But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. In 2020 people predicted that Facebook Horizon would only go one direction, always improve and become as pervasive as the internet. So when you predict that the design and architecture capabilities of models will continue to improve, thus making code quality irrelevant, you sound very confident. And if in five years you are right, you will brag about it here. If not, well I for one will not track you down and rub it in your face. Peace out.
You're confusing betting on a company/product vs betting on technological improvement in general.
It is absolutely the case that virtual reality technology will only get better over time. Maybe it'll take 5, or 10, or 20, or 40 years, but it's almost a certainty that we'll eventually see better AR/VR tech in the future than we have in the past.
Would you bet against that? You'd be crazy to imo.
Well I wasn't talking about AR/VR tech. I was talking about a society where using VR like in the the visions the company Meta was drawing up. It hasn't manifested and since the company Meta is now downsizing their VR investments the progress of that AR/VR utopia is not _currently_ getting better, because people don't like it/use it. And I got a kid that was HOOKED on vr and spent so much time with his friends on VR, and now. They hang out on Discord and play CS2 on a very flat 2d screen. Will this change "In The Future(tm)"? I don't care but my point is that a statement like "code quality will be irrelevant" miiiight age poorly if in five years, taking into account model improvements, people still care about code quality and the agentic engineers still use extra effort to make certain the outputted code adhers to "good code" standards. I know I will but if ass code turns out to over time be objectively better than good code, I might change my mind or maybe start a new career in something tangible.
Well, I wouldn't say it's irrelevant. That's a high bar. But I think it's becoming less relevant. And I tried to explain this as a counterpoint to engineers who think AI coding won't catch on in a lasting way bc its code quality is garbage.
All else being equal, ofc you'd rather have good code than bad code.
But millions of non-developers who can suddenly build simple software for themselves (or use AI assistants that generate simple ephemeral software on the fly) aren't going to care about the underlying code quality so long as it works, which it does.
And hundreds of thousands of software engineers, who can suddenly build singlehandedly what in the past took a team of 5-10 to build, are going to be okay with the tradeoff of getting massive speed boosts but with quality not quite as high as if they were to build everything themselves. Same for software engineers who are now churning through their list of side project ideas, which has mostly sat dormant for the past 10 years.
Previously they lived in a world where the only axes were, "Build more things vs have good quality" or "Build ambitious things vs have good quality." Now they have a new axis which is, "Allow AI to help vs have total personal control of quality," which is quite similar to the pre-existing axis of, "Hire employees vs have total personal control of quality." But way cheaper and more accessible. Of course some will take advantage. Which means, de facto, a world where code quality (or at least personal control of code quality) is on average less important and prioritized than it used to be.
We're seeing all of this happen right now. People are making these choices in large numbers today.
There's a kid outside the window of the place I'm staying who's been in the yard playing and talking with people online through his VR headset for like 2+ hours. He's living in the future. Whatever happens, he and his friends are going to continue to be interested in more of this.
Whether what they're using in 20 years is produced by the company formerly known as Facebook or not is a whole different question.
Edit: cool article, I have myself speculated that we will get a new language made for/by llms that will be torture writing by hand/ide but easy to read/follow/navigate/check for a human and super easy for Llms to develop and maintain.
I wonder how much the roots of erlang is showing now? Telephone calls had a very specific "natural" profile. High but bounded concurrency (number of persons alive), long process lifetime (1 min - hours), few state changes/messages per process (I know nothing of the actual protocol). I could imagine that the agentic scenario matches this somewhat where other scenarios, eg HFT, would be have a totally different profile making beam a bad choice. But then again, that's just the typical right-tool-for-the-job challenge.
I love that the tool in question is very calm and collected, in contrast with the emotional wreck that is the US regime. I got a very helpful response to this prompt and I will make it continue working on a python script to get my historical chats looking good in Obsidian.
> Ok. So I'm cancelling the subscription to ChatGPT and moving over to Claude because of the news of OpenAI striking a deal with us department of war. (https://www.techradar.com/pro/openai-just-signed-a-huge-deal...) Please line out a good exit strategy where I can keep the information in my chats and projects on my own hard drive.
What would help so much would be to force the platform to act in a way to not try to retain the user at every cost.
Like YouTube. I would love to have parental settings, "no shorts", "no recommendations on video page". Kids could search and click on the creator to see more. Combine that with blocklists and curated allow lists. Boom, YouTube is not a problem. And kids getting bored of clicking around would be a feature.
I'm in the later part of the game and I feel really stupid. Some levels are so small I feel like I can understand all possible strategies but none work. Lovely game overall though, highly recommend!
Weird fun fact (as an Argentinian who went to school in England for a few years): in English-speaking countries, America is not a continent in the same way as in Spanish. In English they have two continents: South America and North America.
So the word "American" in English does not mean the same as "Americano" in Spanish.
There's really no natural word in English to refer to someone from "El continente Americano", because no such continent exists in English. That's why they use the word "American" to refer to someone from USA exclusively.
That sounded fascinating as a rather large difference in world view stemming only from using different languages.
It turns out that there are various models for the number of continents, and that is (phew) known in Spanish, too. See the Wikipedia page [1] (link to Spanish version) for instance. This is for European Spanish though, but I couldn't find a version of the page in es-AR.
I think "the Americas" means the continent(s), and America (to some extent) can mean either but it would feel more like something used as a gotcha at a pub quiz.
You're definitely right about there not being a word for someone from that continent though.
"American" to refer to USA exclusively does make sense either way because USA shares the continent with at least two other countries no matter how you slice it.
Frankly, the model with the single America continent doesn’t make any sense, because south and north Americas are so different in both geographical and cultural/historical sense.
If you purposely go into your phone settings and turn off auto-capitalization (which is what the kids do, since they're all typing on their phones), isn't it the very definition of pretentiousness? You're going into extra trouble to signify you're part of a clique, while feigning "laid-backness" and "i dont even care bro".
But you do care. You care so much to project your appearance of being cool and that you don't even care that you go through extra trouble to keep it up, even though paradoxically it would be LESS effort to not do it.
I think you are reading to much into kids trying to break norms and trying to be "part of a clique". It's not pretentiosness, it's part of finding yourself. They are also actively trying to get you to not read them because you are old and think they "are not serious" so mission accomplished I guess. And time will tell if these kids will invent something you have to respect. (Spoiler alert, we did and they will to)
I turn off autocapitalization on my phone so I can be consistent with my computers where it IS more effort to use capitalization. I also believe quite dogmatically that computers should not try to be smarter than me, I can press the buttons I intend to press, including the shift key on a phone keyboard.
This is not because I’m super cool, it’s because I’m an old man and I’m still typing in 2025 like I was typing on IRC in 1998 when nocapsing was absolutely dominant.
But if I type in a space where proper capitalization is expected, like HN, I do it (this was typed on my phone with no autocorrect, suggestions or autocapitalization — I know, I’m dumb and my opinions and settings are wrong). If it was my personal blog however I would do whatever I felt like doing.
Of course you are free to do what you want on your blog, but some choices make it harder to read. IMO not capitalising is similar to using hard to read fonts or colours.
You're describing a 15 second effort that is performed at most once per phone purchase, and at its least once in the owner's entire history of iOS backup/restore processes. Less total effort than our comments took to write. You're then reading a whole lot into that.
> If you purposely go into your phone settings and turn off auto-capitalization (which is what the kids do, since they're all typing on their phones), isn't it the very definition of pretentiousness?
That's incredibly presumptuous of you. That they're on their phone, that they had auto capitalization defaulted to on, that it's them who turned it off, that they didn't turn it off for whatever other reason (bugginess).
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