Well, I think there is something to it. Computers were at some point newly invented so research in algorithms suddenly became much more applicable. This opened up a gold mine of research opportunities. But like real life mines at some point they get depleted and then the research becomes much less interesting unless you happen to be interested in niche topics. But, of course, the paper mill needs to keep running and so does the production of PhDs.
There are some services where it makes sense. E.g., submitting taxes with the government, logging into the banking website. Apart from that kind of service, yes I don't think I would want my identity or age verified on more or less any website.
I mean, if you live in a country where the state will delegate ID verification to a creepy company instead of having that as an in house capability you have more pressing structural issues to deal with.
Ha! You are concerned about the privacy aspects of IDs but you want me to list what authentication services I use for you? That's too funny to help out with :p
The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.
Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect.
Democracy is about governance, not access.
A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
It can be about both meanings. The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:
I've been wondering recently if there's some practical path forward for some sort of co-op based LLM training. Something which puts the power in the hands of the users somehow.
The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have.
(Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)
But the LLMs are quite the opposite: People should not bother with developing software, but ask the big LLM providers to do it for them instead.
In all aspects of the term, software is getting less democratized. But that is in line with a decades long trend, where computers used to ship with BASIC installed and now you need a specialized IDE tool which has a learning curve.
It used to be that you could dabble with HTML but now you need to learn a few javascript frameworks just to modify existing code. You used to start a piece of software by running it, modern server software is a fragile jigsaw that is delivered to production in the cloud. The list goes on. The future we are being promised is that you ask your paid-for development agent to make the necessary changes you require and deliver in to production in the cloud.
Which is fine, in a way, but it shifts power to the professionals. Just as Google, Apple or Microsoft owns your identity and your data, and you pay to use it, they can also decide to deny access for any reason. They are private companies, after all, and it is their data.
If software development were democratized, then decisions that software developers make would be made democratically. On or off the job. On the job, the workplace would be run democratically, instead of as it is now, dictatorially. Or off the job, groups of engineers would be coming together to create governance and make collective decisions about the software they use, like the Debian project or the recent Nix governance. Neither is the case.
Building yourself a table using some new carbon fiber hammer isn't democracy. That's just consumerism.
Hard to state that LLMs "democratize" software development when LLM companies can ban you from software development for any reason or no reason at all, and without recourse of any kind. The HN frontpage currently showcases an Antigravity ban that applied across Gemini, and there's few companies that provide affordable LLM services.
The actual elites greatly extended their control over software development, that's the opposite of democracy
This only remains true so long as open weight models lack significant utility.
Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.
The problem is compute and memory. I think OpenAI bought RAM supply mainly to choke the ability of consumer hardware to run open weight models (that hit the memory bottleneck before other constraints). Now there's a shortage in other components as well. I don't see how local AI can compete in usefulness.
It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools.
What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers
Anyone could make their own tools before this as well. Just needed to learn something first.
Real democratizing or programming is free access to compilers, SDKs, etc. AI coding does nothing to help that. In fact, it hurts it, because those non-programmers only get access to the AI tools on the terms of the AI companies. Sure they could train their own models, but then we're back to having to learn things.
I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering.
It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all.
But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at colleges has extremely high attrition.
A minor secondary effect may have been that if you were not a software developer, your boss didn’t want to see you programming.
CS programs have high attrition rates because programming or "coding" has been touted as easy money for a couple few decades now. When people find out it's not so easy, they bail. Holding a few layers of abstractions in your head is not something that everyone does easily.
Just as keeping most of the structure of a 4-novel-long story in your head is not something everyone can do, hence why being a successful author is not something that everyone can do. Start telling everyone that being a novelist is easy money, though, and you'll see Comp 101 courses filling up and the attrition rate correspondingly go through the roof.
This is literally the same for all professions, only in CS/SE it is for some unknown fucking reason considered “a problem”. Why isn’t there “replace extremely expensive doctors/lawyers with AI” movement?
Because programmers made the LLMs, and they first applied it to the problems they know, so the examples of "replacing a programmer" are abundant. Then the hype train rolled in and now it's suddenly going to replace everything, just that software engineering is the low-hanging fruit since they already have "proof" that it works in that domain.
Hint: it actually doesn't work at real depth, and why not is fairly well explained in TFA: they hype always overestimates the depth of the field. So these advances do help to make easy thing easy (in the case of LLMs because they have been trained on a billion examples of the easy stuff), but don't really end up helping with the hard things (because they really only make new things that weren't encompassed in their training by getting lucky, and because tedious things are different than hard things).
Overly optimistic people are already talking about using LLM based AI as a way to provide healthcare access in underserved (i.e. rural) areas. There's already lots of studies going on for things like using AI to identify tumors and cancers in MRI and other images.
There's national headlines every few months for lawyers getting in trouble for submitting LLM hallucinated citations in court, so lawyers are starting to do it to themselves as well.
It's early days yet, because unlike most CRUD apps, the consequences of hallucinations and outright bad calls in medicine and law are life ending. Unless the bubble pops soon, it's coming though.
Yeah. There's a barrier also for professional surfing, soccer, cinema acting, submarine soldering, cooking.
Lots of people bought thousand dollars worth of cooking books and still make food their dogs turn the noses with disgust at.
Maybe there's some fucking talent requirement to do that stuff, even if just a little bit, to the despair of all Project/Product Manager types that secretly hate and despise software engineers.
One day people will not even be able to own computers anymore. They will be owned, controlled and rented out by corporate elites for limited purposes only. The personal computer will probably either cease to exist due to economic factors. It will probably be made illegal for citizens to own free computers. We'll probably need licenses to operate one.
The mere concept of people "making their own tools" is just comical in this bleak timeline.
There’s definitely a type. My wife is much smarter and harder working than me, near perfect SAT score, made it through an engineering degree at a much better school than I went to. Then did med school, residency, and fellowship.
She’s insanely quick. I once told her about one way hashing and before I was even half way through the explanation. Before I and ever said a thing about what they were used for she stops me and says “oh so that’s why websites can’t just send you your password when you forget it”.
At her job she has to call time of death for kids, tell people their kid has cancer, deal with people who literally want her dead, work shifts where she is the one ultimately responsible for the life and death of every patient that walks in the door, and work 7a-4p one day then 10p-7a the next.
She can do all that but she says that she hated her Matlab class in college more than anything else and she could absolutely never do my job because she doesn’t have it in her to bang her head against a wall chasing down a bug for an hour that turns out to be a typo.
... if they are privileged enough to be able to take time away from family and jobs.
The current crop of LLMs are subsidised enough to make this learning less expensive for those with little of both time and money. That's what's meant by democratised.
The US losing the plot doesn’t change the fact that the tech is fundamentally democraticism on a personal level.
If all the frontier models disappear into autocratic dark holes then yeah we have a problem but the fundamental freedom gain an “individuals can make tools without knowing coding” isn’t going anywhere
You'd bet that if LLMs were democratizing, they'd be 100's of feet away from it.
That they're charging in suggests it can be just as feudal as every other technology. It has no moral value. It's a tool; a butcher can swing an axe in the kitchen as much as in the battlefield.
That's a great point but you didn't make your linux machine yourself. A large tech corp made it, and each of its parts. Some of us could probably make their own computers but I don't think I'd be able to make one smaller than the house I live in. There's something to be said about large-scale automation and that's not that it "democratizes" anything. Like you say: quite the opposite.
Sure, we can run the math on heat dissipation. The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source and it application is high school level physics. You talk about 50 MW. You are going to need a lot of surface area to radiate that off at somewhere close to reasonable temperatures.
There’s more to it than that though. The solution using the least possible lines is often inscrutable and brittle. The art is in finding the right level of abstraction which can deliver the performance required while being sufficiently legible. Depending on the specific problem you have to weight your solution accordingly, if performance is critical you must often forfeit legibility. The art is in recognising and dealing with trade offs.
when building an airplane one of the goals is to figure out what you can remove without affecting the stability of the plane. performance (use of fuel) matters here too. so it's kind-of the same thing?
They say that prediction is difficult, especially when it is about the future. Unwise economic policies may be punished quickly, slowly or might be revoked before punished severely. The question is how much risk one is willing to take. Another matter is of morality. Being invested into something means supporting its practices and being partly responsible for them.
Incorrect. The rules based order was first attempted after the first world war and then created after the second one. These are lessen that have been bought with blood. Lots of blood. Megaliters of it. The incredible stupidity of throwing that away is absolutely disgusting.
The "rules-based international order" was a fiction popularized by US policy makers who wanted to quietly substitute it for international law, so they could violate said laws, while still vaguely gesturing at moral authority.
"In the 1940s through the 1970s, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and decolonisation across the world resulted in the establishment of scores of newly independent states.[67] As these former colonies became their own states, they adopted European views of international law.[68] A flurry of institutions, ranging from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) to the World Health Organization furthered the development of a multilateralist approach as states chose to compromise on sovereignty to benefit from international cooperation.[69] Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing focus on the phenomenon of globalisation and on protecting human rights on the global scale, particularly when minorities or indigenous communities are involved, as concerns are raised that globalisation may be increasing inequality in the international legal system.[70]"
Laws aren't fictitious just because people/countries break them. No one writes a law thinking "that settles that, no more embezzling." Laws simply tell you how that system works: you embezzle, FBI arrests you, you get tried, etc.
Also the US always made a big deal about not joining various treaties, with their reasoning explicitly being "we actually plan to do a lot of things that would violate that treaty." In that sense, that shows the US actually had respect for those institutions.
Also, the west benefited from this arrangement. Most western countries could benefit from the rules based order, and when they needed a little pump, the US broke some rules and brought home a treat for the home team. You might argue this undermines the whole enterprise, but my counterargument is this is the longest period of relative peace and prosperity humankind has ever experienced, so although it wasn't perfect, it was a huge improvement.
Ofcourse people break laws. But they are enforceable and the authorities have absolute power to enforce them. Putin can get away doing whatever the f he wants but nobody in Canada can get away with breaking any law they want whenever they feel like it, for example. That's the difference between the very real Canadian laws over Canadians and "international law" over nobody. Now Canada can pass a law that is in line with some international agreement, but it's still the law of Canada. Other laws don't apply in Canada. Canadian laws don't apply in other countries. And that's about it. If we had world elections, world government, world police, world courts and world laws, with all countries giving up their sovereignty to those institutions then we'd have "international law". Until then we don't.
International law is different, but everyone knows the scenario where like, the ICJ tries and imprisons Putin is remote. Almost as remote as Trump being tried for treason tho....
I'm not sure "everyone knows" applies here. This is one of these situations where the language is intentionally confusing. Because most people when they hear about laws have certain assumptions about what those are and how they work.
In this case this assumption is completely disconnected from reality. So yes, neither Trump, nor Putin, nor Starmer, nor Macron, nor any US citizen, and likely no citizen, or government of no country with any sort of power (India, China) or with a patron country with power isn't subject to any "international law". I.e. doesn't exist, it's just a word salad to manipulate the masses.
Rich and powerful people go to jail all the time. SBF? Ghislaine Maxwell? Maybe that boundary is pushed but at least in theory in the "western/democratic" world you can't get away with breaking the law simply by having power (and yeah Trump and such - but in general). So sure, there is some erosion of rule of the law in the western world, but it's still a thing.
But you are right that people assume that. They also assume the rich pay no taxes. So they "assume" a bunch of nonsense. Some once told me assume makes an ass of you and me.
I think people think the US is supposed to follow this thing called international law, or at least they'll express some outrage when it doesn't.
The manipulation is that people believe in this thing called international law as something that anyone has to follow where in practice no country would ever let international law supersede its laws if it went against their interest and there is no mechanism to force this. You keep seeing news about this and that being against international law (be it Israel or the US or Russia, would be the typical use case) and people actually think this is a real thing, like there's some law book somewhere that applies universally to every country. Very few people have the real and correct understanding that these are just norms or treaties or agreements that countries decide to follow or not on a case by case basis as per their interest, i.e. not a law in any real sense of the word.
Well but I think those instances are like, "wow this dude actually went to jail? how badly did he fuck up?" or whatever. Like, a counter example is like, one person went to jail for the financial collapse of 2008--to the surprise of no one (though, a fair amount of justified outrage). Rich people also frequently pay no taxes, like famously Amazon.
But, I don't think people have a detailed understanding of these things. I do agree they're at best fuzzy about what international law is (I am also fuzzy on it). I just don't understand what's manipulative about it. Like, what are people induced into doing based on the premise that the US follows international law? I think anyone operating in that sphere (international shipping, piracy outfits, aid organizations, criminal syndicates) is probably savvy enough to know the US will just blow you up and lie about it for thirty years.
Laws are enforced by sovereign countries that have police and courts etc. "International law" has "laws" (well very few if any) with no sovereignty. That's what makes it fiction. It's just newspeak to make people think that there are laws that exist outside the system of countries, and there aren't, at least no binding ones that countries can't and don't override. That's not a law.
Ofcourse laws, like any other human constructs, are invented by us and don't have independent existence.
When I drive to work here in Canada the "international police" stopping me for violating the "international traffic laws" is really not a concern.
I acknowledge that the 20th century was marked by much bloodshed, but this wasn't limited to the world wars and it continues violently into the 21st century.
If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined?
Why is the American military budget so much higher than the combined military budgets of all other countries?
> If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined?
It's the other way around. Rules are tools of peace. No peace, no rules. But if you want peace then you have to be ready to wage war. It's called deterrence and the EU is learning this just now, again. That's also one reason why the USA has been called the world police... because it was true.*
If nobody enforces the rules any more, things break down and we close in on violence. It is plain to see on the global scale, e.g. Russia's war against Ukraine, and also the domestic scale, e.g. ICE's violence against their own citizens in the USA.
> Why is the American military budget so much higher than the combined military budgets of all other countries?
The US military budget is about three times that of the EU or China's, or about a third of all military spending on the globe. Obviously, this is much higher than any single entity, but not all other countries combined.
* Frankly, being the world police has had a lot of benefits for the USA. Why they are abdicating this position to run a protection racket instead is for wiser people than me to answer.
You're confusing rules with treaties, agreements, and balance of power.
Yes- When there is one super power in the world and it says if you don't behave a certain way we're gonna bomb the heck out of you, or boycott you, you get a certain behavior. Even then you might get some actors (like North Korea, or Iran, Yemen, Russia, China and more) that have no problem openly defying and challenging the super power to some extent.
When the balance shifts and you have other blocks with more power that feel comfortable in defying that super power (like China or Russia today) then you see that changing.
There are no "absolute" rules. There are power dynamics, countries, interests, politics. Rules can exist only within a structure that can enforce them, like a country.
Whether or not a 'LIO' exists is not that interesting to me. What is interesting is what actually exists and what has happened in history. What actually exists is an enormous shock after, for instance, world war one where the question arose how it is possible that basically an entire generation of young men was slaughtered. E.g., every small village in France has a memorial of the fallen soldiers during world war one. For many decades after the war commemoration were/are still being held. It used to be that competing for territory was just the normal thing countries did. Then, it became clear that this has a potentially enormous cost in human lives. The obvious conclusion for people who are not sleepwalking through life and through history, is that any political leader who advocates for a change in country borders and does so much as hint to violent means of doing so is totally deranged and immoral. A similar shock has gone through the world after world war two, which, for instance, lead to the creation of the declaration of universal human rights. Among the decent public, it is also concluded that a violation of human rights is deranged in immoral.
I agree most countries, certainly western countries, have realized that waging the kind of wars like WW-I and WW-II is not a good idea. But there have been a lot of war and killing anyways since the world wars and there have been a lot of new borders redrawn and countries formed. In more recent times we have Putin invading Ukraine and the general instability of the post cold war Eastern Europe.
So the calculus has changed for many reasons. But "new order" is not one of them. The so called new order was a result of the calculus changing, not the other way around. Countries fight for power in other ways and other societal changes also influence their decisions. I.e. you are confusing cause and effect. Now we have different dynamics, not a collapse of world order, things have shifted very slightly. "The end of the world as we know it" gets a lot of clicks on social media but it's not like we're suddenly having WW-I all over again and it's not like that order you thought was absolute really was. It's just that's how the alignment of interests landed.
Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem. Almost all software that I have encountered that was painful to work with chose a framework that did not apply to their situation.
E.g., develop a generic user interface framework which makes it very quick to produce a standard page with a series of standard fields but at the same time makes it very painful to produce a non-standard layout. After that is done it is 'discovered' that almost all pages are non-standard. But that 'discovery' could also have been made in five minutes by talking to any of the people already working for the company....
Another example: use an agent system where lots of agents do almost nothing, maybe translate one enum value to another enum value of another enum type. Then discover that you get performance problems because agent traffic is quite expensive. At the same time typical java endless typing occurs because of the enormous amount of agent boilerplate. Also the agents that actually do something useful become god classes because basically all non-trivial logic goes there....
> Sure, high level is the goal. But the question is whether the abstractions are the correct ones that fit the problem.
Not quite. The path to high level always involves abstractions that fit the problem. There is still room for a decision to replace high-level with low-level in some very specific bits of a hot path, but that decision also takes into consideration the tradeoffs of foregoing straight-forward high-level solutions with low-level versions that are harder to maintain. The sales pitch to push code that is harder to maintain requires a case that goes way beyond performance arguments.
The difference is that in C one is supposed to do allocations and deallocations oneself. Then move semantics is just pointer assignment with, of course, the catch that one should make sure one does not do a double-free because ownership is implicit. In C++ ownership is indicated by types so one has to write more stuff to indicate the ownership.
> The difference is that in C one is supposed to do allocations and deallocations oneself
No, you should only use the heap if necessary.
The bigger issue in C is there is no concept of references, so if you want to modify memory, the only recourse is return-by-value or a pointer. Usually you see the latter, before return value optimization it was considered a waste of cycles to copy structs.
In the embedded world, its often the case you won't see a single malloc/free anywhere. Because sizes of inputs were often fixed and known at compile time for a particular configuration.
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