I recognized this a few months back when I wanted to see the algorithm that a website used to do a calculation. I just put the minified JS in ChatGPT and figured it out pretty easily. Let's take this a few steps out. What happens when a LLM can clone a whole SAAS app? Let's say I wanted to clone HubSpot. If an LLM can interact with a browser and figure out how a UI works and take code hints from un-mimified code I think we could see all SAAS apps be commoditized. The backend would be proprietary, but it could figure out API formats and suggest a backend architecture.
All this makes me think AI's are going to be a strong deflationary force in the future.
>If an LLM can interact with a browser and figure out how a UI works and take code hints from un-mimified code I think we could see all SAAS apps be commoditized. The backend would be proprietary, but it could figure out API formats and suggest a backend architecture.
whoooha! that's a lot of probing and testing of the SAAS that would be required in order to see how it behaved. SAAS aren't algorithms, they operate over data that's unseen on the front end as well...
>All this makes me think AI's are going to be a strong deflationary force in the future.
I don't get this. I've literally never worked anywhere which had enough software engineers, we've been going on about software crisis for about 50 years and things are arguably worse than ever. The gap between the demand for good software (in the sense that allocating capital to producing it would be sensible) and the fulfillment of that demand is bigger than ever. We just don't have the mechanisms to make this work and to make it work at an economically viable level.
Then we get AI to help us and everyone thinks that the economy will shrink?
You wouldn't necessarily need to do much probing - consider that the documentation would provide numerous hints to the agent as to what each endpoint was actually doing.
Honestly, the value in most business software isn't the actual technology. It's the customer base and data held by the platforms.
Someone could already easily clone HubSpot relatively cheaply even if they hired developers, but that doesn't mean it will be anywhere near successful.
This is relevant for me today since we are designing a new house. To go with an architect is looking like between $50k - $100k for basic building schematics and not the build plans. This seems like a lot to me. The route I'm going down now is finding houses I like on Zillow and hiring a Designer on Fivrr to basically copy them and create a 3D model in Revit that can eventually become building plans. So far the Fivrr Designer costs $100 per Zillow house to model into pretty good Revit plans that I could take to a Draftsman in my area to turn into building plans. It feels a little like cheating, but I've been seeing good results so far.
AI is increasingly used to prescreen resumes for a lot of these high-applicant jobs in tech. The Hiring Manager is probably looking at 10% of the resumes that come in after AI has screened them. I'm working on a side project that tailors each resume for the job description to get past these AI filters. It's called https://CustomizedResumes.com. I'd love to hear your feedback on the idea.
I'm working on hacking the job application process by having LLMs take your base resume and tailor it for each job application. I'd love your feedback https://customizedresumes.com . I've been A/B testing by applying for jobs with only my base resume compared to an AI-customized resume. It's roughly a 2x higher response rate with the customized resume.
I really like React Create App on the front end with AWS API Gateway connected to AWS Lambdas. I use AWS Cognito for user login and AWS DynamoDB for my data store. Hosting is dirt cheap to start and scales well if your app takes off. The downside is that you're coupled to AWS.
NextJS does more than create-react-app, but you're not required to use all those extra features. You can use it to just escape the tedium of configuring JS tooling.
I spent 4 hours trying to figure out how to build a static nextjs website. I ended up giving up and switching to astro. You basically need to understand SSR to do static sites.
Vite is the closest thing we have to a Create React App successor. It does most of what CRA did in its heyday, while subsisting on far fewer dependencies. Run `npm create vite@latest` and just follow the CLI prompts.
someone told me about vite. ill try that out next. I switched to astro for a blog after giving up with nextjs, and it works pretty well for a blog. not sure about a front end app though.
You could build a blog with Vite and @mdx-js/react, but that honestly might be overkill. Astro is definitely tailored towards the blog use case. Gatsby is another older framework that's oriented more towards building a blog, but I'm not a huge fan of how it insists on making you use GraphQL. Eleventy is another popular choice for JS powered static sites if you're not set on using React.
The article compares The Little Mermaid with Furiosa. The two movies cannot be any more different. I saw Furiosa and enjoyed it a lot. It's not a kid's movie... I think a summer blockbuster needs to appeal to a wider crowd.
This kind of research is non-falsifiable and I think it's just a waste of these scientists' talents. You will hear never-ending theories of the Big Bang, black holes, and the end of the universe because all this research is non-falsifiable and just people playing with math and coming up with different ideas that humans find interesting, but will not affect your quality of life at all.
Science has to be falsifiable or else it's just a new type of faith.
This kind of research is definitely falsifiable. If you read the article you'd see tons of graphs that are the result of actual direct measurement of phenomena. These measurements are used to rule out some of the theories, and conform to other theories. Astrophysicists make predictions and run experiments all the time. The same is true for black hole theories.
No one is claiming that their speculative models and hypotheses are "truth". Before sufficient evidence is available, you start with a model and a hypothesis, which drives the search for evidence. Then it becomes falsifiable once you gather the evidence. I think you may have missed the explanation of science where the first step is to create a guess and that drives your experiments.
As far as "not affecting your quality of life at all", people have been saying this about cutting edge science since forever. "Time can't be relative, it's just scientists playing with math. Besides, we'll never travel fast enough for it to matter and it doesn't affect our lives anyway." Yet time dilation is an important factor in your daily life if you ever used GPS.
> just people playing with math and coming up with different ideas that humans find interesting, but will not affect your quality of life at all
A lot of people like to pursue knowledge purely out of curiosity. Some people even think that having a good quality of life means that there is room for these sorts of conversations!
This kind of reserach, which comes with new ideas which better explain our observations, helps balance exactly the blind faith in religion.
People will always ask "where everything came from" questions. And if there is no science with plausible big-bang => background radiation... theories, you can just as easily return back to creationism.
I kinda agree about researching the end of the Universe, but the birth of the Universe and black holes a pretty relevant to modern day science. We don't have a theory of quantum gravity, we have a singularity at the big-bang, etc.
Finding a theory of everything could unlock many new practical improvements. Falsifiability not only happens when you can disprove something with a physical experiment. You can't trigger another big-bang, but with a better model, you can falsify the currently accepted theory because it makes a prediction.
Thinking about the end of the universe is not that pointless though. It's tending towards philosophy, which could make people think what's our role in the world, can we at some point exist again, I think the list is long.
> I kinda agree about researching the end of the Universe,
It's a fallacy to believe that people are specifically researching the end of the Universe. We research models. The standard model for example is parameterized by six numbers. You measure those six numbers, put them in the model, and the model will tell you how old the universe is and what will happen in the far future.
If it turns out that different probes yield incompatible sets of values for those six numbers, for example probes from the early universe vs more current probes (e.g. the cosmic microwave background vs super novae data), then the model must be wrong. Then we might look for another model, perhaps one with seven parameters, where the additional parameter characterizes the evolution of dark energy, which assumed to be constant until now, and see if that fits better. And what do you know, that model might yield a different result for the age of the universe and its fate.
It's a consequence of fundamental research, not a primary goal in itself.
Do you mean that we will not be able to witness the fate of the Universe? But this very article shows the case when the theory about a Universe fate was falsified or at least came close to it. If a theory is making predictions, and one can check them, then it is a falsifiable theory. Simple models of Universe make predictions, like "you will get the same rate of an expansion however you measure it", and oops... different methods give different results.
I believe you are confusing a falsifiable theory and pragmatic knowledge. We are really cannot predict any practical applications for these kind of theories. So they are not pragmatic. But they are falsifiable.
Why would the big bang and black holes be non-falsifiable? You can observe them.
Even "the end of the universe", just because something is in the future doesn't mean you can't make scientific predictions about it based in your understanding of physics.
Technically, by this logic, isn't estimating when a bridge or building will collapse also non-falsifiable? Because it is in the future? But we do use math plus current understandings to make predictions.
I don't know, there's many "useless" things done that at a later date have been found to be beneficial in areas not intended be the original experimenter.
With such general assertions, you really have to be careful not to end up looking like the one who is being taken in by faith. Science is not about quality of life, but about gaining knowledge. Not all scientific knowledge is based on falsifiability. Science does not float in an empty space but has a foundation that is not itself science.
Not sure about whether it's falsifiable or not, but maybe it can affect quality of life?
I mean, imagine we do find the answer to a cause of the big bang or the fate of the end of the universe, there might as well be some knowledge in there that allows new kinds of engineering that can be useful for daily life
E.g. (silly example): understanding how to create a big bang might allow creating an entire universe from scratch with minimal compute resources, in which we can then game
I think it is a lot harder for new Software Engineers to get into the field today. I was a self-taught engineer when I got into the field 10 years ago. Now I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 100 company. But now I'm hearing stories that companies are not even looking at self-taught Software Engineers.
As someone who graduates their degree in two days I can definitely confirm this. Even though I have sent out over 40 applications, maybe two came back to the phone-screen.. It really feels bleak to get any kind of junior role right now.
> But now I'm hearing stories that companies are not even looking at self-taught Software Engineers.
Same boat for me down to self taught and entry 10 years ago, I just avoided the management path.
I've had companies flat out reject me (for mid level roles) due to not having a SWE degree, even though I literally have 10+ years of professional experience in the area they're hiring for. I can only imagine self taught and no degree would get laughed out of the room most of the time now unfortunately.
