That may be true if you're severely depressed, but I think it can save you if you're starting to get depressed.
That's what happened to me at one point, and an online comment saved me.
I was like 60% depressed but on my way there. I just took my first computer science class in college but I was overly ambitious when I participated in an undergrad CS research. The stress and imposter syndrome was shoving me to the downward spiral.
I posted some gloomy thoughts on an online forum. It was long ago, but I remember the post contained how I could kind of relate to the villain while watching the movie The Dark Knight Rises.
Some online person advised me "lift weights". I had never tried seriously lifting weights, but I was living in a student apartment 10 minutes away from the student gym, so I decided to give it a try. I can't forget the sensation when I did a set of bench press. After a period of amassing so much stress, each rep felt like I was reaching my hand into my brain, directly scooping out the waste and tossing it away.
I became much more active after that, and successfully finished the research and the degree.
It's like how homelessness is more reversible for people who became homeless less than a year ago, and why organizations focus on those groups.
However, I have a dumb question (as someone who doesn't know about electronics): how is it different from a YouTube lecture where the same content is demonstrated with real objects or with animation?
I'm not sure if the interactivity in these examples add much value to learning, as the buttons only serve as 'show me the next animation'.
If the eventual goal is to build a virtual sandbox that models the real world more closely, then I think this is a great first step and a great idea!
Compared to a YouTube lecture, the core difference is not just that things move on screen, but that the learner controls what happens and when. In a video, the explanation and animation follow a fixed path chosen by the creator. Even if the content is excellent, you are mostly a passive observer. Here, even if the current interaction is simple, the learner is making choices and triggering outcomes, which changes the mental model from watching to doing.
> we may see the rise of “developer-less” companies.
I think the opposite trend will also emerge and more than offset this. Yes, vibe coded tools may fit the needs of low-stake applications for some companies, but if it was low-stake enough to start with, they likely didn't hire many devs, if any.
More likely we'll see non-tech companies starting to hire a dev to build custom software (e.g., ERP) suitable for their use cases vs. buying SaaS and paying consultants to customize it.
I'm not betting directly on that, but I will say that IF one-person AI-coded SaaS companies become a thing, THEN there will be a huge number of SaaS companies who suddenly find themselves competing with the AI coding tool vendors, who will "dis-intermediate" Enterprise startups by getting Enterprise customers—who already paying hundreds of dollars per seat per month—to go ahead an write their own low- and medium-stakes apps. With or without consultants.
Look at how much they are spending. Think about how HN cheered Tesla's innovation in disintermediating vehicle sales by selling direct. Now think about OpenAI or whomever selling directly to enterprises. It's the same proposition:
"That Enterprise SaaS startup adds a markup to the AI that is powering your app."
Again, this is only IF the AI-vangelists are correct that some startups will collapse to a solopreneur. I am not sure that those same startups won't vanish entirely.\
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There are some high-stakes apps where Enterprises prefer vendors for extrinsic reasons. For example, some apps must have certain certifications, and in a vibe-coded future, the cost of certification could exceed the cost of development by multiple orders of magnitude. And it needs to be kept up. Another example would be apps where for liability reasons, it is helpful that there be an "industry standard."
But lots and lots and lots of apps are not nearly so consequential.
We already have "developer-less" companies. Adidas doesnt make its own website. They hire an agency, in this case Reaktor. This setup already works so efficiently that even hiring vibe coders would end up being costly.
I honestly hope that is the case. That is the way it used to be. Non-tech companies used to have a few in-house devs to give them the in-house tools and customizations they needed. If developers are easier to hire, cheaper, and more productive with AI tools, maybe we can go back to that world.
I read the first 4-5. They either 'provide services' to govs/law enforcement, and/or are ran by govs.
So to answer to your question, Nothing. You can write 100 letters to your senator, MP, mayor, etc. The "system" will serve its purposes. Best case you will get a response that "national security, paedophiles, terrorists, bad actors", etc.
In some regions you can file a GDPR nightmare letter, which will be shut down because of EU DPR ("national security, paedophiles, terrorists, bad actors", etc.)(yes I copied and pasted from above.. there is a pattern here).
Historically (and Harari describes this far better in "Nexus") documentation and bureaucracy was created to exert control. Any information 'must' be captured, stored, processed, assessed, flagged. Before we only had letters and radio. Now we have more letters (bits and bytes/packets). The mechanism is the same. Collect, store, process.
Cross-referencing this with 1984, everything we do/say/send/etc. will never be forgotten, can and will be used against us. Politicians though can 'rewrite' history ('Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.').
> The history lesson is that when the most of the GDP generation doesn't need without the help of the population, the result is a regime. Scalable and cost efficient AGI will do the same to countries that do not make most of their GDP from extracting natural resources because once the citizen is not needed for wealth generation, territorial control, etc., their political representation goes away.
Doesn't Norway bring that conclusion in doubt? The state gets massive revenue from oil as well as oil-financed investments, but is still very much a democracy.[0]
It might be that democratic countries are more resilient to that kind of effect because (and to the degree that) they already decouple productive power from representation.
E.g. a welfare state doesn't make sense from a purely GDP-selfish perspective, beyond as a crime-prevention tool, since people on disability benefits don't work. But they still exist.
Sometimes I believe that democratic systems can also be so polarized (as america) and rest of the countries that they simply split a country into two pieces somehow.
One might want lets say welfare to the youth/masses and the other wouldn't want it sometimes it feels like just to differentiate themselves from the first or to just contradict it.
We have sort of stopped coming to common agreements in republicans and democrats and heck some democrat bsky user pasted me an AI pic for something and when I said that it doesn't actively contribute to the thread they had the balls to say "Google things.Do your own research. Research." Like uh okay mate, we are on the same page but even then they came across as passive agressive :/
We just infight and never try to reach conclusion's man. And if we do and become tolerant, some intolerant freak hijacks the system, maybe the system's broken a little, I am not sure. but I know its the best hope
It is possible that in a future where territorial control is done by robots and drones that are mass produced and maybe even self-replicating, and the scientific and economic output comes from AGI, there won't be ballot boxes anymore. There will be also no food stamps, hospitals, a justice system or anything that benefits the common person. Everyone will just be building power plants and datacenters and robot factories while being supervised a robot or being implanted with a motor control chip, or being processed into Soylent green to be fed to a chemical reactor to power a data center with the same level of indifference we currently have for animals in industrial farming. All while the people running the dystopia party all day and take selfies while not caring at all.
The difference is that leadership and wealth has agency and power. Of course the coming dystopia will serve to benefit them exclusively. Who do you think is calling the shots here today? Billionaires are. These are products designed for them by people they hired. The idea of using profit to create a billionaire is already inefficient and yet, that is how most of these companies are structured to burn profit on enriching the few vs having the ceo live like a monk and putting everything back into the company.
Leadership and wealth are quite fluid in major transitions.
Read up on the US robber barons and they didn’t come from old money. The relatively recent (80’s to today) round of Tech billionaires don’t hail back to earlier great fortunes and most VC investors lost money compared to a simple index fund.
The first few rounds of AI investors are already getting screwed.
I was like 60% depressed but on my way there. I just took my first computer science class in college but I was overly ambitious when I participated in an undergrad CS research. The stress and imposter syndrome was shoving me to the downward spiral.
I posted some gloomy thoughts on an online forum. It was long ago, but I remember the post contained how I could kind of relate to the villain while watching the movie The Dark Knight Rises.
Some online person advised me "lift weights". I had never tried seriously lifting weights, but I was living in a student apartment 10 minutes away from the student gym, so I decided to give it a try. I can't forget the sensation when I did a set of bench press. After a period of amassing so much stress, each rep felt like I was reaching my hand into my brain, directly scooping out the waste and tossing it away.
I became much more active after that, and successfully finished the research and the degree.
It's like how homelessness is more reversible for people who became homeless less than a year ago, and why organizations focus on those groups.