This is also why I think we will enter a world without Jr's. The time it takes for a Senior to review the Jr's AI code is more expensive than if the Sr produced their own AI code from scratch. Factor in the lack of meetings from a Sr only team, and the productivity gains will appear to be massive.
Whether or not these productivity gains are realized is another question, but spreadsheet based decision makers are going to try.
The business leaders do not care about this yet. I think a lot of people think we already have more Seniors than we will need in the next 5-10 years.
Also - the definition of Senior will change, and a lot of current Seniors will not transition, while plenty of Juniors that put in a lot of time using code agents will transition.
>while plenty of Juniors that put in a lot of time using code agents will transition.
But will they? I'm not at all convinced that babysitting an AI churning out volumes of code you don't understand will help you acquire the knowledge to understand and debug it.
Apprenticeship. You will have to prove to the company that working at a minimal wage is still beneficial. Or we can take it even further, you will have to pay the company for getting the necessary experience. Maybe you sign a 5 year contract with a big cancellation fee. It is not unheard of. I remember some of the navy schools having something like this. You study for 5 years for free (bed and food are paid by the school) and then you have to work for at least 5 years for the navy or pay a very big fine if you refuse to do so.
The bet from various industry leaders appears to be that the current generation of engineers will be the last who will ever need to think about complex systems and engineering, as the AI will just get good enough to do all of that by the time they retire.
I think it’s deeper than that because it’s affected more industries than software and already started pre AI.
American corporate culture has decided that training costs are someone else’s problem. Since every corporation acts this way it means all training costs have been pushed onto the labor market. Combine that with the past few decades of “oops, looks like you picked the wrong career that took years of learning and/or 10 to 100s of thousands of dollars to acquire but we’ve obsoleted that field” and new entrants into the labor market are just choosing not to join.
Take trucking for example. For the past decade I’ve heard logistics companies bemoan the lack of CDL holders, while simultaneously gleefully talk about how the moment self driving is figured out they are going to replace all of them.
We’re going to be outpaced by countries like China at some point because we’re doing the industrial equivalent of eating our seed corn and there is seemingly no will to slow that trend down, much less reverse it.
If you look at the luddite rebellion they weren't actually against industrial technology like looms. They were against being told they weren't needed anymore and thrown to the wolves because of the machines.
The rich have forgotten they are made of meat and/or are planning on returning to feudalism ala Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, and co's politics.
The highest volume OTR shipping lane is LA to Phoenix, which is already the perfect place for self driving vehicles.
I've been saying for years, trucks should drive autonomously from one mega parking lot outside a city to another at nighttime, and have humans handle the last mile during the 7-3 shift.
My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the look of things, its the all around disregard for user experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad downgrade.
I think it makes sense. They refocused it on sharing or extracting information from screenshots. Which is what people want more than saving them to the camera roll. Being able to copy text or translate the text in a screenshot is super useful.
I don't see this as just exercise in making a new useful thing, but benchmarking the SOTA models ability to create a massive* project on its own, with some verifiable metrics of success. I believe they were able to build FFMPEG with this rust compiler?
How much would it cost to pay someone to make a C compiler in rust? A lot more than $20k
* massive meaning "total context needed" >> model context window
This point on security is great point that I have not fully appreciated until now. I have been telling people that my own ability to use claude code has been a game changer for what sort of tools I will or will not pay for or use. This includes random self host services.
For personal use, those making their own software will still be a minority for a while, but at my job we are seeing potential to save $1M-$10M a year by rolling a custom tool vs paying for a commercial one. The saving here come from the tool doing a better job, not the license we pay.
As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon?
The moon has:
- Some water
- Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?)
- a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem
- a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem
- close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated robots work
I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to commit to a hyper-scale effort.
The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.
A lot of people don't quite understand how terrible of a material lunar regolith dust is. There's not much stuff on Earth quite like it. The Moon doesn't experience any weathering, so its all super sharp and jagged compared to how smooth even the grittiest sand is here on Earth. Its electrostatically charged so it wants to cling to dang near everything. Its highly toxic to breathe in for the same reason as miner's lung. It will work its way into every joint and seal.
Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.
What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs?
Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.
I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:
- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem
- stronger materials
- 3d computer chips
I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.
We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we need zero g to do either of these things.
Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is about launching AI compute into space. To do important stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of government intervention.
Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required.
i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age.
the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated. it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100 tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.
And Fortescue and others are working on BEV vehicles for those giant Tonka trucks that move the raw ore to the processing areas at the top of the opencut.
They were also working on a "zero energy" train that would run "downhill" from the mines to the ports to charge its batteries that would then take the empty train back to the mine.
Battery tech wasn't sufficient (yet), but that doesn't mean it can't come back when solid state and sodium ion batteries come online.
have to take this stuff with a grain of salt. a lot of australian mining companies do this so their stock qualifies as ESG and pension funds can buy it.
turns out pit mining is good for the environment after all
A wise man told me, you know signal works because its banned in Russia. I also find it incredibly ironic that they have a problem with this, when the DoD is flagrantly using signal for classified communications.
I have full confidence in Signal and their encryption but this argument doesn't make sense to me. It could be the opposite, that Russia knows it's compromised by the US government and don't want people using it. I don't believe that's the case but the point is you can't put too much weight on it.
They aren't taking issue with Signal, per se... they are upset that people are sharing the whereabouts and movements of ICE officers. Signal just seems to be the medium-of-choice. And this just happens to give them a chance to declare Signal as "bad", since they can't spy on Signal en masse.
My personal connections who are in the military use it for texting from undisclosed locations.
I've heard from people who have worked with the Signal foundation that it was close to being endorsed for private communication by one branch of government, but that endorsement was rescinded because another branch didn't want people knowing how to stay private.
> I've heard from people who have worked with the Signal foundation that it was close to being endorsed for private communication by one branch of government, but that endorsement was rescinded because another branch didn't want people knowing how to stay private.
The US government recommended Signal to for personal communication. See this article, in the section "Signal in the Biden administration and beyond":
There aren't a lot of things I would claim Russia is a leader in, but state sponsored hacking and spying on its own people would both definitely make the list. That's not to say no one has cracked it, but if the Russians couldn't do it there aren't many who could.
The best part is that, in trying to comply with this guidance, the government chose Telemessage to provide the message archiving required by the Federal Records Act.
The only problem is that Telemessage was wildly insecure and was transmitting/storing message archives without any encryption.
Military personnel are currently only allowed to use Signal for mobile communications within their unit. Classified information is a different story, though.
I don't think I agree with the following from this guide:
> Do not use a personal virtual private network (VPN). Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your
internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface. Many free and
commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies. However, if your
organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.
> Personal VPNs simply shift residual risks from your internet service provider (ISP) to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface.
That's true. A VPN service replaces the ISP as the Internet gateway with the VPN's systems. By adding a component, you increase the attack surface.
> Many free and commercial VPN providers have questionable security and privacy policies.
Certainly true.
> if your organization requires a VPN client to access its data, that is a different use case.
Also true: That's not a VPN service; you are (probably) connecting to your organization's systems.
There may be better VPN services - Mullvad has a good reputation around here - but we really don't know. Successful VPN services would be a magnet for state-level and other attackers, which is what the document may be concerned with.
Come on, man. We're talking about classified information, not general OPSEC advice. I worked in a SCIF. Literally every piece of equipment, down to each ethernet cable, has a sticker with its authorized classification level. This system exists for a reason, like making it impossible to accidently leak information to an uncleared contact in your personal phone. What Hegseth did (and is doing?) is illegal. It doesn't even matter what app is used.
Whether or not these productivity gains are realized is another question, but spreadsheet based decision makers are going to try.
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