If you're going to vibe code on legacy code, use the languages used there. If you're going to vibe code something new, then I recommend Rust. There are few cases where I would vibe code something brand new in C, mainly when building a library I'm going to need to use from other C programs.
I agree that coding is more fun than vibe coding, right up until you have a massive refactor that is super repetitive and no fun to author, but an LLM can do it in no time flat. Even if an IDE can help with the refactor, there are cases where they can't. And anyways, if you're working with a codebase you understand but are not super familiar with, then vibe coding is incredibly productive, though, well, you'll spend much more time reviewing what the LLM did, so maybe not quite that productive (unless you count on others to do your review, but that's not very nice, and it will show).
> If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.
I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything. If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners."
What would they get from the plebs? Suppose we went through The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated, then what? Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.
> Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.
I don't think we'll have Star Trek economics, because that would be fundamentally fair and egalitarian and plentiful. There will still be resource constraints like energy production and raw materials. I think it will be more like B2B economics, international trade, with a small number relevant owners each controlling vast amounts of resources and productive capacity and occasionally trading basics amongst themselves. It could also end up like empires-at-war (which actually may be more likely, since war would give the owners something seemingly important to do, vs just building monuments to themselves and other types of jerking off).
Consider being a significant shareholder in the future as analogous to citizenship as it exists today. Non-owners will be persona non gratae, if they're allowed to live at all.
> If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners."
I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative.
>> If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners."
> I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative.
No, that doesn't surprise me at all. I'm basically just applying the logic of capitalism and automation to a new technology, and the same thing has played out a thousand times before. The only difference with AI is that; unlike previous, more limited automation; it's likely there will be no roles for displaced workers to move into (just like when engines got good enough there were no roles for horses to move into).
It's important to remember that capitalism isn't about providing for people. It's about providing for people with wealth to exchange. That works OK when you have full employment and wealth gets spread around by paying workers, but if most jobs disappear due to automation there's no mechanism to spread wealth to the vast majority of people, so under capitalism they'll eventually die of want.
See also: Citigroup's plutonomy thesis[1] from 2006
tldr: the formal economy will shift to serving plutocrats instead of consumers, it's much more profitable to do so and there are diminishing returns serving the latter
> Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing [...]
Yes, actually, because this has been a deep vein of writing for the past 100 or more years. There's The Phools, by Stanislav Lem. There's the novels written by Boris Johnson's father that are all about depopulation. There's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. How about Logan's Run? There has been so much writing about the automation / technology apocalypse for humans in the past 100 years that it's hard to catalog it -- much of what I have read or seen go by in the vein I've totally forgotten.
It's not remotely a surprise to see this amp up with AI.
Yeah, I am familiar with these works of art and probably most people are. However, they were mostly speculative. Now we are facing some of their premises in the real world. And the guys who push the technology in a reckless way seem to notice this, but just nod their heads and carry on.
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Works of art, works of predictive programming, life imitating art -- what's the difference, if in the end the artistic predictions come true?
People have been thinking apocalyptic thoughts like these since.. at least Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). That's 227 years if you're keeping score. Probably longer; Malthus might only have been the first to write them down and publish them.
This is another one of those apocalyptic posts about AI. It might actually be true. I recommend reading The Phools, by Stanislav Lem -- it's a very short story, and you can find free copies of it online.
Also maybe go out for some fresh air. Maybe knowledge work will go down for humans, but plumbing and such will take much longer since we'll need dextrous robots.
LOGO was my first interaction with a computer back in 1996. We had to write one program in LOGO in our computer class and we were allowed to play one of the following three games for rest of the period: Dangerous Dave, Paratrooper, or Prince of Persia.
I got an Amstrad PCW handed down to me from my dad as my first PC around the same time.
Booted always with disk 1 and that was Locoscript and learned typing on that thing.
When I discovered there is a second disk that boots you in some dark and hidden alternative mode (read: CP/M) I felt like a hacker.
Hidden inside this cave was the only program the manual mentioned in this section: Logo! I did not know that my PC could display anything except characters and it was. so. amazing. to see self-drawn lines on that thing.
We learned the same lessons for the parts of CPU, computer generations, Babbage and co for 5 years. Our lab exams was more means than ends, so `pir*2` will carry more marks than `3.14r*r`.
To be fair, turtle graphics is not itself Logo, Logo was originally designed for text manipulation (because all schools had at that time were teletype terminals). Then came the idea of a physical turtle robot, then the graphical turtle when schools got computers with CRT displays.
My partner and I do maintain a complete (and extended) Logo interpreter however, so yes it really does live. Somewhat :)
The LOGO I got to use when I was 12 was practically a micro-Lisp with turtle graphics. JavaScript is a sort of a Lisp. Thus "LOGO lives" seems appropriate to me :)
I want to preface this by noting that as an adult, I totally understand the intent behind LOGO, its use as an educational tool, and understand its historic place in computer history.
But as a pre-teen kid in the early 80s? I hated LOGO! I thought it was a baby language and I wanted to get back to doing cool stuff in BASIC. Ten year old Me thought LOGO was soooo dumb - you couldn't make a video game, so what use was it?
It seemed every year we'd have a grade school class using LOGO - for a math lesson, or an art project, or an "intro to computing", etc. I was always a classic 80s young computer nerd snob about it.
We did LOGO then some sort of watered down BASIC. Both were incredibly useless to my education because at no point was any serious attempt ever made to teach that these were the tip of any sort of computer programming iceberg. We were simply given lessons and assignments and told to things and we just did them without understanding what we were doing. At least with math they had some example applications for everything they taught us.
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