u/BX1959

We'll need to see whether upcoming labor market data releases confirm an increase in hiring, but this is still encouraging news.

The question is whether companies are still willing to pay tons of money for AI when they're simultaneously growing their workforce. More than one company said it was laying off workers to afford AI investments; well, perhaps AI will now be the target of cost cutting.

It's good to see that investors are beginning to pay attention to cash-flow issues at megacap tech companies. The graph of Google's cash-flow trends over time is particularly striking.

I found this to be a thoughtful overview of AI's possible impact on the future of work. (Spoiler: He thinks there will still be plenty of work to go around.) I'm personally a bit more skeptical of AI's capabilities than Arvind, and I also didn't see much reference to the massive costs involved in training and applying LLMs. However, I think many of you will find it to be a helpful read.

I particularly appreciated Arvind's critique of the idea that AI will eliminate the need for software developers. I also appreciated his point that if AI gets better, our own (AI-assisted capabilities) will also increase, which further casts doubt on the idea that AI will simply replace humans. (The trouble here is that AI won't always result in increased productivity--and might create unrealistic expectations of how fast one can complete a given task with AI.)

My favorite part was this reflection near the end (which echoes a point that Lars Faye made in Agentic Coding is a Trap):

"It’s very tempting to use AI for tasks that I am myself not yet an expert at, because learning new things is of course very hard. But that leads to my losing whatever little skills I have in that task over. It’s much better in the long run if I first put in the time to master the task myself before I use AI to augment my productivity."

I have been trying out Collabora on Android for local spreadsheet editing. However, I often found that, when opening spreadsheets from my default file explorer using Collabora, they would end up as read only documents.

I'm now finding, though, that if I instead open files by (1) opening the Collabora app on my phone, then (2) selecting the file from that app (via the folder icon on the top right), the document doesn't get converted to Read Only mode.

Just wanted to share this in case it helps anyone else who's facing a similar issue.

Mackintosh points out that the choice of SpaceX and other companies to use equity for acquisitions indicates that that equity may be overvalued.

The lack of a real moat for LLM providers seems to put these companies in a hard place. Charge too much and you lose customers to whatever LLM is the hot new thing; charge too little and your IPO might be a flop (if it happens at all). And even if compute were eventually to become cheaper, that would simply make it easier for people to spool up local models and bypass OpenAI and Anthropic altogether.

Really not sure what the long-term solution for these companies is.

I don't actually know how Bjarne Stroustrup (the creator of C++) feels about LLMs or vibe coding. However, I've found some helpful arguments in favor of traditional programming from the 3rd edition of his 'Programming: Principles and Practices Using C++' textbook. (I've enjoyed playing around with C++ here and there, but I want to gain a more solid foundation with the language.)

Here are just a few of my favorites--I'm sharing them in case they inspire anyone else who prefers to write code by hand.

• "Programming is like athletics, music, dance, or any skill-based craft. Imagine people trying to compete in any of those fields without regular practice. You know how well they would perform. Constant practice--for professionals that means lifelong constant practice--is the only way to develop and maintain a high-level practical skill." (p. 25)

• "Often, a problem is only fully understood through the process of programming a solution for it." (Preface, p. vix)

• "We consider programming itself a form of problem solving: only through complete understanding of a problem and its solution can you express a correct program for it, and only through constructing and testing a program can you be certain that your understanding is complete. Thus, programming is inherently part of an effort to gain understanding." (p. 8)

• "Programming is learned by writing programs. . . . You cannot learn to swim, to play a musical instrument, or to drive a car just from reading a book--you must practice. Nor can you become a good programmer without reading and writing lots of code." (Preface, p. x)

• "Like mathematics, programming--when done well--is a valuable intellectual exercise that sharpens our ability to think." (Preface, p. vix)

• "We insist that craftsmen must understand their tools, not just consider them 'magical.'" (p. 6)

• "Programming is understanding." (Kristen Nygaard, p. 115)

I don't think these quotes were written as a reaction to AI; many, or perhaps all, of them were probably present within his earlier copy of the book as well. Nevertheless, they constitute solid reasons to continue learning and writing code the 'old-fashioned' way.