> I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive
Those two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Something being easy to implement is completely unrelated to whether forcing its implementation is overreach.
Which is why s/he mentioned both of them. *This* law is simple to implement *and* it's unobtrusive. It's actually a really good way to solve the problem without creating privacy concerns.
How do you verify someone’s age reliably without identifying them? Unless there’s some standard around zero-knowledge proofs they’re implementing that I’m not aware of, they’re probably going to end up identifying everyone as part of this system, since kids will try and bypass it and parents will demand it be made more robust. Kids will still bypass it no matter what we do.
You don't. The law we're discussing doesn't verify someone's age. Please stop calling it an age verification law, because that's completely disingenuous FUD.
> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.
And you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs.
I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.
Not the original poster, but moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money, money that previously financed quality journalism, not to mention the people in charge of maintaining the classifieds ads business.
If you are working for the newspaper, your job is a reaction to the death of the original business, and you are the automation that came in their stead
> moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money
I was part of the online division of a newspaper. Online classifieds did lose them money, but for my company at least, moving them online was an effort to stop losing all of the money from them.
> you are the automation that came in their stead
Sure. We hired fewer people to answer phones for managing their classified ads, but we hired more people to moderate the site and make sure people weren't posting obscene stuff. And it also employed a handful of software developers.
I'm not convinced it was a total loss. I can't speak to the quality journalism part though
Surely you jest. How often have we seen tech types say "learn to code", suggesting that people whose careers are disrupted just retrain into a different career, telling businesses to adapt or die (pre-LLM), or make condescending analogies about buggy whip makers on HN and /. before it? Quite a lot over the past 20 years.
Software ate the world and the techbros were very blatantly unsympathetic about those affected by their industry and careers being upended. Don't think that anyone forgot about that now that we're the ones in the crosshairs.
You're looking a massive selection bias. Most people in tech are _not_ saying those things (e.g. most software engineers in my circle would agree learning to code at a non trivial level is decidedly NON trivial). The vocal elite at the top of the tech pyramids (who have a vested interest in sweeping externalities under the rug) are the ones spewing that shit.
Yeah, because someone who is trying to sell you something would NEVER try to convince you that you can't possibly hope to compete without buying their product. /s
Apache still runs about 23-28% of websites (with some measurements suggesting it is pretty close to equal with nginx). PHP is still in use by 70-80% of websites (numbers vary depending on where you look).
You make it sound like both pieces of tech are irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth.
some quick googled examples (like I said other sites' numbers vary, but you get the general idea):
> Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing it because it would have been impossible for you in any practical way
If you are having an LLM generate the assembly language for you, that is not even remotely close to writing the assembly language yourself.
I don't find it exciting even in the slightest. I can think of nothing more boring and unsatisfying than having an LLM generate all of your code for you.
I mean, I understand why some think this could be exciting from a "I can get something done fast because the LLM generates it for me" standpoint -- because their excitement stems from something getting done at all instead of just sitting in the pool of ideas forever. However, you will never know the code generated by an LLM like you know the code you wrote yourself. Also you will never gain the same satisfaction of finishing a project where the code was written by an LLM that you gain from finishing a project where you wrote the code yourself.
If you are a person that doesn't care about coding or doesn't like to code at all, I could totally see why you'd find this exciting - to you it's all about avoiding work you don't care for or want to do yourself anyway. Also, a high percentage of people who do love coding have zero interest in writing assembly language, so if they were required to write some for a project, I could also see them being happy with having an LLM generate that part of the project for them.
However, I think for people who genuinely love to write code, the situation is the opposite of what you said -- it is far more sad than it is exciting. In fact, for many of them it has already reached the point of depressing for many reasons. I don't think it is primarily because the LLMs have gotten significantly better at generating code (which they have). I think some of the bigger reasons are that so many people who now pay people to produce code have:
1) got a very short-sighted and "rose-colored-glasses" view of what LLM-produced code will do for their company.
and
2) deeply under-appreciate the value of having a person or team of persons who understand their business, the hardware and software required to support their business, and the work required to both keep things running and handle new requirements as they come along. Because of that under-appreciation, many already have punted ( and/or are preparing to punt) those people to the curb because they think they can just have an LLM do their job and save a ton of money.
In the long run I think most (if not close to all) of those businesses are going to be sorry if they over-indulge in replacing human-produced code with LLM-produced code. I think the ones who lean too heavy on the LLM side are going to eventually collapse into a heap of unmanagable dumpster-fire code that they can't understand nor maintain. A whole new world of incidental complexity will consume every project, and in the long run it will just eat them alive (figuratively speaking, of course :-D ).
The artform only dies if you let it. Even if your employer is so idiotically myopic as to forbid you to ever write your own code, you can still continue the art on your own time. I for one don't care how "good enough" any AI-lableled technology gets at writing code. I will continue to hone my craft until the day I either die, become too unwell to do it, or some other creative endeavor consumes all of my personal time.
IMHO, It's a better time than ever to develop a new IDE. Just make one that cares deeply about performance (i.e loads instantly, and always has a snappy response). Make features easy to control. Allow me to turn on only the things I care about and to shut the rest off.
I can't even remember the last time I was impressed by the speed of an IDE, though we have more computing power now than ever. I'd love to see someone new come in and wipe the floor with all of the current contenders.
I don't think the likelyhood of "electricity and Internet, running water grocery stores" being pulled out from underneath you (either by long term failure or prohibitive cost changes) is anywhere near as high as it is for subscription-based AI tools (at least not in the US).
That was a factor with electricity early on as it was first put to use. The flip side of the infamous "does it make the beer taste better?" adage/nonsense is that, per the story, back then you had breweries build their own power plants, because electricity was just that useful. It took a while for the market to start feeling comfortable with reliability of electricity supply and price point.
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