> "They are forbidden from creating original works to express themselves. However, they are still permitted to comment on writing, interpret it, share their taste. They are still valued for their appraisal, presentation, understanding and appreciation of creative writing. They just can’t write creatively anymore. They can go on as an enthusiastic spectator.
> ... It revealed that the process of prompting novel proofs will be as auraless as ordering doordash. Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age. Is there not something evil in the act of blocking all future generations of mathematicians from the experience of discovery? Forget about accuracy or even attribution. Something fundamental to the experience of mathematics is being taken."
These passages resonated with me, as someone who has been enchanted by writing software for almost 60 years. It crystalizes something that has been nagging at me for many years: I like writing software. Reviewing, testing, spec-ing, designing, etc. are all important, but they are all incidental to the actual creation of software. They are all necessary for me to do if I'm going to write software, but they are peripheral. I didn't latch on to computer programming because I got into flow state reviewing code, or spec-ing it.
And this is happening in one profession after another. For example, fighter pilots. I suspect that a fighter pilot feels about flying jet fighters the same way that I feel about programming. And he or she will soon be exactly as useless: Doing things related to flying, from the sidelines, but not doing the thing him or herself.
Choose your favorite metric: mindshare, running instances, development target. Free and low-end beat expensive proprietary.
"Least popular" is an odd claim. If you count Windows desktops, and then count all the Linux installations (desktop, servers, cloud, Android, other devices), I suspect Linux would prove to be most popular. Sure, add Windows servers to the contest, that's a rounding error. And what about VMs? How do you think Windows VMs stack up against Linux VMs in number?
There is constant shifting between client and server computation. I think it is a stretch to call cloud servers “mainframes”. There are still old school mainframes, running JCL, and old school mainframe DB2 and COBOL. That ain’t cloud.
I don’t agree. In the mainframe/PC battle, MS and Apple were basically on the same side. Once the dinosaurs went extinct, different mammals fought for dominance.
Not sure what your point is. I’m commenting on a moment in time which is like an earlier moment in time. A different moment in time will have different analogs.
No, I don’t think so. PC + MS Office killed Wang custom hardware/software, for example. LibreOffice is much later, and can’t displace MS Office due to network effects. Cheaper won, cheapest can’t because of those effects.
But different huge companies have different incentives. It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to have me running a powerful open source model on a $4k machine that they sell me.
The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins.
- PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to.
- PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products.
- Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge market share from the mainframe world.
Ignoring the huge Chinese open-weight models for a moment:
- The training costs and resource requirements for frontier models are unsustainable. The high price, and social pushback, mean that the American companies producing these models are precarious.
- There are enormous financial incentives for research results allowing for cheaper, less resource-intensive models of high quality.
- Local LLMs on consumer hardware are akin to the PC hobbyist world of the 70s and 80s.
Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models doing pretty much anything that frontier models can do right now.
Getting back to the Chinese models: They allow for new competition against Anthropic and OpenAI, basically SaaS renting out these very capable AIs much cheaper. That will just accelerate trends.
I used to love ORMs so much that I built one for Java, in the early 90s, and it was one of the main offerings of a startup that I joined. I have come around 180 degrees. My rethink started when a developer at a Wall Street bank said: having Oracle on my resume is valuable. Having your ORM on my resume is not.
And then there’s the “now you have two problems” dynamic. You not only have to write high-performing queries, but you have to get the ORM to generate that query for you. And sometimes you don’t want objects. And the schema mapping has to track schema changes.
Just write the damned SQL, it’s not that difficult.