Was invented long, long time ago. I first learned formal definition as "part count reduction" fromm Design for Manufacturing (DFM).

Renting won't match home ownership for few reasons.

First one already mentioned in the comments is you can be kicked out at any time within your rental agreement. I was "lucky" enough to get our rental sold two years ago and then again this year. Packing and looking for another rental with 2 months notice is not fun (and boxes smell).

Another difference is location and place itself. You'll have much fewer rentals in a very nice neighborhood, and even those that are rented out, are the worst - corner lots (3x gardening cost/effort), facing major roads or other things that make life less comfortable.

Rental condition is not under your control. At least in Seattle area owners I rented from didn't keep the house well maintained, which resulted in:

* roof leak (no moss treatment performed, grew and lifted shingles).

* 25 yo furnace "worked" until one midnight my family had to evacuate and call fire fighters due to CO alarms getting off. Four days without heating after that (owner offered to reimburse for the cheapest hotel nearby).

* Appliances are not replaced until they break. I looked at one property few weeks ago that had original once white appliances. I asked if owner is willing to upgrade them, the agent laughed at told us they will fix it if something doesn't work after we move in.

I pay only 650/mo for rent though. My friends with homes around me pay about what I pay in rent in their home property taxes alone... Or especially once you add in some utilities, like my heat is included in my rent and I can have my place at like 75F all winter if I want.

Also yes they replaced the dish washer and refrigerator with new ones before they broke or died while I've been there.

But you rent a studio and they have a 4 bed house. You compare apples and oranges

So what's the house comparison for me then? If people are going to say owning is always better, then what should I be owning instead of renting my studio?

Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.

Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.

Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.

> I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology.

When I was young I ran into a number of adults who refused to use e-mail. They thought it was a disgrace, a fad, or useless. They hated being forced to write emails and tried to force everything into being a phone call or a meeting.

Back then changes happened more gradually.

It took a long time for technologies like cell phones and email to permeate. AI went from a novelty to being the only topic in tech overnight by comparison.

> Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.

Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful, but you could ignore them and your life wouldn’t be any different.

AI is infiltrating tech jobs whether you like it or not.

Outside of tech and email jobs AI isn’t as big of a talking point. I talk to construction contractors and some people in other physical jobs who are positive about it. They don’t see any threat to their job but they’ve found a lot of ways to use it for things like helping with translations and quickly searching for advice.

> Blockchain and NFTs were a useless sideshow. Their investors and hodlers were trying to force them into places they weren’t useful

Not unlike trying to cajole a probabilistic text generator into writing code that isn't atrocious. And failing.

If you actually try and use frontier models with basic harnessing and skills setup, you can’t seriously make this claim. Agentic coding is getting extremely good when you take time to properly setup an environment for an agent to work in.

No it isn't. It's the same slop as it always was. People are always trying to claim "but the latest models are really good!" and it just isn't true.

It's not just AI. It's AI on top of society discontent that existed for a long time, but accelerated recently. The big underlying problem is, since at least 1970s every subsequent generation had to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as their parents. For a few decades it was balanced by the increasing women's participation in the workforce. But then, since 2008, we got banking crisis, both political parties focusing on outrage, pandemic, great resignation, generation of workers lost due to the lack of in-person contact, and now AI.

There hasn't been a tech nearly as disruptive in recent times and possibly in all human history. Agriculture and industry both had obvious benefits serving humanity whereas AI can be a bit more of a competitor to it.

Totally, that's what history teaches us /s

Not from so distant past - Soviet Union collapse caused mass unemployment and similar socioeconomic scenarios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wild_nineties

Mass poverty and skyrocketing crime levels (mugged for sneakers was common), while ultra rich grabbed money and power.

What does history teach us in this context and how is the current situation comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Not sure if I get your point

<sarcasm>History teaches us that rich and powerful think about consequences of their actions and optimize for balanced, non-violent outcomes</sarcasm>

In this context, I argue that if a significant sector of economy goes fully AI, it is similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union where within few months most people lost their jobs. The wikipedia link above shows how similar scenarios unfolded in many eastern block countries, specifically mass unemployment, poverty and crime.

Is there a plan to extend search to book content?

Since the books are available on the site as text and HTML the search engines index them already for you. Try searching for the below; it should take you to the book you expect as the first result:

site:gutenberg.org "it was the best of times"

not that I know of ...

Hunger games in the age of AI - eliminate/automate your colleague's job, until a single software engineer is left (or two if aristocrats will see it as a good PR).

If AI writes your articles, why use brain?

You sneer but the models are much better now than last month and token costs are down! LLMs are just like compilers for the brain!

/s

Just like human typesetters who mucked around with silly metal cubes were replaced by more efficient word processing software, human writers who muck around with silly words will be replaced by AI. Future writers will work at a ~higher level of abstraction~ :sparkle:

"Claude1, find the most popular topic online", "Claude2, write a blog about that", "Hmm hmm good, but can you make the title more punchy?", "Claude1, fact check and report back to Claude2"

Now do it with code

There are traces of that internet and my own collection of links is still enough to satisfy my reading and communication needs. I tried to explore Kagi's small web and there's a very small overlap with my list. Probably everyone should maintain their own reading/tracking list.

Great read. Got absorbed into few scenes. The scene with applauds played in my head as a silent movie with Charlie Chaplin presenting his perfect plans and crowd applauding unrealistically fast (due to under-cranking) with piano playing Super Mario theme in background.

It shares some ideas with Peter Naur "Programming as Theory Building".

Quote from the post article: "To quote Michael Polanyi: we know more than we can tell. Some load-bearing context exists precisely because it was never put into words, and writing it down would change what it is."

Imagine how much knowledge exists only in the heads of software engineers, with code being just a functioning footprint of that "Theory". I know SRE in FAANG who told me that multi-billion system is supported by tribal knowledge within their group, and for years, even pre-AI it was a protection against automation.