[nostrademons]

Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done, PG was fond of saying "It has decades to run. Social changes take longer than technical changes."

I think we're at a similar point with LLMs. The technical stuff is largely "done" - LLMs have closer to 10% than 10x headroom in how much they will technologically improve, we'll find ways to make them more efficient and burn fewer GPU cycles, the cost will come down as more entrants mature.

But the social changes are going to be vast. Expect huge amounts of AI slop and propaganda. Expect white-collar unemployment as execs realize that all their expensive employees can be replaced by an LLM, followed by white-collar business formation as customers realize that product quality went to shit when all the people were laid off. Expect the Internet as we loved it to disappear, if it hasn't already. Expect new products or networks to arise that are less open and so less vulnerable to the propagation of AI slop. Expect changes in the structure of governments. Mass media was a key element in the formation of the modern nation state, mass cheap fake media will likely lead to its fragmentation as any old Joe with a ChatGPT account can put out mass quantities of bullshit. Probably expect war as people compete to own the discourse.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done

Literally who wondered that? Drives me nuts when people start off an argument with an obvious strawman. I remember the time period of 2005-2007 very well, and I don't remember a single person, at least in tech, thinking the Internet was done. I don't know, maybe some ragebait articles were written about it, but being knee-deep in web tech at that time, I remember the general feeling is that it was pretty obvious there was tons to do. E.g. we didn't necessarily know what form mobile would take, but it was obvious to most folks that the tech was extremely immature and that it would have a huge impact on the Internet as it progressed. That's just one example - social media was still in its nascent stages then so it was obvious there would be a ton of work around that as well.

[nostrademons]

If you were in tech in 2005-2007 you were part of a small minority of the general population. It often didn't feel like a small minority because, well, you knew all those other people on the Internet, but that's a pretty strong selection bias.

There is, of course, the Paul Krugman quote from 1998 that by 2005 the Internet would be no more important than a fax machine. [1]

Here's Wired in 2007 saying, in reference to Facebook, "no company in its right mind would give it a $15 billion valuation". [2]

I remember, being at Google in ~2011, we used to laugh at the Wall Street analysts because they would focus on CPC numbers to forecast a valuation, which is important only if the number of clicks is remaining constant. We knew, of course that total Internet usage was still growing quite rapidly and that queries had increased by roughly 4x over the 2009-2013 timeframe.

And a lot of people will say "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?", and I'll point out that many people who assumed the Internet had lots of room to grow in 2005-2007 did end up very rich. Google stock has increased roughly 20x since 2007 (and 40x from its 2009 lows). Meta is now worth $1.6T, a 100x increase over the $15B valuation that everyone thought was insane in 2007. Amazon is also up about 100x. It would not be possible to take the other side of the trade and make these kind of profits if the majority of people did not think the Internet was largely over.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...

[2] https://www.wired.com/2007/10/facebook-future/

[lamasery]

> If you were in tech in 2005-2007 you were part of a small minority of the general population. It often didn't feel like a small minority because, well, you knew all those other people on the Internet, but that's a pretty strong selection bias.

Didn't we only pass 50% of households having a home PC in like... '00 or '01 or something? And I mean just in the US, which was way ahead of the curve.

> Here's Wired in 2007 saying, in reference to Facebook, "no company in its right mind would give it a $15 billion valuation". [2]

I actually think that's correct... if the smartphone hadn't taken off right after that. The "consumer" Internet and computing, the attention economy, et c., functionally is the smartphone. A desktop computer and even a laptop aren't in use when driving, at the store, at the park, every moment on vacation, et c. It'd still only be nerds lugging computers everywhere if nobody'd managed to make a smartphone that's capable-enough and pleasant-enough-to-use to expand the market beyond the set of folks who might have had a beeper in earlier years (the part of the market Blackberry was addressing). A gigantic proportion of the "GDP of the Internet", if you will, exists because smartphones exist.

[fragmede]

I'm reminded of the quote that ATMs didn't unemploy bank tellers, smartphones did. While not owning a laptop may seem inconceivable to us here, smartphones exist as the only connection to the Internet for many.

The interesting question is without Apple and the iPhone, would RIM/Blackberry have "figured it out"? Would we be on 2-way "pagers" with keyboards and stupidly expensive data plans that you have to order separately? Because while the original iphone was a marvel in terms of hardware, I think the bidet contribution was the integration with AT&T for the cellphone plan, which only Steve Jobs had the clout to pull off.

[magicalist]

> I don't know, maybe some ragebait articles were written about it, but being knee-deep in web tech at that time, I remember the general feeling is that it was pretty obvious there was tons to do

Almost definitely professional ragebaiters in Wired or Time or whatever, yeah.

[Maxatar]

I was also in tech at that time, in fact I worked for Google during that period and people definitely thought that the Internet had reached its peak. So many criticisms back then not about just peak Internet but that all these companies were blowing money on unproven business models, they were unsustainable, unprofitable, it was all just hype.

You also had numerous telecommunications companies going bust in one of the largest sector collapses in modern financial history, the largest bankruptcy in history (at that time) was WorldCom, followed by the second largest bankruptcy in history with Global Crossing... Lucent Technologies went belly up and the largest telecom company at the time Nortel lost 90% of its value, eventually going bankrupt in 2009.

And then of course the great recession hit, tech companies took a massive blow, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple and other tech giants lost 50% of their stock value in a matter of months. You don't lose 50% of your value because people think you have a promising future.

It wouldn't be until the explosive rise of smart phones and close to zero percent interest rates that sentiment turned around and tech companies ballooned in value in what would end up being the longest bull run in U.S. history.

[vharuck]

I agree with the gist of your points, but not much with these two:

>followed by white-collar business formation as customers realize that product quality went to shit when all the people were laid off.

These will be rare boutique affairs. Based on how mass production and cheap shipping played out, most people value price over quality. The economy will rearrange itself around those savings, making boutique products and services expensive.

>mass cheap fake media will likely lead to its fragmentation as any old Joe with a ChatGPT account can put out mass quantities of bullshit.

We have this today. And that's not a "same as it ever was" dismissal. Today, there are a lot of terminally online people posting the equivalent of propaganda (and actual propaganda). Social media pushes hot takes in audiences' faces, a portion of them reshare it, and it spreads exponentially. The only limitation to propaganda today is how much time the audience spends staring at the "correct" content provider.

[tossandthrow]

You are very strong on the "slop" bias. Why?

In managing a large to enterprise sized code base, I experience the opposite. I can guarantee a much more homogenous quality of the code base.

It is the opposite of slop I am seeing. And that at a lower cost.

Today,I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, debt principal down.

[chaps]

Which company do you work at so we can avoid your migrated endpoints?

[bsmith]

All big tech companies are mandating employees to use AI for tasks. Unless there's a similar movement to open source that is AI-free, you're going to need to be tech-free of you want to avoid companies that use AI.

[tossandthrow]

Wtf. You don't even know what the migration was about?

[chaps]

I mean, I'm always down for learning something new. But I hope what I learn includes the name of the company I'd like to avoid.

[tossandthrow]

Your tone is in conflict with the statement that you are curious.

[chaps]

It's because you're deflecting. :)

[apsurd]

One point: yes, you're speaking from the power position. God-mode over a fleet of minions has always been an engineer's wet-dream. That's not even bad per-say. It's the collateral damage down stream that's at issue. Maybe you don't see any damage, but that's largely the point. Is it really up to you to say?

[tossandthrow]

What is the collateral damage? In ensuring that a bunch of endpoints use the same structure using LLMs?

[apsurd]

Let's not debate that it's possible to make very large very safe changes. It is possible that you did that.

This is about "slop bias". I'd wager that empowering everyone, especially power-positions to ship 50x more code will produce more code that is slop than not. You strongly oppose this because it's possible for you to update an API?

I'm stuck on the power-position thing because I'm living it. I'm pro-AI but there are AI-transformation waves coming in and mandating top-down. From their green-field position it's undeniable crush-mode killin' it. Maintenance of all kinds is separate and the leaders and implementors don't pay this cost. Maybe AI will address everything at every level. But those imposing this world assume that to be true, while it's the line-engineers and sales and customer service reps that will bear the reality.

[tossandthrow]

> Maybe AI will address everything at every level.

I think this is the idea you need to entertain / ponder more on.

I largely agree with you, what I don't agree with is the weighting about the individual elements.

My point was that I could do a 30 minutes cleanup in order to streamline hundreds of endpoints. Without AI I would not have been able to justify this migration due to business reasons.

We get to move faster, also because we can shorten deprication tails and generally keep code bases more fit more easily.

In particular, we have dropped the external backoffice tool, so we have a single mono repo.

An Ai does tasks all the way from the infrastructure (setting policies to resources) and all the way to the frontends.

Equally, if resources are not addressed in our codebase, we know at a 100% it is not in use, and can be cleaned up.

Unused code audits are being done on a weekly schedule. Like our sec audits, robustness audits, etc.

[apsurd]

Yeah, the more I debate the AI-lovers the more I can empathize with the possibility it may very well turn out to be everything is an Agent. Encodable.

I'm not a doomer either, but I do think this arc is a human arc: there's going to be a lot of collateral damage. To your point, Agents with good stewardship can also implement hygiene and security practices.

It's important we surface potential counter metrics and unintended side effects. And even in doing so the unknown unknowns will get us. With that said, I like this positive stewardship framing, I'll choose to see and contribute to that, thanks!

[skeeter2020]

>> Works flawlessly, debt principal down.

I don't doubt it completed the initial coding work in a short time, but the fact that you've equated that with flawless execution is on the concerning-scary spectrum. I can only assume you're talking "compiles-runs-ship it"

The danger is not generating obvious slop, it's accepting decent and convincing outputs as complete and absolving ourselves of responsibility.

[tossandthrow]

You are right, and it happens that the output looks decent.

Code idioms, or patterns if you will, is largely our solution.

We have small pattern/[pattern].md files througout the code base where we explain how certain things should be done.

In this case, the migration was a normalization to the specific pattern specified in the pattern file for the endpoints.

Semantics was not changed and the transform was straight forward. Just not task I would be able to justify spending time on from a business perspective.

Now, the more patterns you have, and the more your code base adheres to these patterns, the easier you can verify the code (as you recognize the patterns) and the easier you cal call out faulty code.

It is easier to hear an abnormality in music than in atmospheric noise. It is the same with code.

[peterbell_nyc]

Seeing plenty of this. The quality of agentic code is a function of the quantity and quality of adversarial quality gates. I have seen no proof that an agentic system is incapable of delivering code that is as functional, performant and maintainable as code from a great team of developers, and enough anecdotes in the other direction to suggest that AI "slop" is going to be a problem that teams with great harnesses will be solving fairly soon if they haven't already.

[apsurd]

I take your point but then it makes me think is there no more value in diversity?

[Philosophy disclaimer] So in a code-base diversity is probably a bad idea, ok that makes sense. But in an agentic world, if everything is run through the Perfect Harness then humans are intentionally just triggers? Not even that, like what are humans even needed for? Everything can be orchestrated. I'm not against this world, this is an ideal outcome for many and it's not my place to say whether it's inevitable.

What I'm conflicted on is does it even "work" in terms of outcomes. Like have we lost the plot? Why have any humans at all. 1 person billion dollar company incoming. Software aside, is the premise even valid? 1 person's inputs multiplied by N thousand agents -> ??? -> profit

[SturgeonsLaw]

> Why have any humans at all

Why have humans do work at all? We could have a radically better existence. It would mean that the few at the top of the pyramid lose their privileged position relative to the rest of us, but we could, actually, have that world of abundance for all.

Work in the current sense arguably isn't even desirable

Maybe I've just read too many Culture books.

[tossandthrow]

These are the right questions to ask.

[hliyan]

> Today, I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, debt principal down.

This is either a very remarkable or a very frightening statement. You're claiming flawless execution within the same day as the change.

If you're unable to tell us which product this is, can you at least commit to report back in a month as to how well this actually went?

[tossandthrow]

It is a part of the smoke testing process right now.

But we run 90% test coverage, e2e test etc. None of which had been altered, and are all passing.

Migrations are generally not that high risk if you have a code base in alright shape.

[bluecheese452]

Ironically the post saying it is not slop sounds exactly like ai slop.

[tossandthrow]

Too. Many spelling errors for that to be slop...