Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@agowa338 @glyph @tymwol @davidgerard Is there data on that? Acknowledging that this is anecdote, I see non-programmers in my extended work and social world trying to build little apps for whatever personal purpose that I don't think they would have attempted a couple years ago. I don't think most of them even know what StackOverflow is. (and their inspiration may be all about marketing rather than actual experience, so we will see how they fare)

@glyph @agowa338 @tymwol @davidgerard What I am most concerned about are what in the post you categorize as harm to the humans and 2nd order effects. I think these get to be much more concerning as the underlying tools get more effective, and I'm not sure how to even mitigate those problems. If we look at how mass media and social media have melted people's brains a bit...

@glyph @agowa338 @tymwol @davidgerard Your post is very well framed. I think you can simplify the equation to C/PH because I, W, and E are each approximately zero, and as you point out it's tricky to estimate the other numbers. If we assume for a second well-framed problems have P close to 1.0 (I suspect this is true), the major variability is C/H which I expect to be highly variable dependent similar to how some areas are easier to mechanically test than others.

@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph It's interesting, this doesn't at all line up with my experience. The tools I tried were able to translate ~1 paragraph of instruction about a change into a point by point plan with references, correctly enough to need very few edits, and then to execute it in one go. Similarly, to take a pasted error (I tried a few, the interesting one was a infrequently manifesting concurrency problem), diagnose two likely causes, and patch.

@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph It's a bit of a puzzle to me why this is the case, but I think some of it is lack of first hand experience. That raises the question of how to make the case or spread awareness without myself encouraging people adopt these tools.

@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph I've done some experimentation and I found the tools to be extremely powerful in the way having a tracked excavator is more powerful than a hand shovel. Perhaps applying it takes some skill, but it magnifies human effort quite a lot. I've grown quite concerned that many people really underestimate the impact these tools are having and will have on a secular trend of power shifting away from labor.

@agowa338 @tymwol @glyph I have been trying to understand this area with precision. I think the kinds of problems the code assistants tend to fail at are the kind that were not generally answerable on StackOverflow in the first place, and which a less experienced programmer might not even recognize or be able to describe well enough to even ask a question.

@ariadne I am periodically tempted to buy an Android-based eink tablet in order to have a programmable but quiet display, and every time I have to ask my self whether I really want to write more code for Android.

@mttaggart @glyph If there is such an unwinding I think users that can't afford premium service providers will fall back to free/subsidized providers and tools that run on-device. A whole spectrum rather than a binary have / have not.

@glyph The troubling aspect to me is the question about labor power and the way the models are produced. If it is truly possible to reimplement a complex parser in a new language for 1MW/h and one developer month that seems like a good trade. The amount of security related churn and heartache that could be avoided by rewriting popular libraries away from memory-unsafe languages, that's a substantial benefit. I doubt it's quite that easy or it would be happening in more cases though.

@glyph @jmeowmeow As you can probably infer I have done a good bit of abyss-staring.

@glyph @jmeowmeow There are other fund structures that do these kinds of investments in some circumstances, Andrew Wilkenson's Tiny being an example that comes to mind, but it's a bit different than what VCs can do.

As for the 5%, it's a rough guess based on different numbers I've heard of different slices of finance. It depends who you count as "institutional" etc, and every fund manager has their own idea about how to allocate.

@glyph @jmeowmeow Most companies don't have a reasonable chance of unlimited upside, or its implied consequence infinite net present value. If you look at a coffee shop, or a copper mine, or a CRM for dentists, you can reason about the business and come up with an idea of its financial mechanics and how it could be funded. Having been around a lot of small software companies I don't think many of them really have the growth potential to justify large outside investments.

@jmeowmeow @glyph Story 1 as written doesn't have enough growth in it. Venture investors will only invest in things that have the potential to grow rapidly and to a large size, otherwise their business model doesn't make sense. Most businesses aren't shaped like that so they need a different kind of funding. VC is only something like 5% of institutional equity investments so it's a small if extremely loud corner of the finance world.

@glyph @glyph On the one hand this is an uninspiring possibility because it implies that without an external stabilizing force the browser world will stabilize with just a few dominant brands. On the other, it suggests that succeeding with a new browser doesn't necessarily entail a massive technical effort, more a cultural, packaging, and marketing project.

@glyph What that suggests to me is the usage dynamics are more like soft drinks, an inexpensive product where choices are driven by habit, brand perception, and distribution more than anything in the product itself. Not much different from how Coca-Cola and Pepsi are more or less interchangeable and equally bad for you.

@glyph I have observed but not followed closely the conversations about Firefox direction, "AI" features, etc. I'm not well-informed enough to have any strong opinions but one thing that's certainly different vs a decade ago is all of the major browsers work well in terms of compatibility, performance, stability, etc. There are differences, but they're all plenty usable. At the same time there a lot of smaller hurdles to switching (bookmarks, device sync, G acct sign-in).

@glyph Interesting. Their self-reported data shows a slow decline in absolute usage [1] while ITU data [2] shows a big increase in total usage, consistent with the reports of rapidly dropping share.

1. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
2. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/

@glyph Do you have a link to the data? (FWIW I'm not in the group, Firefox has been my secondary browser since around a decade ago, with Safari as primary due to the large performance difference historically and now mostly inertia.)

@glyph It's pretty dishonest and probably breach of contract but in the US this tends to be how things go.