Why is it news? Why grown up people in charge of tech businesses assume it's not going to happen? It's a slot machine - sometimes you get a jackpot, sometimes you lose. Make sure losing is cheap by implementing actual technical guardrails by people who know what they are doing - sandboxing, least privilege principle
Universal basic income is not an adequate replacement for a good career. Universal unconditional prosperity might be one, but it's not clear whether AI can really do that.
Personally, no, haven't seen it in professional settings. Colleagues using AI heavily did not show any superhuman development speed, but definitely increased review burden compared to writing code by hand.
Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
That’s like saying email powers entire economies. It’s not WhatsApp that’s providing the value there, and if they press to hard to try and pull revenue from it, all that communication would flow into another channel.
WhatsApp is one of the buggiest UIs I use daily. Random things like images/messages stacking on top of each other, seeing the HD and low definition videos as two separate things in favorites, never being able to view the HD one, sometimes the messages never scrolling quite to the bottom, just amateur level stuff, I'm a bit impressed with how bad it is.
I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
Not going to argue about what will or will not happen (predictions are hard, especially about the future), but you absolutely don't need AI to explain layoffs at Meta. On one hand they have a failed investment in Metaverse and an underwhelming attempt to participate in AI race. On the other hand they have a stable advertising business that doesn't need much innovation, but can always benefit from some cost cutting
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
Meta, as an organization, is not designed to produce anything useful. If someone at Meta thinks they could organize a programmer collective that would make its members good (or any) money, they can just walk out and do that. Computers are cheap, means of production are not limiting people's capacity to earn living with code.
Every programmer owns the means of code production (unless they forgot how to code without Claude). Turns out it's not necessarily enough to make money.
Yeah, that's the thing. You need the whole business to turn code into money, and you need this business to be run well, and either do what people with big money want it to do or to make lots of people with small money pay for its product regularly. Either way, it's not what autonomous programmer commune will do well in my opinion
It's usual for the programmers (or laborers in general, perhaps) to assume that their portion of the business does all the "real work" and the 60-70% "rest of the company" do nothing and add no value.
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