What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning math, coding, etc? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of already mega-rich.)
If you look closely at the gains in math, it's largely in proof writing. The reason is Lean, it's not some general intelligence jump, and the number of people actually working on proofs in life rounds to zero.
Most jobs don't involve formally verifiable outputs. Lots of things involve judgment, nuance, parsing ambiguity and indeed just being a human who can be in a meeting and explain themselves. Maybe those jobs will go too, eventually, but it's not purely a function of applying 10,000 agents to the problem.
Much though jobs may involve those things, it has been rare for me to be in a position where management has valued those things to an extent where they would discern between me and a frontier reasoning LLM's capabilities on those same decisions.
If you think it'll keep improving from here, probably we all have to do some kind of physical labor that isn't profitable to automate. Small batch manufacturing is alright, service work, etc.
If you think it'll slow down, you can do some of the same stuff you're doing now for lower pay while supervising an AI, maybe?
>Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. [1]
Current models are already very very capable. If it becomes cheap and very fast, i think it is game over.
This is a repo for a new thing that is not identical to LaTeX, but intended as an improvement upon it. Typst seems apropos to bring up in related conversation.
What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning coding, math, etc, as we were told to do? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of already mega-rich.)
You can calm down, even those with machine learning knowledge and most of those working for the AI labs won’t be needed anymore if models are capable to improve themselves.
In the end, having a machine replacing the work of a human is a good thing - in most of the cases we don’t work because of the work but to make a living. If too many people can’t make a living anymore the system is going to change. For the better or the worse.
I'd be happy to not work anymore with a strong welfare system redistributing society's gains to the leisured masses, but absolutely nothing I've seen of the direction of politics in any recent years gives me hope for this kind of situation coming about.
No it is good for humanity, but not necessarily good for individuals who built technical foundational skills on things that will be taken over by automation.
AI as it is now and as it will be projected into the future WILL automate many skills. But not all skills. MANY MANY people will retain skills that cannot be replaced by AI. One career track that will be replaced is definetely the SWE. Or at least massively reduced in capacity if not eliminated all together.
When AI can replace most SWEs, it can cost-effectively build systems that can replace most other white-collar workers as well. It's mainly skills involving physical work that cannot be replaced without major advances in robotics. Anything done with a computer in a office will be gone if SWE is gone.
Coding is the easiest thing for the ai to do, the rules are strict, there are plenty of working code to use as example and training data. The most important is that even an ai can decide immediately if the output is good or bad (working vs not working) and try again.
All other white collar jobs does not seem to have this immediate, automatic response loop, so the ai can only rely on a human's judgement on the quality of the work. Which is slow and unreliable. The human is not going to throw an exception while reading the ai generated scientific paper. It is inconsistent, two humans can make the opposite decisions about the same output. No way for the ai to measure auccess.
It is going to change a lot of things for everyone, no question about that, but nothing like this. Coding is obsolete. Actually writing the stuff into an editor does not make any sense.
We are now shepherds, we make sure the agents are well fed and not doing anything stupid.
For me it is amazing to watch it in action, I don't mind being a shepherd :) I'm not interested in the syntax of the languages or code formatting. Tabs or spaces? Who cares, neither. I also don't like shell scripts, batch files, yaml configs, json, xml. Watching the agent going through this shit like a tank is amazing.
I agree about the shepherding role. But, I'm not sure about how hands-off the shepherding will be at well-run companies. I work on pricing software for a regulated industry. If I were to start over again from scratch on some of the systems I work on, I could certainly get AI to create a black box that prices per a spec while showing its work. I would iterate on the system and validate the output with the help of an LLM. I would make sure all edge cases are covered and lock in the behavior with "unit" tests. I'd continue to monitor the system in production.
The problem that I see with a black box approach is a lot of uncertainty about how long it will take to get the initial system reliably producing the correct output with acceptable performance. I could deal with that, but the bigger problem I see is the unpredictability of future effort to make changes to the system as my company grows (more traffic to the system, more/changed territory specific laws, more features). This uncertainty could be mitigated by an experienced software engineer guiding what gets built inside of the box. This guiding would include a familiarity with how the code is structured.
Even if one assumes a black box approach, what the box should actually do still requires the mindset of a good software engineer. Many product managers or non-technical parties requesting software won't think through and find problematic inconsistencies or gaps in the business rules they asked for. They won't anticipate how to frame the problem in a way that makes expanding upon the capabilities later easier.
So, I think the role would look like a blend of software/system architect + product manager + dev/LLM ops + QA. At least this would be true at a company that I would want to work for. I've always preferred working in small, strong teams where everyone has a lot of ownership. There will always be the LLM day equivalent of software produced by offshore teams in the early 2000s. I'm sure their modern-day ilk will excrete something that's good enough. I don't want to work for this type of company.
I believe what happens in the aftermath of a capitalist-driven revolution is most people who were climbing the class hierarchy fall back down again and wealth inequality increases. Maybe things will improve in the future, but GP is rationally contending with the fact that most of us will lose out because of this and if we’re lucky our grandchildren will have easier lives in certain ways, but different lives than we would live.
Very true, unfortunately it is just about repeating something for long enough so you micro agree on certain things and adopt a new "normal" and that volume of info is getting out of hand
I have exactly the same thoughts - or perhaps slightly bleaker ones - evry time I read this relentless stream of news about new model releases. I’m tired of all the enthusiastic comments about how excited everyone is about the latest benchmark results and so on.
I have a strong suspicion that many of those comments are written by people who are already financially independent, have millions in stocks, and can just sit back, coast around and watch this whole spectacle unfold while using LLMs to vibe-code their next fun side projects without a shadow of anxiety about their own future.
I’ll most likely be labelled a helpless doomer and downvoted into oblivion for saying this, but I genuinely struggle to see any silver lining here.
Are you doing less work now because of AI? Not sure about you, but I'm doing a lot more work. Not saying I like doing more, or how it's getting done, but nonetheless I don't feel like AI is doing what the CEOs of AI labs want to convince everyone of.
100% in real life where everyone has an AI there are new problems to deal with. There's a lot of correcting AI slop code. There's a lot of having to read AI generated slop docs and posts and PR comments. There's a lot of evals for large AI agent chains and prompts, etc.
It's natural to worry about one's own future but I think it's a bit wild to worry just _your_ job that would be replaced. Not just for those with phone center jobs or art jobs or programming jobs - remember, the whole premise was AI overtakes humans, why would that slow down after _your_ job?
Because of this, I don't think many are thinking "90% of the world won't have a source of livelihood but that just means I chill at my lake house for the next 20 years like a normal retirement". Instead, it's usually either "I think AI is overhyped", "I think humanity will figure something out", or "I think this is the end of humanity".
Public opinion and politicians will only notice when the job losses are massive, unfortunately. Right now, unemployment rates are still stable. We can only hope they will notice before things fall off a cliff (if they do).
I feel the same sometimes. I don’t see how this doesn’t lead to massive job losses. The thing we spent our lives/careers learning is now worth basically nothing in comparison.
AI is only going to get better and do more with less humans in the loop over time.
That said, I do also relate to the "coding was never the hard part"-type arguments, and much of my day is spent on the stuff in between writing code.. but still.
I see how it won't lead to massive job loss every day, idk. Now every idiot has a massive slop code cannon they can point at any working system and bombard it and we all have to sift through and find the nuggets and gems in the rough
Yes same thoughts. I dont know anyone who are both enthusiastic about those and work for salary. If you dont have any financial concern, this is really great.
Are you sure that will be enjoyable? Lots of articles out there about people opening coffee shops with idyllic dreams of what it will be like, only to find the reality is a daily grind (hehe) of dealing with delayed suppliers, broken machines, absent staff. All that not-fun stuff falls on you while the customers sip their cappucinos.
The answer to this is: countries with the most natural resources will build robots to farm all their food, mine all their minerals, and build all their products. It will be up to governments to enforce that outputs are equitably distributed to the populace. Countries without natural resources, or ones with corrupt governments, will continue to have serious, and likely worsening, problems.
Thought experiment: If no thought workers are needed to design or engineer a Ferrari, what is needed? My answer is time and natural resources (include energy).
People need purpose. Workplaces provide a very structured, highly managed, perpetual treadmill of purpose. Not purpose in the "self growth" sense, but just something to keep people occupied. "The devil looks for idle hands", and with a large swath of the population* on welfare, there's a good chance he'll find plenty.
[0] that said, population in developed countries is naturally declining so maybe it won't be a problem in the long term either; or maybe, with less need to work, people will be more inclined to raise other people, leading us to both more machines and more humans.
Don't be selfish. Think first of all the jobs that are already dead. A friend of mine she's a translator: like translating financial documents between french/english/spanish. It's over for her: she doesn't get 10% of the gigs she used to get and the 10% she gets is... Verifying AI output.
Think of the artists: I'm sorry for those too, for for many it's already game over today.
> How will we make a living?
A friend of mine who's got his own software-consultancy SME is now advertising on LinkedIn that he'll also help your company fix the mess LLMs created.
That's how you'll make a living: by learning, in addition to all you've already learned, how you work with harnesses and LLMs to be more productive, by learning what they're good at and what they suck big fat balls at.
> Think of the artists: I'm sorry for those too, for for many it's already game over today.
No it's not??? People want human made art. Abstract artists didn't paint anything technically challenging and they sold art for millions because art is about human connection and human inventiveness, not whatever prompt you could feed into an AI.
> he'll also help your company fix the mess LLMs created.
Hugely valuable. I keep a list of every PR I halted which was AI generated with AI commit summaries and AI tests and no human reviewer till me. It's very easy to convince people to keep me around. AIs are smarter than ever but the people using them and putting the prompts in and not reading the output are still as dumb as before
This is such a childish take I hear getting thrown around all the time on the internet. If you really have just been listening to whoever is telling you how to be successful, then you were always doomed to fail at some point. Like, have some self-respect and own your own life, for better or worse.
>Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living?
Take it from someone who studied machine learning specifically: nobody is safe if you assume these companies are going to produce a product that will put everybody else out of business. If AI is going to take your job, then it's gonna take enough jobs that your problems will not be personal but systematic.
Perhaps it was childish to listen to advice, sure. I was a child when I made my formative choices; I was a teenager in college and so on. I can't go back in time now.
Yes, these problems are systematic. That is what I am saying. That doesn't make it any nicer.
10-20 years? I doubt it. There are a bunch of companies actively working in bringing AI into robots, so they can make your dishes. And so far progress looks quite good.
Also, if enough people are going for the same backup plan it might not work out. Why should anyone book you as a personal trainer instead of the other 500 guys in town. And who is going to be able to afford paying you anyway?
> There are a bunch of companies actively working in bringing AI into robots, so they can make your dishes.
I know, I'm excited to buy the first relatively affordable ones.
> Also, if enough people are going for the same backup plan it might not work out.
Sure, could happen. You can't really plan for the future -- we like to think we can, but the best you can do is set your goals and deal with the hand life gives you along the way.
> Why should anyone book you as a personal trainer instead of the other 500 guys in town.
I'm not particularly worried about this, but that's an individual thing based on network/connections and life history that doesn't apply to everyone.
I doubt it. It’s not just America working on these breakthroughs anymore. Now we have two powers working at break neck speed to get to that point and the Chinese are making a lot of progress.
Those robots are a gimmick and they can only do prescribed tasks in a super constrained environment. They are cashing in on LLM hype right now, vision has had some advances thanks to transformers but we are so far away in terms of the hard stuff (dexterity and physical sensing) still.
Is that 10-20 years number based on anything? I genuinely have no idea, but when I saw a video showing what's happening at the World Humanoid Robot Games[1], I realized I didn't have a good idea of where we really are with robotics.
We are talking that hundred millions of people will switch their jobs, how you will keep your value or earning as personal trainer. It's not easy to say switch the job. This question must be answered by politicians not us.
You'll be fine. All these AIs still need direction, drive, and prompts. And it'll still be important to evaluate their output and correct it. And you'll be more productive and able to do more tasks quicker than usual with you helpful human expertise guiding the AI which is far more general.
You're the taste and decision maker. The AI is like a really precise, fast Google, Wikipedia, codegen tool
It’s an interesting moment in history, people 35+ yrs old seem to be less afraid if tech because we learned that things change in the way we work.
People below this age got used to fact that the work and tech doesn’t change - just because for the last 10-15 years it didn’t.
The problem is it’s turtles all the way down. The AI will be able to use AIs better than a good engineer can. And it will also be able to use AIs to use AIs to use AIs better than the engineer can.
The threat is that the very kernel of value you had is gone forever. There is no more differential leverage.
Under rent control the highest possible rent is set by laws. If you fall behind on the allowed rent increase you’re usually not allowed to catch up to market rate later, such as when your tenant leaves and you put the unit back on the market. So to avoid getting stuck at below market rate with no legal way to catch up, you have to take the maximum allowable rent increase every year. In some situations it’s better to leave a unit empty and wait for someone be willing to rent at the rate than it is to lower rent, because the consequences of lowering rent will stick with the unit for years.
Without rent control, rents can be kept constant, moved up, or moved down without having to consider the consequences for years to come. The ceiling is set by the market rate, but there isn’t a function driving all of the landlords to raise by the annually permissible maximum so they try to discover it instead.
Rent control is instituted in cities that have constrained housing supplies, so the demand is there. Landlords switch to raising rents in unison by the maximum allowable amount every year because that’s the only way to operate.
I live in NYC, which has rent control, and the idea that a landlord would otherwise lower rent is hilarious.
Landlords raise rent by the max allowed because they can. There is no “catch up” because the purpose is to protect renters against huge jumps.
I think rent controlled units that sit empty should be subject to a tax based on an escalating percentage of the market rent. You can own property to rent out, but in a city with a tremendous shortage of housing, you need to rent it out.
I lived in a building with affordable housing units and management decided they would rather not rent them out at all. Horrible.
New York’s rent control works differently from the Bay Area’s. It’s absolutely worth it to just raise the rent on a Bay Area unit if it’s rent controlled even if that means it runs empty. That isn’t usually the case in New York.
> I think rent controlled units that sit empty should be subject to a tax based on an escalating percentage of the market rent
They would just be taken off the market and then relisted later.
Forcing people to rent their properties and also forcing the price isn’t something I can get behind. People need to be able to choose what they do with their property.
Just as well I’m not arguing for rent control or any particular policy then isn’t it?
I’m pointing out that the “it’s my property I can do what I want” attitude needs to be balanced with public needs for housing, because society isn’t purely about optimising the content of your wallet, and extreme deregulation results in slums.
(Your linked paper there also says that rent control results in more properties having affordable rent at the low end of the market, but less overall rental property supply, indicating a reduction at the higher end. I’m good with that as a consequence, those who are better off can usually afford to get into purchasing a property. In some markets, like much of Australia, having fewer landlords and wannabe landlords competing to purchase properties would be a bonus. This actually looks like a win all round TBH.
tl;dr - congrats, you’ve used science to sell me on rent control)
> (Your linked paper there also says that rent control results in more properties having affordable rent at the low end of the market, but less overall rental property supply, indicating a reduction at the higher end.
Your conclusion is completely wrong.
What happens when you reduce the higher end of the rental property range? Do you think the people who would have been renting those properties simply vanish? Disappear from the rental market?
No, obviously they don't. So what are they doing instead? They're renting those mid-end properties instead. And what happens to the people who would have rented those mid-end properties that are now occupied by the wealthier renters? They get pushed to the low-end properties. What happens to the people who were trying to get into the low-end properties? They're pushed into being roommates or leaving the city.
Any policy that reduces overall housing supply is a loss for the low end. The way you're bending over backwards to try to imagine this as a good thing indicates something very wrong with your assumptions.
This is a case where someone has become so narrowly focused on hurting the people they perceive as wealthy (people who rent the expensive units) that even solutions that hurt the poor (policies which reduce housing supply) look like a good idea. This isn’t a good way to think.
> Do you think the people who would have been renting those properties simply vanish? Disappear from the rental market?
Actually yes, entirely unironically.
We even have evidence of this dynamic in Melbourne. When various tax measures were taken that sucked some of the profit out of investment properties, making landlordism less attractive, we saw there was less competition for house purchasing from well-funded investors. This in turn allowed would-be owner-occupiers to buy more houses, as they were no longer forced into rentals they didn't want, no longer outcompeted by those with easier access to larger lines of credit. This reduces the population of people seeking rentals.
Result - decline in the absolute numbers of rental properties in the city, but an increase in rental property vacancy and a slight decrease in rents.
> Any policy that reduces overall housing supply is a loss for the low end.
Except it doesn't reduce the overall housing supply, because overall housing supply includes both rental properties and owner-occupied properties. Those houses don't just disappear.
You're making the (false) assumptions that there is no interplay between the two markets and that everyone that lives in a rented house wants to live in a rented house.
The same paper specifically notes that the increase of units affordable to very low income levels depends on there being any significant number of units affordable to very low income levels in the first place, and that's something that's functionally nonexistent in places like San Francisco and NYC.
Why is this so difficult? We will try absolutely anything except to allow enough housing to be built, and then ask why there isn't enough housing. It's madness.
If there isn't enough housing, no amount of shenanigans can overcome that inconvenient fact, except to build more housing. That's it. That is the only thing which can alleviate a housing shortage.
Particularly in NYC you can’t just build housing - there’s nowhere to put it! The city is already incredibly dense and most land is already used for housing. Your best bet is demolishing lower rise buildings and replacing them with high rises.
Which, they do all the time, even in places like Brooklyn. It’s been happening for decades. But as you can imagine, it’s a long and arduous process. It’s not like erecting an apartment complex in the middle of a big plain of land in Texas.
> People need to be able to choose what they do with their property.
We have a severe housing shortage and these are developers building high-rise apartments. This isn’t me saying you should be forced to rent your second bedroom.
They are getting permits and incentives _to build housing_.
If the thing you own happens to be essential for other people's lives, and in short supply to boot, it would be irresponsible to leave all the decisions to you.
If the maximum allowable rent under rent control is bearable by the market, why would a landlord not do that in the absence of rent control? Are there landlords that are stupid and hate money?
> Landlords switch to raising rents in unison by the maximum allowable amount every year
Blaming this on rent control? This entire take is absurd. Because of the simple fact that landlords, especially using this software, do this in cities without rent control.
Unless now type arguing that Berkley rent control forces landlords in cities without rent control to seek maximum rents...
Rent control is flawed, limiting housing stock is flawed. But blaming landlord's pricing behavior on this is obviously false. Simply because it happens without rent control.
> Blaming this on rent control? This entire take is absurd
Rent control is one of the few topics where the vast majority of economists agree on something. It makes people who don't understand second-order effects really angry when the conclusion doesn't match what they want to see, but it's been proven out across the world so many times that anyone who refuses to acknowledge the real problems with rent control is either uninformed or denying reality at this point.
You just want to talk about rent control. Even when it's not the issue at hand. It's the equivalent of watching a kid fall and skin his knee and someone steps forward to get on a soap box about rent control.
Rent control can be bad, but it's not even close to the cause of every problem in housing. Most importantly, it's not the cause here, and it's absurd to say it is.
Sounds like we should prevent rent increases. Fix the law, don't throw it away. Landlords that cannot afford to be landlords need to sell and go get a real job.
No one is entitled to be a lazy landlord taxing other people's existence and its extremely rare for a landlord to have built new houses, they mostly gatekeep the existing housing.
People in california need to take advantage of a populace willing to vote for constitutional amendments and override the politicians.
None of this is relevant to Berkeley since California law prohibits rent control on vacant units (and has for decades). When renting ti a new tenant landlords can charge whatever they like.
It's honestly absurd to read this thread because everyone who has ever rented in the SF bay area knows this, yet there's a whole discussion based on some half-assumed idea of what the system is.
They would. But second order effects ensure that this very act leads to the decline of housing prices. These effects being eliminated by rent control makes it the premier anti-tenant policy.
What second-order effects...? Feels like such an oddly opqaue way to talk about them. And how do you ignore the effect of the fact that rent no longer rises during the life of the tenant, making it lower after a while than it would otherwise be...? (How) is it so obvious that that is dwarfed by the second-order effects of uncontrolled rent that it doesn't even warrant a mention? Because it isn't to me.
> And how do you ignore the effect of the fact that rent no longer rises during the life of the tenant,
Rent control schemes don’t work like this, except in completely broken policies.
Landlords are given an allowance for rent control increases year over year. The point is that they basically have to take the maximum allowed every year to avoid getting stuck.
Prices are a signal, and price changes are how market participants can determine which way supply and demand curves are moving.
By legislating prices and price changes, the signal is muddied, and market participants cannot take action to match the movements of the supply and demand curves.
Prop 13’s property tax rate increase cap is also price fixing. These kinds of laws are mostly ways to enrich and reward those who got or were born somewhere first, and run counter to the vaunted meritocracy that a so called free market can encourage.
Edit: The most helpful thing the government can do is maximize price transparency, so the smaller entity can be on equal footing with the bigger entity about which way prices are moving. Tenant agreements should be public record, like land sales are, and that would not only help cops with kicking out squatters, but also give renters more power in negotiations.
These side effects of these dynamics are not going to be evident or resolved in the short term. It took decades for prop 13’s (and other effects) to compound and become visible, and it will take decades to undo.
There is no shortcut though, the incentives have to be set right, and there has to be patience for the results to show. Unfortunately, long term benefit at the expense of the short term is a core weakness in democracy.
I don't think that's true. Prop 13 for example is priced into the market. Buyers bid higher because their taxes are frozen. This doesn't take decades to correct.
Market reactions are instant. Once the policy is fixed we don't have to wait for a generation
Buyers bid higher because sellers are giving up their low property tax, not because the buyer will have a low property tax in a decade or two. Sellers are hesitant to sell because they are giving up a lot, California had to pass a special law just to let old people downsize without losing their low property tax on the big home they raised a family in.
If rent no longer rises then the profit doesn't rise commensurately with demand, so the money isn't there to build supply.
Rent control crushes supply to the degree that the rent control caps rents below the actual market rate.
If you're lucky enough to get rent controlled housing then you're in good shape. But good luck getting it when things get far enough down the timeline.
Rent fixing is the other side where supply is manipulated to extract the maximum profit. In this case the coordinated rent pricing action behaves like an oligopoly.
If rents can’t rise quickly, then the expected profit of a building goes down, which means prices for land go down, which means it is cheaper to build, which means it balances out.
If the balance is far enough off that everything turns into commercial real estate, that can be solved, too.
You’re misunderstanding 2 fundamental things. First is that it’s very expensive to build anything in major US cities with the high cost of labor, materials, and permitting. Rent control completely tips the balance against building housing that you’ll rent out. Second is that the value of land is not going to depreciate in these premier US cities just because it’s not profitable to build rental units. There’s many valuable things you can do with that land, rental units will just stop getting built in favor of other things.
With rent control, you are limited in how you can increase rent later, so it’s to your benefit to let the apartment sit vacant longer until you get a desirable rent. Without rent control, because you can just increase rent next year by whatever, you can rent it at the market rate right away without waiting.
You might prefer to have the vacancy filled faster rather than waiting for the highest possible price. These algorithmic pricing cases kind of revolve around this concept.
It is the value that the service provided the companies.
Landlord input a desired vacancy rate or time on Market, and service suggests the right price.
I hate Python and I'm onboard with putting it down in many ways, but significant whitespace isn't weird in a first programming language. It's only weird if you've absorbed from some other language the convention that whitespace shouldn't be significant.
Haskell, Lean, and Agda too. But even if Python were the only one, it wouldn't be weird to someone for whom this was their first programming language. It would just seem the way programming languages are. There's nothing intrinsically weird about indentation being significant. It's quite visibly part of the code you write and read.
> There's nothing intrinsically weird about indentation being significant. It's quite visibly part of the code you write and read.
The idea is fine, I guess, although I certainly don't care for it. Where it gets most nasty is that whitespace that looks the same (in your editor) might not be equal and will cause you pain.
> Where it gets most nasty is that whitespace that looks the same (in your editor) might not be equal and will cause you pain.
First off, what editor could I end up using in 2026 that makes this a realistic problem? Even the most basic editors I know of have options to convert tabs to spaces automatically (and any responsible teacher will tell the student to indent with spaces), and to continue the previous line's indentation automatically.
Second, modern Python is stricter about this, and also gives clear error messages.
People love to say the Unix philosophy is "Write programs that do one thing and do it well". But this does not really seem to me to really match Unix practice. And it doesn't match LLMs either, as the article notes.
(So what is this article talking about? I guess it's talking mainly about "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface".)
Yes. And math too. I think there's lots of beauty remaining in understanding these things, and using that understanding to craft things cleanly rather than as slop, but no one will pay us to do it, so we will never have the opportunity to do it.
You don’t have to get paid to make contributions to math. There are still loads of hobbyists making contributions around the world. The guy that found the aperiodic monotile was a hobbyist who collaborated with a researcher. There was a significant proof in combinatorics (lower bound on superpermutations) contributed by an anonymous 4chan poster!
Hobbyist mathematics may long outlive a lot of research mathematics, and I think that’s okay. There’s nothing in the human spirit of inquiry that necessitates academia as an all-powerful institution. Heck, there have been a lot of problems with the institution in recent years, and those have everything to do with perverse incentives and nothing to do with AI.
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