[slopinthebag]

I largely agree with you but I still can't stand the "you're gonna be left behind!!" framing that is really common with people who are enthusiastic about AI. What does it even mean to "be left behind" in this instance, it's just a vague emotional expression.

These AI tools are not hard to learn, in fact they're super easy when you have some experience programming, so the only people who are going to be left behind are the ones who simply refuse to use the tools out of principle. And why would they care about being "left behind"? They're making a conscious choice to not use the tools. They want to be left behind!

And not everyone who is skeptical are that out of principle, some just don't see the value yet or are slowly and cautiously adopting it into their workflow. If AI powered coding ends up being even half as good as promised, so good that denying the evidence is impossible, they can just start using it and catch right up. So who exactly is "being left behind" here? It's complete nonsense while simultaneously being extremely condescending and I get triggered every time I read the phrase.

I don't mean anything against you personally with my ranting, it's more a general observation. Perhaps you and some others do mean it as a genuine bit of advice, like "hey, you should learn these tools or else you might struggle to find work in the future", but the sense I get most of the time are people who are gleeful that the non-believers are soon to be homeless or whatever.

[bronlund]

Yeah, I could have formulated that in another way - 'missing out' would be a better term. I do not mean to be condescending in the meaning that I look down on people that have other preferences than me. Take books as an example. I do not believe that people that can't read is of any lesser value than me, and whether you can read or not, is a poor indication of how intelligent you are - or how happy you are for that matter. Sure, information is important, but there are a lot of different types of information and a lot of different ways of acquire it - so I do not believe that my way is any better than someone else's. That being said, me being able to read and appreciate books, do believe that people who can't, are missing out.

We know books has been used for both good and evil, but I still think books are a wonderful invention. Same with television or the internet, the quality of the content on there doesn't really take anything away from the fact that the technology in itself is absolutely amazing. In hindsight - it has been a minute since Gutenberg - how the society has adopted the written word do have real implications for the people living in it though. If you can't read today, you will struggle. Not because there are anything wrong with you, but because the system more or less take it for granted that you can.

And it is going to be the same with AI, but even more so. The ones who learns to master it will dominate those who don't. It will create a new form of class divide, where access to tokens and knowing how to use them, is going to be the main drivers. AI is still in it's early stages and we see that not everything is alright with it, take for instance the economics around it or the environmental impact it has. But still, I do believe that it is an amazing invention, and that if you do not embrace it, you are missing out.

[slopinthebag]

If someone said "Yeah I haven't read in 5 years" would you find it reasonable to tell them they're going to be left behind? If someone did that to me in person I'd consider whacking them in the face.

Maybe don't say it online if you wouldn't say it offline.

[bronlund]

No, but if you claim that reading will be the end of human kind, I will have no problem leaving you behind.

[slopinthebag]

Sounds good buddy

[bronlund]

Yeah. I understand the whacking part now.

[adampunk]

I think this approach means well, but it doesn’t connect with the reality of the times. You’ve got people repeatedly insisting that times have shifted and folks are going to be left behind because that’s what’s happening. October 2025 marked a turning point in all of software— that sounds grandiose, but it’s true. The longer we pretend that it didn’t happen the harder it gets to adjust.

I think people are talking like this because we have not lived in a genuine computing revolution like this since probably the introduction of the micro computer. It’s been more than 40 years.

I get that people are mad about this. That’s real obvious when you comment in any way about the use of AI. You get told that you’re a robot you get told that you’re not a real engineer you get told that you’re insecure you get told that—-all kinds of things. So it’s super clear that people are upset because they’re being fucking childish about it. Even a post like this one where the author tries hard to be pretty nice, we see the same sneering comments about training your own replacement and shit like that. It’s not subtle.

Where I get off the train is concluding that because they’re upset that they don’t need to be told what’s happening. All of computing is already changing. It’s already happening. It’s like if the sun winked out right now we would discover it in eight minutes, but the event has already happened. We are merely outside the cone of visibility. This shit is all happening right now. It is all real. I think it does a disservice to people to pretend as though it’s not.

[slopinthebag]

No disrespect intended but I think you're in a bubble. Things will change, sure, but not to the same extent as the invention of the Internet for example.

[bronlund]

I disagree. This is like the invention of the steam machine which may be the most important factor in kickstarting the industrial revolution. I am pretty sure none of the guys who were there, had any clue as to how this was going to change the world, but I suspect at least some, knew that; this is something else.

People are bitching now about how AI has ruined coding, not fully grasping that for most people, there will be no code, no applications, no operating systems. AI will pretend to be all of that, and doing it way better. A six year old will be able to "out-code" all of us.

This is half a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiqrsv530Y

[archagon]

Comments like the one you’re replying to give me a disturbing feeling — like AI is speaking through the mouths of its users, Pluribus style.

[adampunk]

What am I supposed to do with this, man?

Am I supposed to talk to you like this? Should I do some psychoanalysis here? If you wanna say I’m pantomimed machinery, then I think we may need to have a discussion.

Because here’s what it looks like to me: I think there’s a lot of people who arguably had a pretty good handle on how their corner of computing worked. They can understand a pretty deep dive into the stack they use, and where they have to deposit something into the intellectual hinterlands, it can safely be abstracted away on dependable, engineered machines or standards. That is no mean feat; lots of people cannot say that. The fact that someone who does say it doesn’t fully understand paging or floating point arithmetic is not a sign that something is wrong, but rather that we have succeeded in big shared engineering problems. Cool.

Some new shit is afoot. We are entering into a new, turbulent, uncertain era of computing. A lot of people who previously had a pretty confident grasp of both the core in the frontier of their work now do not understand what is driving the frontier. They have made the fact that they do not understand this everyone else’s problem. Rather than admit that they do not understand an area they used to understand we are subjected to incessant infantile progression through what I hope are stages of grief. Because at least then it might come to an end.

Everyone has an explanation for why this is all gonna collapse tomorrow and why they don’t need to learn about it. Everyone has a smart remark about the use of AI for some very important moral reason which also means they don’t need to learn about it. They both add up to the same thing which might just be healthier if treated as a true admission of ignorance.

[adampunk]

I think we are *for sure* in a bubble. There is a kind of venture-capital driven craze for compute because...well a whole host of silly and sensible reasons. It's hard to talk rationally about the money being thrown around if you have suspicions that billions of it are being thrown around because some dudes think they'll create god in the machine and own it, or that they have some theory of consciousness tied up in the matter. Animal spirits, in a sense.

Some of the money thrown around is by companies that want to lock in some kind of interdependency because the only downside they can conceive is Oracle or Dell or whoever invents AGI and they get left behind. So huge circular deals are getting made which increase the correlation coefficient for any collapse to 1 lmao. These deals are getting made for reasons that feel like 2004-2005 american real-estate, where the downside risk of a national profile of mortgages was actually (not joking) taught in textbooks to be 0. So naturally if you're maximizing revenue by making things interdependent, you really only consider the upside.

All these forward looking energy contracts and local generation of energy are signs that the market is under strain more than we expect increasingly exponential future use. Giant companies are thinking they're locking counterparties into the right risk structure (here with an energy company being somehow willing to foresake this infinite future energy price they could charge by just waiting), but really that energy company is perfectly happy to accept some money to start a project which will generate revenue long before electricity. That energy company has an idea of its own risk and revenue profile and they can extract money from a bubble, too.

I give us...months? Maybe 18 months--probably less--before things things get really nasty and messy for the firms who thought they were buying a golden ticket. It then gets messy for users (if not sooner) who are right now being subsidized nicely--not the ludicrous 5k being thrown around recently but compute is at a subsidy right now, so long as you want to rent it or can run a model like Qwen locally. Lots of other people are paying for that subsidy while extraordinary amounts of money flow from one part of computing to another. That's already having weird consequences as firms who spent money on what is essentially rental compute pushing their employees to use more of it in order to keep the person who made the contract safe. More companies will do the Microsoft route (no I'm not talking about Copilot!) and try to push tasks into their internal pipelines like MSFT does with Azure--where with e.g. github, what github needed to do took a back seat (literally haha) to integration with the compute pipeline. That's good-bad-whatever, depending on how you want to think about it. But it's certainly disruptive and I think right now a lot of genAI is doing that kind of disrupting, where people and orgs are being forced through money shaped holes.

I don't know what happens when the music stops. I just know that it is playing.

[bronlund]

I don't think that many will disagree with you on this. If we compare it to the dot-com bubble in 2000, just as speculators then tried to get in early in this new thing called Internet, today they are trying to capture early market shares in this new thing called AI. But just like then, when this bubble bursts, the technology that everyone was chasing, will still be relevant. Today the internet is regarded as critical infrastructure.

And I do think you are underestimating just how much money these guys can print, if some event is disrupting the machine. If this thing really goes down, it will be by design and because they got the Thing 2.0 ready to go.

[adampunk]

The problem I have with this analogy is it cuts the other way. His tempting to look at the dotcom bust and think of pets.com or some other venture where somebody lost their shirt. It gets a little harder when you expand it to companies that today own an enormous slice of the world, because they bet on the Internet. Most people lost in the dotcom boom; Amazon, for instance, didn’t. The whole premise was that if you moved soon enough, you could buy in on the ground floor—-that was emphatically the case if you bought Amazon. Now they own a huge almost inextractable chunk of the Internet. It’s quite hard to do business or pleasure on the Internet without somehow involving Amazon.

What I am saying and what I think a lot of folks who are trying to get this point across are saying is that this will be critical infrastructure sooner than 20 years. The right frame of mind is to look at this like we look at the Internet circa of the 1980s or the 1970s. This is big messy and experimental right now. We are in the middle of rebuilding computing with foundation models. That is happening at an enormous subsidy for the time being.