Looking forwards to all the blog posts from tech bros losing data, money, or getting hacked from this. They will be surprised that it could happen that bad, and they will feel shitty and upset.

And I will struggle to find sympathy through all my schadenfreude and piles of told-you-so-a-million-times.

Don’t say “impressive productivity gains” when they are doing less and worse.

Yeah it got bought up by Microsoft and Meta at the same time. They are using it to lay off people.

“Be gentle,” I whispered to the rock and let it go. It fell down and bruised my pinky toe. Very ungently.

Should we worry about this behavior of rock? I should write for Futurism.

“We are gonna use MechaHitler for good we promise”

Yeah I don’t think we actually disagree much here. :)

I think my angle is just slightly different? I see that ease of access (eg cloud) make it possible for a lot more uncurious and clock-out people to enter the field and pass as competent. To be honest, even the modest introduction of auto-formatting editors are easy to see as good and useful, but I also feel that they allowed shoddy work to look passable at first glance. AI will make this a lot worse.

But as for the actual people who have it in them to be competent, people that were always there and still are, cloud is not going to make them worse.

I understand.

Obviously, “knowing which cloud services to enable” is a lesser skill than knowing how those services work. That is not a parallel or equal skill in any way.

But do you assume people are just going drrrrr brain off when they don’t learn that one skillset you are accustomed to spotting?

Yeah I can see that.

However, you are now arguing a different point than I am getting from your original post. Maybe my fault in interpretation ofc, but the main difference (in my view) is:

You say “incompetent” and “less skilled” as general statements on senior engineers. Those statements are false.

You also say “missing the skills you are looking for” which is obviously true.

And the implication that before cloud, people developed the specific skills you need more naturally - because they had to. This makes sense and I believe it.

That being said, I am genuinely frustrated by how little people know or care about the plumbing these days. :D

I am so fucking tired of seeing someone spin up 3 cloud databases for what could be a 40k in-memory hashtable.

That is technically correct in a way, but I’ll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.

Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.

Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!

So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.

I think this doesn’t really make sense for MS as a cost saving measure. It is a signal in order to sell copilot and other snaike oil to other companies hoping to cut costs.

Let me guess: There are ways for Google’s scraping, search engine, and AI model training to bypass this.

With that level of indirection gymnastics, you can accuse anyone of anything.

(This comment written in the language of a brutally colonizing and genocidal empire.)

A family member with no inherent moral compass or empathy, whose eyes, ears, thoughts and agency belong to teams of trained profit-seekers in a different country.

I disapprove of this humanization of software.

It got more legal a few years ago, I think. Not explicitly “made legal”, but the legal foundations have been eroded. I.e. if you can expect to get away with something it is legal in a very real sense.

It’s always been practically legal for empires like the US, Russia, China to commit any atrocities in weak countries, More and more countries are seeing how much they can get away with.

Netanyahu tested the limits over and over and saw there were really quite few legal limits. With Gaza, he saw the limits didn’t actually exist at all.

During the invasion of Berlin in 1945, the overwhelmed German command trying to map out the Russian advance had to resort to just calling businesses or homes of people living in areas they were uncertain about.

If most people in a district did not pick up the phone, or someone did pick up and swore in Russian, they marked it on the map as invaded.

Different worlds of course, but the point is that civilian phones have intelligence value.

It could make sense as a super creepy tactical choice by Iran to deny intelligence gathering from abroad.

I feel that this article is based on beliefs that are optimism rather than empiricism or rational extrapolation, and trains of thought driven way into highly simplified territory.

Basically like the Lesswrong, self-proclaimed “longtermists” and Zizians crowds.

Illustrative example: Categorizing nannies under “human touch strongly preferred - perhaps as a luxury”. This assumes automation is not only possible to a degree way beyond what we see signs of, but that the service itself isn’t inherently human.