[HN Gopher] The Next Abstraction
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The Next Abstraction
Author : mbs348
Score : 19 points
Date : 2025-05-22 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (substack.com)
| redwood wrote:
| Spot on. New things will be possible. New things will be done.
| And so the wheel turns.
| alserio wrote:
| I don't know, feels kinda shallow as an argument. For example
| it only works until the demand for (paid) software exceeds the
| offering.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think of Java as one of the earliest widely-accepted languages
| that introduced a lot of design patterns and language idioms that
| have become pretty much par for the course, since.
|
| I never really _liked_ it, but I see its influence in Swift,
| every day, and I do like Swift.
|
| I think that we are at the "unlikable Java" stage of AI, right
| now. In a few years, we'll be seeing the next generation of
| tools, and they will be pretty cool.
|
| And no, CEOs, you won't be able to fire all of your developers,
| and still stay in business. The developers will just have
| different tools at hand.
| alserio wrote:
| But CEOs are putting a lot of money in AI and the books need to
| be balanced somehow.
| keybored wrote:
| I guess all vaguely bait-level articles will be about AI now.
|
| Well, so much questionable here. First of all abstraction.
| Everything is an abstraction to programmers. It's not, please.
| The author even was kind enough to contrast it with an old school
| bona fide abstraction. Garbage collection eliminates memory
| unsafety. You just don't have to worry about it. That's a real
| abstraction. It takes power away and streamlines the whole
| experience since you don't have to worry about certain variables
| any more, they are just gone. What does AI do? It's leverage. It
| might help you do things whatever factor of times faster that you
| insist. Completely unevenly. There is not one thing it reliably
| abstracts away. Please use precise words. You're supposed to be
| technologists/technicians.
|
| Then there's the old looking to the past in order to lecture
| about what is hyped as completely unprecedented space-age
| technology. Okay to be honest this isn't inconsistent if you
| merely think that AI is a great technology but not a revolution,
| not even a "silver bullet". But anyway I see no reason to
| slavishly look to the past. The past is in fact tiny. WWII ended
| one person's lifetime ago. How much oil was in the Earth 150
| years ago? How much now? How reliably could you say that we could
| just expand economically forever 80 years ago? With climate
| change and whatnot, how is that looking right now?
|
| Why not be a little cynical and pragmatic and consider that
| everything might not play out exactly like they did in a person's
| lifetime kind of timespan. The worst could happen. What's a
| billionaire with both a robot workforce and a robot army? That's
| you getting discarded like the useful idiot that you are, or
| were. Just someone who dutifully built the whole world up for a
| little wage so that it could all be taken away.
|
| Maybe you think economists are smart because they have quips
| against "finite piece of pie" so-called fallacies. Maybe you
| think that the best programmers are the ones who hustle along to
| the next paradigm, well those are after all the real go-getters,
| the ones who just get on with business. I think those are tunnel-
| visioned specialist fools.
|
| Dig yourself into your specialist niche, aspire to be the hacker
| among hackers. Revel in embodying the values that only other
| members of your professional/hobbyist group respect. Meanwhile
| ignore the sharks of the world circling around you and get taken
| advantage of without any recourse or even notification.
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(page generated 2025-05-22 23:00 UTC)