> People spoke in a particular way, say 60 years ago, that left very little room for interpretation of what they meant. The same cannot be said today.
Surely you don’t mean everyone in the 1960s spoke directly, free of metaphor or euphemism or nuance or doublespeak or dog whistle or any other kind or ambiguity? Then why are there people who dedicate their entire life to interpreting religious texts and the Constitution?
> third-parties who can make all sorts of decisions based on a made up story about who I am, my preferences, my values and whatnot
You're going to be presented with ads and preyed on by marketing no matter what. The "made up story about who you are" is just even more imaginary the less they know about you. You'll simply be presented with less-targeted ads.
Not the point, no one benefits by having an accurate (or non) dossier built on them, up for sale. The drawbacks may be infrequent and postponed but as history confirms, quite real.
There's a massive difference between launching a piece of software and launching a successful business.
Over the last couple of months I've seen a load of new "product launches" in my niche but when you look at them they're largely vibecoded and don't show deep understanding and sustainability, so it's pretty likely you'll never see them as successful businesses.
Looking at some of the related places like /r/sideproject/ there's a lot of releases and I'd be willing to suggest that most of them are using LLMs
Then, respectfully, what is the point? Does the trillions-of-dollars AI industry exist to support a few hobbyists building niche products to scratch their own itch? I thought the promise here is increased productivity, presumably in the economic sense.
There seems to be a lot of hype, and has been for years, but I’m not seeing it materialize as actual economic output. Surely by now there should be lots of businesses springing up to capture all of this value created by vibecoded software.
Whilst I have no special knowledge, my expectation is it'll do both. If you reduce the barriers to coding you'll get more code, both at the hobbyist/one-person level and also at the large corp level.
Whether that translates into more value for those larger corps is the trillion dollar question :) Writing code is a small part of the process of finding and shipping features that customers want, so it remains to be seen how much LLM tools translate it.
I think it's fairly widely accepted that from a financial standpoint we're in an AI/LLM bubble. There has been more investment than we're likely to see financial benefits, but it's impossible to predict to what degree (if you can predict that and the timing you can make a lot of money!!)
Fellow New England -> Colorado transplant. It was pleasantly shocking for me too how much chattier and friendlier people are in Colorado. But now I've lived in Colorado long enough that when I go back to visit New England, it's shocking how cold and taciturn people are there. Conversations with strangers rarely get past "How ya doin?" "Fine and you? "Fine, thanks."
I do appreciate how direct people in the northeast tend to be, and sometimes miss that aspect of the culture.
I grew up in small town Midwest and have now lived in tiny town New England for 20+ years. It still bothers me that folks here in New England won’t even acknowledge you on the sidewalk as you pass each other whereas in the Midwest that is a good excuse for a conversation. They haven’t worn me down though, I still say hello at least to each person as I pass and maybe get a mumble back 50% of the time.
I reckon the developers most excited about AI & agents never got the same thrill or satisfaction that you do. Those developers are plainly motivated by different things, and that’s okay.
I wouldn’t say never. I spent the first 10 years of my career loving crafting code. Then I moved up in seniority and naturally my focus and prioritization had to shift. Even before AI I didn’t code that much, focusing more on design, planning, reviewing, firefighting, and team leadership (still an IC).
One exciting thing about AI is when I have an idea of something to do and can visualize it, instead of writing a ticket that sits in the backlog, I can use AI to vibe it up, with just a couple hours of my attention I can spare. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s fun and satisfying to get more shit done, and be able to scratch the same builder and solver itches in my 10% time.
> If it does that, it doesn't matter where it came from.
Personally, it matters to me quite a lot where art comes from, especially music. I have a hard time "separating the art from the artist". If I find out a musician is a creep/abuser/rapist, I can't enjoy their music anymore.
This belief obviously isn't widespread given artists like Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, R. Kelly, and Jimmy Page are still wildly popular. But I assume I'm not alone in this.
As for AI music, it's hard for me to imagine an "AI Musician" ever becoming very popular because I reckon most humans want some human-ness in their music. And I think if an existing artist ever put out AI music as their own, they'd lose some fans pretty quickly.
No, fair point. I'm the same, I can't enjoy the music if I know the artist is not a good person. Though I do think this gets taken too far; I can enjoy Pink Floyd even though I have huge disagreements with Roger Waters' politics.
I'm not sure I could tell the difference between AI and human music already. In a few years I'm pretty sure I couldn't. This is the bit where I'm not sure it matters. I mostly listen to music for the nostalgic emotions now anyway.
Surely you don’t mean everyone in the 1960s spoke directly, free of metaphor or euphemism or nuance or doublespeak or dog whistle or any other kind or ambiguity? Then why are there people who dedicate their entire life to interpreting religious texts and the Constitution?