The incredible improvements have only been over the last 9 months or so. Business, especially disrupting entire job functions, takes much longer than that. As is typical with this type of change, it'll be slow until a tipping point, then FOMO will hit.
If I were to count the number of times you all have said "incredible improvements" here on this site over the last 7 years, what number do you think I'd come up with, and would that change your tune? I'll do it, if I must, to show you all how un-serious is this claim.
If anything the expectation of incredible improvements just over the horizon makes an argument for not adopting AI or at least doing so very judiciously.
Why would you spend dollars on tokens today if you expect the same tokens will get you something vastly superior in a few months, or that they'll do the same job for nickels on the dollar? Do you just hate having money or what is the problem?
Weird, AI enjoyers have been calling the game for years. We're already supposed to have achieved AGI and already be in the midst of the technological singularity. The tipping point was when AI solved the Navier-Stokes problem. All human created art, media and software development has been declared dead a dozen times over.
Firearms are capable of being used for legal purposes, as they are in the overwhelming number of cases. A radio that transmits on a restricted frequency is illegal. The ruling doesn't say legal frequency transmitters can't be sold, just that the broker (ebay) is responsible for ensuring it's not facilitating the sale of illegal radio equipment. Ebay is the one choosing not to sell most radio equipment (even if legal), because they don't want to deal with it.
Firearms used to be widely available at big-box stores, as they were legal (and still are), provided the store prevented illegal purchases. Most box stores/locations no longer sell firearms, because they don't want to deal with it.
They also reduce friction for purchases, which merchants that aren't short-sighted realize nets them far more on balance. Retailers that are or have been locked out of processing credit cards (marijuana retailers, porn) are often desperate to appeal those restrictions.
I do the same with Home Assistant and my many EspHome devices. HA works well, and it has a lot of nice features and extensive community-built integrations, but configuring and laying out the UI is a disaster. You can choose between WYSIWYG UI tools that are limited and cumbersome, or you can deal with raw YAML that stretches far beyond what YAML should be used for with deep nesting, and it's poorly documented to boot. It feels like a proprietary workflow engine, where you'd rather just write it in a real programming language.
Agents cut through all that crap and allow me to make changes without learning a new overwrought configuration language that thrashes syntax every few months. The fact that it is open and fully modifiable redeems it, because I can ignore all the annoying parts while achieving what all that was envisioned to allow.
Don't forget (at least in the US), artificial scarcity intentionally created by licensure requirements and/or unions. If I wanted to be an electrician tomorrow, even given my experience and knowledge of the subject, I'd still need 8,000 hours of apprenticeship and other verified instruction/classes. Finding someone to apprentice under, being paid slave wages, tends to be the biggest blocker.
You're probably not counting all the overhead, particularly from heavy equipment. Skidsteers, dump trailers, stump grinders, as well as all the oversized/towing capable trucks to haul those machines around. All of that equipment needs maintenance and fuel, as well.
The expensive part is usually just showing up ready to work, with a marginal cost for each additional tree. If you had 15 trees taken down in one day, the cost per tree would work out to seem much more reasonable.
My neighbors were having a bunch of tree work done, and I asked the supervisor what it would cost to take a big dead one down on my property. I planned to do it myself, so I had a strong haggling position, and I got him to $400, which felt worth it to save me a day's worth of hard labor. If they weren't already onsite with all the gear, that would've been $2K+ easy.
I thought for sure this was going to talk about the non-scientific IARC classifications. Even group 1, the doozies, doesn't consider dose or actual risk, leading to ludicrous adjacency like processed meats and asbestos. Scientists that aren't politically motivated wouldn't classify things on a list with terms like 'probably' or 'possibly'.
DBFs tend to be the easy part, in my experience in a similar company (not as much revenue.) The spec is simple enough that one can write a reader/writer in an afternoon, even before AI.
My biggest challenge is the speed at which calculation heavy business logic can operate in FP, even on network shares, as long as they're optimized for IOPs not bandwidth. Trying to adapt similar data access patterns to a networked RDBMS will kill you with round trip and connection overhead. Converting that logic to set-based operations or stored procedures means altering logic and all the risks that entails.
I went as far as to write a YouTube downloading app, that uses ytdlp, but presents the downloaded mp3s in a feed that can be picked up by antennapod.
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