I wish I knew that one month ago. Hired a small local company to fix something in my house, great reviews in yelp/facebook/google, license+insurance. The guy came for the estimate and everything felt smooth. Two other guys came for the actual job, no company, no license, I couldn't even communicate with them until I opened voice translator. They did a terrible job and made the situation worse than before.
And yet listings in nice neighborhoods are gone in under a week in Seattle suburbs now. I started a rental 2 years ago and now again - similar houses are at least 25% more expensive now than two years ago. There was a line of families when I was viewing houses with good schools.
I think this is all demand/supply problem. There were way more rental listings May/June 2024 than this year.
All those C*Os and founders are good and successful politicians, not nerds. There was a colossal PR campaign to picture them as nerds for multiple reasons, but most of them never created like nerds would do (with a passion, going deep, enjoying the process & the result).
Politicians become successful due to skills incompatible with nerd mindset. Look at Linus, he could built an empire but he's a git.
Renting won't match home ownership for few reasons.
First one already mentioned in the comments is you can be kicked out at any time within your rental agreement. I was "lucky" enough to get our rental sold two years ago and then again this year. Packing and looking for another rental with 2 months notice is not fun (and boxes smell).
Another difference is location and place itself. You'll have much fewer rentals in a very nice neighborhood, and even those that are rented out, are the worst - corner lots (3x gardening cost/effort), facing major roads or other things that make life less comfortable.
Rental condition is not under your control. At least in Seattle area owners I rented from didn't keep the house well maintained, which resulted in:
* roof leak (no moss treatment performed, grew and lifted shingles).
* 25 yo furnace "worked" until one midnight my family had to evacuate and call fire fighters due to CO alarms getting off. Four days without heating after that (owner offered to reimburse for the cheapest hotel nearby).
* Appliances are not replaced until they break. I looked at one property few weeks ago that had original once white appliances. I asked if owner is willing to upgrade them, the agent laughed at told us they will fix it if something doesn't work after we move in.
Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
<sarcasm>History teaches us that rich and powerful think about consequences of their actions and optimize for balanced, non-violent outcomes</sarcasm>
In this context, I argue that if a significant sector of economy goes fully AI, it is similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union where within few months most people lost their jobs. The wikipedia link above shows how similar scenarios unfolded in many eastern block countries, specifically mass unemployment, poverty and crime.
Hunger games in the age of AI - eliminate/automate your colleague's job, until a single software engineer is left (or two if aristocrats will see it as a good PR).
There are traces of that internet and my own collection of links is still enough to satisfy my reading and communication needs. I tried to explore Kagi's small web and there's a very small overlap with my list. Probably everyone should maintain their own reading/tracking list.
Great read. Got absorbed into few scenes. The scene with applauds played in my head as a silent movie with Charlie Chaplin presenting his perfect plans and crowd applauding unrealistically fast (due to under-cranking) with piano playing Super Mario theme in background.
It shares some ideas with Peter Naur "Programming as Theory Building".
Quote from the post article: "To quote Michael Polanyi: we know more than we can tell. Some load-bearing context exists precisely because it was never put into words, and writing it down would change what it is."
Imagine how much knowledge exists only in the heads of software engineers, with code being just a functioning footprint of that "Theory". I know SRE in FAANG who told me that multi-billion system is supported by tribal knowledge within their group, and for years, even pre-AI it was a protection against automation.
If that happens globally where AGI and engineer replacement is "shipped" as a social construct, I'm afraid real software engineers (who can write and understand production ready systems) will be the vocal minority who can't do anything.
Software Engineering seems to be quite unique to enable this due to few factors:
* Many software engineers didn't do real engineering work during their entire careers. In large companies it's even harder - you arrive as a small gear and are inserted into a large mechanism. You learn some configuration language some smart-ass invented to get a promo, "learn" the product by cleaning tons of those configs, refactoring them, "fixing" results in another bespoke framework by adjusting some knobs in the config language you are now expert in. Five years pass and you are still doing that.
* There are many near-engineering positions in the industry. The guy who always told how he liked to work with people and that's why stopped coding, another lady who always was fascinated by the product and working with users. They all fill in the space in small and large companies as .*M
* The train is slow moving, especially in large companies. Commit to prod can easily span months, with six months being a norm. For some large, critical systems, Agentic code still didn't reach the production as of today.
Considering above, AI is replacing some BS jobs, people who were near-code but above it suddenly enjoy vibe-coding, their shit still didn't hit the fan in slow moving companies. But oh man, it looks like a productivity boom.
That's what happens when "family farms" rely on a large industrial complex and grow a mono-culture that doesn't have uses other than canning.
It was an easy, steady cash-positive business until it wasn't. If those farmers thought what is final product and who benefits from it most, they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally, which many California family farms do.
If you read documentation around Rust Async and Tokio, you'll find proper explanation why CPU intensive parts should not be part of async stack, how to use primitives efficiently (like std::sync::Mutex in async blocks), how to glue sync and async code.
A lot of code doesn't follow there guidelines because they don't care about efficiency and don't need it. But there are numerous projects who care about performance and efficiency, and realize the pitfalls once code runs in production (ScyllaDB is one example).
LLMs don't help as well, generating everything async up to the main, using wrong primitives and not properly designing the system.
There's a subset of software engineers who understand most of the points from the article, but it looks more and more like this train can accelerate towards the cliff due to steam from burned money.
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” quote is usually applied to markets, but it can be applied to software engineering as well - all jobs can be gone even if world will be submerged into technological crisis, with single nine availability (and I'm talking about 9% :) ) and all accounts compromised.
"Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many layers of indirection." Bjarne Stroustrup
That's why you see hundred level call stacks, polymorphism with a single implementation and still errors are hidden or root causes hidden behind "exception caught".