For what it’s worth (ie, absolutely nothing), I agree with her 100%. I didn’t get into this field in order to prompt an AI to take care of the details. I got into it because I love the details.
I’m a strong performer on a good team at a company many people would want to work at… and I know the clock is ticking. Sooner or later, I will be too slow.
I’m not going to claim that this is the wrong way to go. It’s obviously the future, and the future doesn’t care what allenrb does or does not want. I’m somewhat hopeful that power and cooling requirements will come down by multiple factors of 10x over time, reducing the environmental damage.
The fact is, I love what I’ve been able to do “the old way” and just don’t feel the urge to move on. So it goes.
Someone the other day was talking about there being two kinds of builders. One likes the details of doing, where the other likes the things they produce.
The idea was that one likes AI and the other naturally hates it.
I thought about that for a bit and decided that, like most things, if you’re any good at something the “hard way” you probably have some of both. Or at least I’m sure it’s true for me.
I LOVE that I can produce the things I want to create without spending months crafting lines of text. The “I know how to architect this, I know what a decent data model looks like, I have a good idea of where someone is likely to introduce security or scaling problems. I can pilot this plane and produce something GOOD.”
But, I really also HATE looking at the final product and forever measuring, in my head, how much of it is even mine. Which parts I haven’t thoroughly reviewed, or would have spent a week learning and didn’t, or maybe wouldn’t have accomplished correctly at all? Am I a fraud, now? I wasn’t before…
Yes, I am much more productive having Claude Code bang out boilerplate back-end code, but honestly I always kind of enjoyed doing it. Now I'm just a micro-manager for an AI.
And honestly, how long will that last? Given that LLMs came out of nowhere to radically redefine my role from software engineer to prompt writer in just a couple years, I have every reason to believe that they're coming for my role as prompt engineer next. (As my CEO surely hopes.)
I'm just glad the timing of the great AI replacement began right when I was nearing burnout anyway.
There are no few smart, knowledgeable people in the world (perhaps self-educated, perhaps not) who for a huge variety of reasons may be either unwilling or unable to hold a typical job.
I’ll bet most of us here know at least a few people along these lines.
Seeing this news story made me briefly fear that they’d found a way to replace this glorious mechanism. Thankfully not. In fact, they’re going to shoot more droplets, more often!
Give me a backup camera without a screen and then we’ll talk. Doubly so because once you’ve got that screen, no automaker will resist making it do other things.
My SO's Buick Enclave has a screen behind the rearview mirror that can be set to show the backup camera. Works okay, but I prefer the actual mirror and just use the dash display. That said, vision issues, so not driving since around this time last year.
This makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up.
What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.
I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.
Not that kind of bus. A “satellite bus” is more of a standardized platform onto which mission-specific payloads are integrated. Saves having to design an entire spacecraft from scratch and gives you a known-good set of functionality.
So, a set of standard software RPCs (remote procedure calls) and APIs (application programming interfaces) and not another electrical signalling standard. Got it.
Thanks for the correction.
So, I guess the next question is what are you folks actually using at the electrical signalling level to talk? (If you are not allowed to say, I understand.)
Nothing about this struck me as a sign that money wasn’t well-invested. From the headline, I was picturing “we raised and then I blew it in Vegas”.
Nothing wrong with admitting to uncertainty and insecurity. I mean, there are two types of people — those who suffer doubt sometimes, and those who don’t admit it. Give me the first kind any time.
Notice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center.
I’m a strong performer on a good team at a company many people would want to work at… and I know the clock is ticking. Sooner or later, I will be too slow.
I’m not going to claim that this is the wrong way to go. It’s obviously the future, and the future doesn’t care what allenrb does or does not want. I’m somewhat hopeful that power and cooling requirements will come down by multiple factors of 10x over time, reducing the environmental damage.
The fact is, I love what I’ve been able to do “the old way” and just don’t feel the urge to move on. So it goes.
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