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Thanks for the lawnchair recommendations, y'all. It's been real, Nova Launcher. Sleep now my sweet prince.

another day another field effecting the "deviant" weight in the FBI's model

And cigarettes and fossil fuels

The trick is, LLMs are only as good as they are at writing code because of all the publicly available source code, tutorials, blog posts and Q&A it can slurp up.

Well obviously cell phones have very powerful tx/rx so my question would be "what is stopping us from using this for p2p", I assume the answer is we don't have software access to the radio, and I assume that's for regulatory reasons but idk

That's not actually true: cell phone rx/tx power is quite low. We can get away with that because all they need to do is get to the nearest tower, which has a ton of power, sensitive antennas, and is very tall. Amateur radios have far more power available to them, but any "p2p" (i.e. simplex in amateur radio) runs into normal RF issues, like obstacles and interference. If you used the existing radios in cell phones to communicate directly with other cell phones, you wouldn't get very far. Even amateur radios, with all their power, use repeaters to the same effect as cell towers.

Sorry by power I meant in terms of capability not like, wattage

Once again, using a computer system to launder a conclusion someone has already made

this already happens

I'm not so sure. Much like search engines, you can run one yourself or pay Kagi but most people prefer to keep their money and deal with the ads. Streaming services have demonstrated that people have a pretty high tolerance for ads.

Search so far has not been overly pushy with ads. It's easy enough to gain the instinct of scrolling down after each search. There's little incentive for people to seek out an ad free alternative.

That changes with local AI though. There is now incentive to integrate and further develop self hosted search. You can see it happening on AI services already, using their own internal search engines for better reasoning and more accurate results.

I suspect Google's censorship and intentional worsening of search results to increase traffic would've been enough on its own to eventually drive people to self hosted search as it became trivial to setup.

Streaming entertainment is different, there's usually no legal alternatives. Either you pay extra for no ads, or you put up with the ads. You could easily say that streaming services have demonstrated that people don't have a high tolerance for ads as well. One of the major drivers to streaming from cable TV was the lack of ads at the time.


I am now imagining a "A Case Of Spring Fever" style educational film about how ads are good actually

The honest truth is it can go either way, really. Just ask all the sign-painters and portrait artists how their career is going

But sign painting isn't programming? The comment is insightful and talks specifically of low and no code options creating more need for developers. Great point. has nothing to do with non programming jobs.

Have you ever tried to paint a sign?

what is special about programming jobs that makes them permanently immune from the high skilled workers being in low demand

the specific tasks (i.e. writing code) might disappear

but the actual work of constructing reliable systems from vague user requirements with an essentially unbounded resource (software) will exist


Of course this is true. Just like the need to travel long distances over land will never disappear.

The skills needed to be a useful horseman though have almost nothing to do with the skills needed to be a useful train conductor. Most the horseman skills don't really transfer other than being in the same domain of land travel. The horseman also has the problem that they have invested their life and identity into their skill with horses. It massively biases perspective. The person with no experience with horses actually has some huge advantages of the beginner mind in terms of travel by land at the advent of travel by rail.

The ad nauseam software engineer "horsemen" arguments on this board that there will always be the need to travel long distance by land completely misses the point IMO.


software is an infinite resource

Well, if we’re comparing all jobs to all other jobs - then you may have a valid point. Otherwise, we should probably focus on comparing complexity and supply/demand for the skills and output being spoken about.

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