Yeah, even though I like 'craftsmanship' here, stakeholders don't. I think "durability" is pretty good. 'Engineering standards' perhaps. I think we'll start to see the groundwork laid for software engineering as a proper engineering field, where specific performance characteristics are required for certain stakes.
Code can be like "heavy machinery", maybe needs license to operate. If an app has sensitive data in it, it becomes like a residential structure subject to building codes and inspections. I shudder to think of how this would play out it our oligarchic, anti-competitive environment though.
Because why would they? Most stakeholders don't have long term incentives, only short term. So the incentive is to buy low, cut corners, sell high. What's more incredible[0] is that the aggregation of this somehow makes long term growth.
Hah. What a dream. Instead they’ll hire a team of what is essentially interns and have them deploy mass amounts of minuscule features with 0 guidance because, “hey - it’s cheap as hell and does 75% of what it’s supposed to do.”
A license to operate the code, what a trip.
To be frank, most other business units that are not tech or tech adjacent do not care about the code in the slightest, or the maintenance / security / durability of said code. It’s a tough world to live in. We understand the value of good code, maintainable systems, and proper design across the board. Relaying that to leadership who does not see the value is time wasted.
“What do you mean we need to rewrite it to adhere to engineering spec? It already works. Just deploy it to production”.
I don’t think we’ll ever be treated as engineers. We just had a non-technical person spin up a vibe-app that is now in production, real (measured, methodical, secure, spec driven, efficient) development is actively being devalued at my company and probably across the board…
Rant over. You propose a good solution I just can’t envision a future like this, there’s too much value in “barely good enough”, but perhaps the ramifications of that will eventually bring about your proposed future!
Not foreseeably. As others have mentioned, DMA requires AI integrations to accommodate competition. To my mind, Apple's Webkit-only playbook is the prototype here. Waaaay too much money to be made as a GEO broker. Namely by selling position/advantages in the harness, or just use it to maintain ecosystem lock in.
As an EU resident, I find no benefits-of-doubt needed to explain why competition against foreign mega-corps is being forced. Its protectionist to promote openness when the closed solutions funnel profit abroad.
That's the way to phrase it if you want to ignore or downplay the leverage that big tech companies have over their users to get them to consent to shady business practices using dark patterns. But this wouldn't be an issue to begin with if it was safe to assume that users fully understand what an app will do with their data, and if it was safe to assume that the app's data-handling practices could not drastically change at the developer's whims.
Apple doesn't trust other providers. See, for example, the ongoing attempts by Facebook & co to exfiltrate as much data as possible. A theoretical Facebook alternative here to super-Siri would have a pipe to slurp up the entire phone's data.
This kind of thing overlaps with the anti-competitive practices driven by Apple's MBAs (like the whole thing with Epic), but it's a genuine concern and one their engineering people think about a lot.
That sounds legit, but do you think its out of scope? Scam texts and emails result in exfiltrated data, maybe they have to require iMessage and iCloud Mail too?
If Facebook's Meta-Siri is being sketchy, that's a problem with Meta-Siri. Take it off the market, bring down the law. Promote competition, and bad actors must be made to loose. Can we not just status-quo fallacy that re dysfunctional consumer protections? or at maybe agree that the perfect-world scope is one that puts exfiltrators in jail, not just rejected from the app store.
Instead we'll just have Siri AI and Google Assistant AI, and no decent competition. I guess maybe we'll get a Meta phone, if the only way to compete is on the entire mobile computing vertical.
Is the end state that countries regulate app stores and approve apps? Apple has legit concerns. The majority of users would happily sell their own data for some tiny benefit. However, like you say, Apple has a perceived or real conflict of interest. Are Apple being benevolent or acting in their own interests?
I think you undervalue the contribution of internet-scale data to foundation modeling, and because LLMs can obsolete the content they required, I think its fair to characterize it as theft. Obviously RL contributes a lot to capabilities, but the judgement that an LLM uses to 'synthesize information' is born from the training data. The scale of the data really is beyond intuition. books3, for example, would 230 yrs of continuous reading
I actually think the "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet" does a lot to characterize the capabilities and effects to a lot of people. Obviously coders are more in tune with how well agents can work, but that's also due more to the RL breakthroughs than foundation modeling.
Can you steal something that is free and openly available?
I just don't understand this argument. "Theft" feels like a nice, heavy, moral accusation to toss at those you're debating with, but the actual prerequisites for theft don't even exist in this situation.
It is a lot more complicated than that. Your content is not simply used, copied, or even just simply distributed. The very terrain that you produce, distribute, represent your content has shifted due to the mechanics of it. Anything you produce is grabbed into AI summaries. They're grabbed into the training data. Humans produce free/open materials for many reasons. A lot of them don't have room to breathe and gain structure due to AI siphoning the entire atmosphere of web; eg communities
I mean, not that I'm a huge fan of IP laws, but yes?
Like I said, if you provide an alternative to all these blogs and forums (because you trained on them or because you scrape them for RAG) then you are stealing their traffic. Search engines were/are already doing that, but the foundation training
I like to think someone can come along with Jobs-like charisma and redefine the public's intuition for personal computing again. Foundation models with maximally deterministic harnesses, voice assistants with honest, tasteful amounts of roboticism, maybe data tenancy that doesn't make you feel like a surveilled ecosystem prisoner.
NVIDIA local AI builds are moving in that direction, but are wildly expensive. I think a lot of the current AI backlash (esp data-centers) comes from the public's accurate intuition that the current centralized, monopolistic, cloud-centric solution disempowers them, and eats any gains this magical technology would've brought them. Plugging a sliver box into the wall and your router, with no recurring fees; that would make people feel different about "taking our jobs" because they would be the unquestionable beneficiary.
> voice assistants with honest, tasteful amounts of roboticism
Do you mean like, hey chatbot stop trying to be my best friend ?
This marketing tone that every company I do business with cares deeply about me as a person - this corrosive hypocritical nonsense has obviously been sucked up into AI training materials.
I think it does have some network effects. When people are sending you 800 line markdown "planning documents" and "specs", drowning you in slop, it induces demand for LLMs to re-deflate that content into something manageable.
I know it sounds extreme to dismiss that workflow, but I don't think people are talking enough about the subtle psychological consequences of LLM writing for this kind of thing.
In the same way that googling for an SEO article's superficial answer ends up meaning you never really bother to memorize it, "ask chat" seems to lead to never really bothering to think hard about it.
Of course I google things, but maybe I should be trying to learn in a way that minimizes the need. Maybe its important to learn how to learn in way that minimizes exposure to sycophantic average-blog-speak.
Yeah, same. I like the silo idea, I'll have to explore that.
I'm relieved to hear this because the LLM hype in this thread is seriously disorienting. Deeply convinced that coding "by hand" is just as defensible in the LLM age as handwriting was in the TTY age. My dopamine system is quite unconvinced though, killing me.
I have a silo’d service that handles file uploads of PDFs, images and so on. It was largely vibe coded.
It sits on an isolated tier and isn’t allowed to persist state or have permanent storage. We wanted to reduce the impact of a security flaw in this code.
We’ve ended up doing similar things for search and for an orchestration tool used for testing. The key thing is it’s non critical so we can live without it.
Code can be like "heavy machinery", maybe needs license to operate. If an app has sensitive data in it, it becomes like a residential structure subject to building codes and inspections. I shudder to think of how this would play out it our oligarchic, anti-competitive environment though.
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