IMO It's a different and new model. We're engineers, and we're rich. It's not going to be good enough for us. But the much larger market by far is all the people who used to HAVE to work with engineers. They now have optionality; the pendulum is going to swing.
I'm curious - why for now? This stuff is practically commoditized. Trying to think of anything that ever successfully got back into proprietary land from there.
The thing is that AI is still more akin to a glorified autocomplete than something that can really supersede your skills. Proprietary model suppliers are constantly trying to obscure this basic underlying fact, without much success (much of the unpredictable shifts you see in proprietary AI behavior ultimately boils down to this); so it becomes far more crystal-clear when using open models that really are a pure commodity.
yeah, I think there's the marketing and then there's the actual true utility. AI isn't a better computer program. It's not going to be able to do everything you want autonomously. But, it's pretty good at some stuff!
It doesn't look commoditized to me, it looks subsidized. It looks like everyone is trying to be "the one" and running as competitively as possible until the others fail. Commoditized would imply these services are all going to mellow into a stable state and mostly compete on price. I don't think that's happening. These aren't paper clips, they are courting governments and trying to pull the ladder up behind them. That's why both Anthropic and OpenAI are preaching doomsday and trying to build a moat with regulations.
Fair. I have high hope for local inference, feel like right now it is simply cost prohibitive to get the hardware. It will be interesting to see what happens.
As an engineer, I want to believe this, but really - does it?
Most folks use frameworks because it's easier than learning how to build it all yourself - things are done for you instead. This niche is now getting eroded by AI and low-code substantially.
Couple that with my experience maintaining frontends that are far too complex for their use cases - e.g. do we really need SPA's, state sync, and reusable components for our admin tool that doesn't reuse components?
This leads me to think there's been bloat here for at least a decade. So, while vibe coding will also lead to bloat, it's easier to work with, and arguably higher value than paying for a specific framework.
It's a tragedy in life that things that are useful don't always get valued, instead being used as a stepping stone for progress, but I'm not sure that has a solution.
I've been exploring decentralized trust algorithms lately, and so reading this was nice. I've a similar intuition - for every advance in scraping detection, scrapers will learn too, and so it's an ongoing war of mutations, but no real victor.
The internet has seen success with social media content moderation and so it seems natural enough that an application could exist for web traffic itself. Hosts being able to "downvote" malicious traffic, and some sort of decay mechanism given IP's recycling. This exists in a basic sense with known TOR exit nodes and known AWS, GCP IP's, etc.
That said, we probably don't have the right building blocks yet, IP's are too ephemeral, yet anything more identity-bound is a little too authoritarian IMO. Further, querying something for every request is probably too heavy.
- Like you mentioned, it helps me learn more about a topic/explore it more deeply, I usually begin with an intuition and then explore outwards.
- Folks positively mention my articles - both current connections and new connections.
- They sometimes spark interesting discussion which helps refine my knowledge further.
> What kinds of posts actually worked (for learning, career, network, opportunities)?
- Hard to say, I don't have a high signal here. Usually just having some content for people to skim was enough, but folks would tend to mention nearly random articles depending on their interests.
> Any practical format that lowers the bar (length, cadence, themes)?
- I'm not a great blogger in that I have no established cadence. I didn't want pressure to deliver crap (biweekly), nor did I want necessarily to put posts on too high of a pedestal (monthly+).
> If you were starting today, what would you do differently?
- Highly recommend going with simple tech. A static site based on Markdown does wonders. Offload discussion threads to sites like HN or reddit - the comment section of your links.
Good question, was on my mind too. The problem I could see is Walmart style - the predator will beat the prices of the non-predator down until the non-predator goes out of business, then raise their prices again.
They can do this because they are operating in other areas with predatory prices, giving them the ability to operate at a loss, and relying on the fact that at least some of those areas are not being challenged by non-predators.
Everybody seems to be playing the game right in this scenario. Interesting to try to come up with a good counter.
Does this actually happen? If a community opened up a co-op shop that started eating into the revenue of a dollar store, would the dollar store company try to fight back, or would they just exit that market?
Yes, I guess well capitalize companies could offer unrealistically low prices, but on the other hand, any kind of co-op or community driven organization has the benefit of not needing the margins. Dollar store investors are there to make a buck, if their capital isn't getting reasonable returns will ultimately exit the business and move somewhere else.
Cooperatives do not get rid of the net negative cycle. Ultimately whatever the benevolent entity ends up being, it becomes a contest of who can bear to lose more money.
Cooperatives distribute the losses but it is still a money pit.
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