> Has anyone else considered that producing code faster isn't necessarily a good thing?
This has been an relentless goal of the industry for my entire 40 year career.
> At a point you're more work for your self/organization because unless you get everything perfect the first time you're creating more work than you're resolving.
Nothing is correct the first time (or rarely). Accelerating the loop of build, test, re-evaluate is a good thing.
I think you captured yet. Not many people agree but the real world metrics speak the truth, and that is trying and failing faster gets you further then methodological planning and structured approaches.
There IS experimental evidence on this and anyones anecdotal opinion is instantly blown to smithereens by the fact that this was tested and producing code faster is provably better.
I recently did a contract at medium sized business with a large retail and online business that had a CFO and several accountants / bookkeepers. You're describing a situation where that CFO only needs two or three accountants and bookkeepers to run the business and would lay off two or three people.
Fair enough - I'm probably biased because I mostly see small practices (1-3 people) where headcount can't really shrink further. In that context it's about throughput per person. But you're right that in a larger org with a CFO making staffing decisions, the efficiency gains get captured as cost savings rather than more clients served. The 5-to-3 scenario you describe is realistic and happening now.
I keep seeing that small teams or individuals are getting most of the productivity gains from new ai.
Small teams or individuals that learn to use ai well can outpace larger teams, even if the larger teams also use ai, because communication / coordination overhead grows faster than team size. Tasks that before needed large teams to get done, can now be done by smaller teams.
Large Knowledge work teams have lost their competitive advantage.
I see this as a business opportunity for small actors. Every large knowledge work team that doesn't quickly adapt and downsize itself, is now something you can disrupt as a small team or individual.
> > Working for free is not fun. Having a paid offering with a free community version is not fun. Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun.
> Completely different situations. None of the MinIO team worked for free. MinIO is a COSS company (commercial open source software).
MinIO is dealing with two out of the three issues, and the company is partially providing work for free, how is that "completely different"?
The MinIO business model was a freemium model (well, Open Source + commercial support, which is slightly different). They used the free OSS version to drive demand for the commercially licensed version. It’s not like they had a free community version with users they needed to support thrust upon them — this was their plan. They weren’t volunteers.
You could argue that they got to the point where the benefit wasn’t worth the cost, but this was their business model. They would not have gotten to the point where the could have a commercial-only operation without the adoption and demand generated from the OSS version.
Running a successful OSS project is often a thankless job. Thanks for doing it. But this isn’t that.
> Running a successful OSS project is often a thankless job. Thanks for doing it. But this isn’t that.
No, even if you are being paid, it's a thankless, painful job to deal with demanding, entitled free users. It's worse if you are not being paid, but I'm not sure why you are asserting dealing with bullshit is just peachy if you are being paid.
They wanted adoption and a funnel into their paid offering. They were looking out for their own self-interest, which is perfectly fine; however, it’s very different from the framing many are giving in this thread of a saintly company doing thankless charity work for evil homelab users.
Where did I say there were only downsides? There are definitely upsides to this business model, I'm just refuting the idea that because there are for profit motives the downsides go away.
I hate when people mistreat the people that provide services to them: doesn't matter if it's a volunteer, underpaid waitress or well paid computer programmer. The mistreatment doesn't become "ok" because the person being mistreated is paid.
I doubt that minio pulled the open source version because they were mistreated.
Really yeah there are some projects where this is a problem, but it’s mostly because the project only has a single maintainer.
People are angry about minio , but that’s because of their rugpull.
The minio people did a lot of questionable things even before the rugpull. They tried to claim AGPL infects software over the network, on a previous version of https://min.io/compliance
> Combining MinIO software as part of a larger software stack triggers your GNU AGPL v3 obligations. The method of combining does not matter. When MinIO is linked to a larger software stack in any form, including statically, dynamically, pipes, or containerized and invoked remotely, the AGPL v3 applies to your use. What triggers the AGPL v3 obligations is the exchanging data between the larger stack and MinIO.
“I don’t want to support free users” is completely different than “we’re going all-in on AI, so we’re killing our previous product for both open source and commercial users and replacing it with a new one”
Now think about this for a moment, and you’ll realize that not only are “AI takeover” fears justified, but AGI doesn’t need to be achieved in order for some version of it to happen.
It’s already very difficult to reliably distinguish bots from humans (as demonstrated by the countless false accusations of comments being written by bots everywhere). A swarm of bots like this, even at the stage where most people seem to agree that “they’re just probabilistic parrots”, can absolutely do massive damage to civilization due to the sheer speed and scale at which they operate, even if their capabilities aren’t substantially above the human average.
> and you’ll realize that not only are “AI takeover” fears justified
Its quite the opposite actually, the “AI takeover risk” is manufactured bullshit to make people disregard the actual risks of the technology. That's why Dario Amodei keeps talking about it all the time, it's a red herring to distract people from the real social damage his product is doing right now.
As long as he gets the media (and regulators) obsessed by hypothetical future risks, they don't spend too much time criticizing and regulating his actual business.
Yes, but those are directed by humans, and in the interest of those humans. My point is that incidents like this one show that autonomous agents can hurt humans and their infrastructure without being directed to do so.
Sorry, misread your original comment. But it seems to me that young people in the 50's and 60's (aka the golden age most Americans think of) where much more dissatisfied than older people -- the 60's were notorious for protests.
I would like to, but I cannot, since it is a region-local newspaper that comes as actual paper, that only has a paid online offer, to which I have no access, nor could I post a link to that. If I went through recent paper form newspaper, I could get a photo of the text in German, but then I would (A) need to spend that time, and (B) need a place to upload pictures, without having to make an account, and only then get back to you with a link. To be honest, I am too lazy to do that, just to justify a comment on HN.
That's not unreasonable, but then you also didn't really "cite" your source. Even without photographing the paper, giving the name of it, article title, or author would go a long way.
I think the downvotes are harsh btw and in general HNers have gotten too reflexively downvoting IMHO.
This has been an relentless goal of the industry for my entire 40 year career.
> At a point you're more work for your self/organization because unless you get everything perfect the first time you're creating more work than you're resolving.
Nothing is correct the first time (or rarely). Accelerating the loop of build, test, re-evaluate is a good thing.
reply