People are losing their mind about this stuff. I have been trying to use ChatGPT and generative products meaningfully in my work for some time now and (for my work at least) I'm seeing it more and more as a gimmick no better than Eliza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA.
At its best it can perform better than a regular search engine, but at its worst, it is like speaking to an idiot exhibiting advanced Dunning-Kruger - it is always 100% confident, regardless of it having hallucinated key parts of its response.
To say that the EU has more regulation is not necessarily true. Let me give you an example. Suppose that i want to create a custom cellular device to control some process in the field. In the EU I pretty much just need to get a CE mark, whereas in the US, I need:
- FCC
- UL or ETL (now this is "voluntary" but if you deploy a non listed product in to some environements, you will be taking your company's life in your hands
- PTCRB - this is a cellular industry certification
- carrier approval for each carrier that i want to deploy on (verizon, etc)
Now some will rightly point out that there are faster ways of doing the above like using modules with modular certification, but you need to pay $$$ for this.
Folks don't see UL, PTCRB and carrier approvals as "regulations" because they are not government mandated. However, they are just as detrimental to innovation as anything that is driven by government.
As a developer of technology products, I also see more and more that US customers are terrified of custom hardware, or even anything physical - they just want to create cloud-based software systems that site in a datacenter that they do not own, running on virtual servers. They are often quite happy to give loads of margin over to folks selling and installing off-the-shelf hardware solutions that are often sub-optimal in terms of functionality, just so they can stay away from the scary physical stuff.
On balance, devs have more agency than ever before, but they choose to use it to load in every daft technology imaginable that makes their resume look good. IMO developers are less and less inclined to act like professionals that bring data to the decision table, so as to create meaningful business solutions.
Take scaling for instance: there is such a thing as unnecessary scaling. I've seen junior devs in AWS shops insist on embedding insane levels of serverless AWS tech, all to serve minimal systems with minimal data and bandwidth and minimal customers. When questioned about the drivers for all of this scaling, they have no reply - its all fairly obvious that they feel that they do not have a career without all of the latest TLAs on their resume.
Apart from creating billions for Jeff Bezos, this is creating bloat on staggering levels. PMs are often unable (or unwilling) to push back, because who wants to questions devs these days?
I buy power tools tools quite regularly and it is almost impossible to find anything decent amongst the utter garbage with made up names. Some of these things are death traps and Amazon does not seem to give a crap.
- stay humble. you are inherently no better than the guy who cleans the floors, even if you are paid more
- your benefits package may rise very rapidly but it will hit a plateau unless you begin caring deeply about a domain other than mere software. You will need to start getting serious about something like finance, healthcare, automotive, etc
i have believed for some time now that this site is kind of like the hats in Westworld - a way of reading tech peoples thoughts so that the site's VC owner can use them in some nefarious way.
Anyhow, I'm coming in here to say that this is a nice little article about an Irish poet. However, by adding this comment, how will my contribution be interpreted by the algorithm. Will I be targeted in some way?