The best argument against Rand is just listening to her for 5min.

Very rarely do you see such a mixture of arrogance, self-righteousness and utter lack of logic in a single person.

And when people started writing books instead of memorizing epic poems.

Most people are used to devices being at least somewhat safe. They don’t expect devices they buy from a large online retailer to be that bad. A flaw here and there, sure, but basically a 100% chance of death? Yeah, that’s not exactly to expect.

And let’s be real here, it’s not too rare, the current victims simply don’t count as much.

All those “tropical” diseases seem to be completely irrelevant as long as only poor people in a developing country get it. But as soon as a good white person dies, it’s defcon 11 and suddenly it’s really important to develop something expensive to help the rich countries.

Python caches bytecode, so the translation happens only once.

Java loads everything immediately and keeps it in memory. All beans, all connections, etc. That takes up a ton of memory.

Of course, but I’m not productive in it.

If I have to do everything myself, it will take more time to get it done. The trade-off is of course always control/speed vs convenience, but C is definitely too inconvenient for me.

Not that limited. Limited means an old thin client, not a microcontroller. I already set up a small web server on a pi pico with mpy, so it’s quite impressive. But from what I understand, the interop with “MacroPython” is not that great.

Did you use mpy for x86 devices? Are the limitations worth it?

But that would mean either using Graal/native image or going full Scala, right?

I only used Scala for Gatling, where it’s obviously very java-y.

There’s nothing to really grow. It’s mostly just small helpers. Aggregate sensor data, pull data from A and push it to B every hour, a small dashboard, etc.

C is too involved for my case , I want to be productive after all.

Rust is already rather low level, though there are some cool looking frameworks.

and I could make a death ray out of my home wifi box and a wok.

I mean, you could. Do you happen to have a small nuclear reactor and about 400l of liquid helium?

Of course it is like that. You’re saying that the complaint is wrong because the author doesn’t know the history, and now you accuse me of not understanding you, because I pointed this out.

If you have to accuse everyone of “not understanding”, maybe you’re the one who doesn’t understand.

It’s easy to criticize something when you don’t understand the needs and constraints that led to it.

And that assumption is exactly what led us to the current situation.

It doesn’t matter, why the present is garbage, it’s garbage and we should address that. Statements like this are the engineering equivalent of “it is what it is shrug emoji”.

Take a step back and look at the pile of overengineered yet underthought, inefficient, insecure and complicated crap that we call the modern web. And it’s not only the browser, but also the backend stack.

Think about how many indirections and half-baked abstraction layers are between your code and what actually gets executed.

And how often do you need to detect images of birds with an unknown accuracy?

That’s what many tech bros don’t seem to understand: much of the software in this world is boring business crap, and that software needs mainly reliability and explainability. You can’t just throw a product around that poses an incalculable risk. And often enough the specifications of these apps is an amalgamation of decades of cruft, and needs to be changed and tweaked often in tiny ways.

I mean, there are certainly cases where AI products have their uses, but those seem to be very small niches.

And there’s hardly any way to start small and improve upon it.

With regular code, I can write a small solution and piece by piece improve it. But with AI, it’s more or less a gamble whether the results will ever get better at all. You might need to slightly rephrase the prompt, or it’s completely impossible. But you don’t know that. You can only try.

I work at a company that does ai research.

You are so emotionally charged.

Let me rephrase that: “My salary depends on believing that AI is great, so I will not stop believing”

But sure, I’m emotionally charged. Not the guy who’s (poorly) defending his excuse for work.

So all your points are “nu-uh”.

Show me a single product that is even close to being worth the investment.

How can openAI ever recoup all the money?

This tech has already irreversibly changed coding, graphic design, marketing, writing, education,…

Where? Writing boilerplate articles without content for dying news outlets? “Coding” hardly changed. You know why? Because typing code is by far the least time consuming part of the work.

And where are all those great graphic design products? You mean those cool images of Trump riding a laser velociraptor?

You think companies would be investing hundreds of billions if there is nothing there?

Yes. Also, Metaverse, blockchain, etc. Ever heard of the dotcom bubble? Same pattern.

You would be wrong, as I work in AI research.

Hard doubt. Because the number one virtue of a scientist is to know the limitations of their subject. So either you’re not actually a researcher, or a really bad one.

Then where is it?

There’s hardly any application that’s more than a gimmick. ChatGPT is an incompetent liar, Sora and all the image/video generators produce mediocre crap the can’t reasonably controlled, chat bots keep making up stuff, etc. etc.

This tech is done. Why do you think there’s no progress from openai? The tech hit a ceiling. LLMs scaled to their current state very quickly, but each increment used exponentially more compute. There’s not enough compute, not enough training data to get better.

I’m pretty sure, you don’t understand how models work. It’s just magic for you. Just like blockchains, NFTs and VR. None of them changed the world in any meaningful way - just scams.

AI companies very fundamentally don’t make money, and have no way to become profitable in the near future. None of their tech has any business model. OpenAI relies 100% on Microsoft essentially donating azure instances.

Sure, AI has its applications, but not hundreds of billions worth of applications.

Why the hate? Because 99% of what’s AI now is actively harming society.

Training and running them consumes enormous amounts of energy, all the IP is within some gigantic monopolistic corporations, these corporations in turn push huge amounts of money into products that are not only bad, but dangerous (MS Recall or X’s porn generator AI), other corporations use AI as excuses to fire thousands of people and letting their core products rot away.

Currently, AI has hardly any positive sides, and those positives are very very narrow. Overall it’s a net negative.

The ranking is perfectly fine, since some of these languages in practice are interchangeable.

You’ll find business software in Java, C#, Python (and VBA, but we’re not talking about that), and you’ll find more system oriented software in C, C++, Rust.

Now, you’re right insofar that it’s misleading to lump all languages together, C and JS rarely compete, but it’s a useful tool to gauge developer/employer pools. If you decide, which language to learn because you want to dip into a new niche, you might not want to learn Steve’s obscure cross-paradigm language (SOCL), but e.g. Rust or whatever is popular.

Same is true for businesses. Yes, your software may be written in really good C, but it’s probably a good idea to go the Java route for the next project, since it’s hard to find 20 new C devs for web apps.

I’m not saying that this specific ranking here is good, its metrics are dubious at best, but the idea isn’t inherently stupid.

I have to say, I’m always skeptical of proposals that seem too active.

Agriculture is mostly passive. Of course plants need care, but most of the time, they’re doing their thing alone. If you need constant monitoring, maintenance, resource cycling, etc, etc, it’ll drive costs up very quickly and will need to be detached from nature quite a bit.

This is, at best, a niche solution for rich countries. It won’t feed the masses.