) a really cool thing.
This isn't someone being inspired to build something: It's the automated "drive-by" cloning and scammy, dubious nature of these clones that bothers me along with the copying of personas & identities to spam them across social media.
I don’t have data on this. But I’m getting recommended YouTube videos that are 1-2 hr AI generated music, in the genre of background music (coffee listening and focus).
I listened to one. It was pretty good!! There’s no lyrical content, but the production was strong.
In that niche of “music you don’t really pay attention to” I predict AI generated music will only grow.
That’s basically the face of GMOs, so it is an issue for GMOs. GMOs for whatever reason have a terrible ambassador and I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary.
For vaccines, a good portion of the population remember vaccines being developed and marketed to help people. Then there are immigrants that remember more recently how life changing vaccines are.
I am very concerned by the rise of political violence in the US, and I especially don't like how much support it gets on social media. Burning down a warehouse or shooting a politician does not make you a hero.
What's the alternative? You think calmly asking those politicians not to sell you out to the trillion dollar corporation that wants to build a datacenter in your backyard is ever going to work? Be real.
History has repeatedly taught us that violence is usually the answer. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but it is what it is.
I think it’s interesting that you choose to focus on this part of the situation. To me, it’s far more relevant that the general public has little, if any, recourse through legal means such as voting. This is what makes political violence inevitable, and some would say, fully justified.
Political polarization create tribalism, where people align their view with their tribe, and justify an increasingly more escalatory means to fight the "other side".
Other potential macro-contributing factors may include: breakdown in local community, removal of community forums for discussion, attention economy and tabloid journalism gravitating toward emotional reaction (TikTok) rather than intellectual dialogue (balanced journalism), social media echo chambers, removal of accessible popular education, defunding of public media, unaffordable public access to medicine, credit culture, increasingly unaffordable costs of living and abnormally performative political dioramas. The net result are people, unable to reason about the world around them, drawn in to emotional us-and-them with a dialogue of echo-chamber reinforcement, who decide semi-rationally to "chuck it all in" the second things get out of control financially, psychologically or emotionally. In other words, the modern world has built a perfect breeding ground for recruitment to extremism. <s>Great time to start a cult.</s>
... and in a classic example, apparently the mere mention of concern regarding the rise in US political violence got this thread flagged. Where can you have a discussion anymore?
Especially consider how many fellow workers Paper Mario could have killed with his arson. But smart people tend to realize they can do more with their lives by not being violent.
In my book, you are a hero if you sacrifice your own well-being for the utilitarian good of the public.
Many people here would call Putin's assassin a hero, the important distinguishing factor is whether it's a clear societal good or bad. If it's unclear then it's assumed bad.
I am not disagreeing with you here. But platitudes do nothing to convince people. You need to actually explain why the world is a better place with X politician in it, because it does actually matter.
Violence isn't going to give you the quick answer you think it will.
Once you start shooting, everyone starts shooting. Bystanders get hit. Companies start defending their businesses with private armies. The economy collapses. We all lose.
Countries high in political violence are the worst places in the world to live.
Except agents actually have an intent, and can route around obstacles to accomplish that intent.
If you merely block a specific action, they will find another way to do what they're trying to do. Agent security requires controlling the agent's intent.
The goal behind most "clean" software design in general is to eliminate the possibility of failure via constraints. That's the pattern I've seen over the years. Of course, the map is not the territory - you need to make sure the reachable set within the constraints is actually a subset of the real reachable set. Which may be underspecified or unknown a priori (as if you could've really specified the true reachable set, why didn't you just encode those rules?)
So I'm sympathetic to the criticism, especially since composition of formal methods & analyzing their effects is still very much a hard problem (and not just computationally - philosophically, often, for the reason I listed above).
That being said, I don't know a better solution. Begging the agent with prompts doesn't work. Are you suggesting some kind of mechanistic interpretability, maybe?
Yes, but the incentives created by that system lead to insurance adjudicators operating with extreme adversariality towards the insured. Add to that the extreme inelasticity of demand for insured products (e.g. healthcare, or getting access to a car to use to commute after one is totaled), regulatory capture of insured products/services by insurers, and time, and you get pretty toxic systems wherein insurers exert upwards price pressure without significant checks.
Regular people, not sociopaths, are responsible for most of the evil in the world.
There is no tiny minority of 'evildoers' that we could root out and be pure from.
Other bad things happen because of unintended consequences or the collective behavior of many people. Climate change or deforestation are not caused by greed or scheming CEOs; it's a side effect from the actions of billions of people individually trying to better their lives.
I'm familiar with it. The "banality of evil" in that book isn't about regular people, it was about the leadership of the Nazi party willing to go along with the Holocaust for personal power, then trying to get out of responsibility for it by claiming they were "just following orders". Those aren't regular people, those are sociopaths.
Regular people don't all independently decide to "do evil". There is banality in the ones that agree to go along with it, to save themselves from being ostracized or mildly inconvenienced. Do they perpetuate evil? For sure. But are they the villains responsible for it?
The "evildoers" are the tiny minority of sociopaths doing the convincing, because it nets them more personal power, and they don't care who they hurt along the way.
There is a huge amount of injustice in the world, morally speaking I should be out there fighting against it with everything I have. But I'm also the sole breadwinner for my family and I have a mortgage, so I mostly keep my head down and try to survive. Does that make me an evildoer? I sure hope not.
Maybe on doctornews, but this is hackernews. To us, Baumol's disease means your job, which has increased productivity, disappears, while your costs, which don't have increased productivity, go up.
It's amazing to me that people believe a company is easier to run than a robot. Several people try to start business every year, most of them fail. The lesson is right there.
The upside here is that it's become extremely easy to make these kind of single-purpose hobbyist apps, and it's only going to get easier.
Yes, selling software may be dead. But instead you'll just prompt your own software for whatever niche problem you're personally solving.
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