There is going to be insane technical debt all over the place in a few years…

Everytime I see this kind of hype pop up I think back to when there was this great announcement from Silicon Valley about a “revolution in transportation” and it turned out to be the Segway.

It doesn’t matter what they claim if they simply can’t get the people to babysit the AI codebase or the AIs for less money than the original ones who didn’t have to deal with AIs and their output used to cost.

As a pretty senior dev who spent a lot of my career as a contractor mainly coming in to unfuck code-bases seriously fucked up by a couple of cycles under less experienced people, if I was pitched work to unfuck AI work I would demand a premium for my services purelly because of it being far more more fucked up in far harder to follow ways than the work done by less experience humans (who at least are consistent in the mistakes they make and follow a specific pattern in how they work) even without any moral considerations (on principle I would probably just not take a contract with a company that had used AI like that).

I mean, I can see their strategy work for junior devs, but that kind of reducing the power of specialized workers was already being done against junior devs using “outsourcing”.

Sorta.

The cultural clashes between people with different cultural backgrounds are to be expected, and the bigger the percentage of people with different backgrounds the more it happens (hence why in the days of countries having 5% immigrants, the idea that “immigrants are a problem” had very little traction). This is just how things are - you can think it’s closed minded of most people (and, by the way, in my experience as an immigrant myself, that includes many if not most of the immigrants), but people are as they are, so we have to deal with it.

Further, judging by the studies I saw in the UK back during the Leave Referendum, immigration does push down salaries in one category only - unspecialized workers. Economically one might think “well, it’s alright then”, but socially the ones suffering are already the worse off amongst the locals plus this is happenning under Neoliberal governments who are actually pulling down Social Safety nets and privatising essential services. This is probably why the Middle Class is often pro-Immigration whilst the anti-Immigration Far-Right Populists end up finding most of their traction amongst the Working Class - immigration benefits the Middle Class because immigrants barelly compete with them for the jobs whilst the mere presence of immigrants pumps up the Economy and lowers the cost of many services (so there is more business for the kind of work done by the Middle Class and services are cheaper for them), but the picture is very different for the Working Class.

(This is why you see a lot of the non-mainstream “Thinking Left” in Europe who bought into Identity Politics is failing to gain any traction and even dissapearing whilst the far-right booms - unlike the old Left these people are from the upper levels of the Middle Class and don’t really see as a problem things which the Working Class sees as a problem and is increasingly hitting the lower Middle Class too, so ultimatelly they fizzle out because they do things like supporting “Open door immigration” because for them it’s not a problem but, de facto, those policies do end up making life worse for a lot of those lower down the economical ladder who would otherwise as they lose trust in the mainstream politicians gravitate towards those parties and instead end up captured by the simple anti-immigration messaging of the Far-Right).

Last but not least, judging by my own country Immigration is the “solution” used to plug the low birthrate problem which is itself caused by decades of policies which lowered quality of life and pumped up realestate bubbles - the very politicians who are causing the problems that make the locals have fewer children, then claim that “we need Immigration because of an aging population” - Immigration is literally the tool used to keep countries going a little longer whilst the pillaging of the wealth of the many carries on. The poor immigrants have no blame for this - they’re just people looking for a better life, same as the locals - but Immigration Policies do have the blame on this and fake-Leftwing (neo)Liberals have purposefully confounded Immigrants (the people) with Immigration (the policy) to portray being against the latter (and, even more, against the artificial need for the latter and who gains most from it - which aren’t the immigrants) as being against “poor defenseless people”.

Unsurprisingly this shit has eventually resulted in increasingly more people losing trust in the mainstream politicians and believing in populists preaching the simple message that “immigrants are bad”.

Nah.

The European Parliament is impeccably democratic, its members selected by direct vote of EU citizens under a Proportional Vote system

The EU Council is way less democractic, being just made up of representatives of each local government in Europe with zero representation for any political forces not in government. It’s like a giant First Pass The Post system with electoral circles the size of countries, only worse so since citizens don’t directly vote for them, they vote for the people who nominate them (they’re government ministers, and local governments tend to be selected by local parliaments, who are the ones who are elected). Also in practice there is very little oversight over their actions since the Press barelly talks about them.

The EU Commission is even less democratic than the EU Council, since its members are nominated by the latter, so it’s even more indirect. It’s supposed by tradition to be one comissioner per country so nowadays there are a lot of commissioners for “irrelevant thing” and the whole thing is the result of a massive game of horse trading and cronyism, especially the head, with the result that plenty of comissioners are complete total crap - the only time my country had somebody as the EU commission head, it was the most crooked Portuguese politician ever to hold an international position (almost the opposite of the current head of the UN who is also a Portuguese) and the once he left after having done everything he could to favor the Finance Industry in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash and went to make millions working as a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs he ended up as the only ex-EU Commission president ever to have his EU building access credentials revoked, as he was illegally using it to just enter the buildings whenever he wanted to do do some behind-closed-doors “lobbying”. It looks like Germany is currently suffering from the same problem of having put an incompetent crook as EU Commission head.

Unsurprisingly, most of the “unbelievably authocratic” shit comes from the Council or the Commission.

Frankly I can see why the Council is as it is - it makes sense to have a place were the various governments of EU nations get represented - but the Commission should be entirelly chosen by the EU Parliament, just like local parliaments chose governments in all european countries which don’t have a strong presidential system.

Well, as I said, Steam already supports all the national payment systems in Europe and yeah, since I’ve switched away from PayPal in GOG, my game payments have also been done by scanning a QR code from the banking app (which goes via an intermediary but ultimately gets turned into a SEPA transfer).

Sure, Steam could add bank transfer payments. They don’t need to as in Europe they already have the VISA/MasterCard/PayPal mafia problem solved, but it would be nice if they did (actually the whole split between payment-system and bank-transfer disappearing and it becoming a single mechanism is probably a good idea).

The lack of a pan-European payment system that’s accepted anywhere in the World isn’t a problem for Steam, it’s a general problem for Europeans wanting to avoid using VISA/MasterCard/PayPal in all their payments no matter where the seller is located (plus even in Europe a bunch of things such as car rental often require a Credit Card). It’s solved for the likes of Steam, but not for other sellers (for example I buy eBooks books from a US based seller who doesn’t support anything but PayPal, VISA and MasterCard and the same when I buy stuff from AliExpress),

When it comes to Steam, the problem of them being dependent for payments on VISA/MasterCard/PayPal is outside Europe, not in Europe.

As I wrote elsewhere, Steam already supports all the European national payment systems, which are all more convenient than bank transfers.

(I actually tested it when writing another post and the Steam payment processing flow first asks you the country you’re paying for and then lists the payment systems for that country, and there I could see the standard national one of the country I gave)

GOG too also supports all the European national payment systems (I know because I switched to using those after the whole VISA/MasterCard/PayPal censorship crap happened).

Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support paying by bank transfer (which goes via SEPA) but a lot don’t, plus it’s a bit less convenient than a dedicate payment system (though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it’s reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole “open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount”).

I believe Valve already supports all the local payment systems in Europe, though they’ll only show it to you if you’re in one of those countries (the payment processing flow asks you which country are you paying from upfront and then uses that to display the various payment systems available for that country).

Same for GOG, by the way.

The problem is mainly that to sell to anywhere in Europe a seller has to integrate with the many local payment systems out there, which is a lot of work for a small seller.

That’s for bank transfers, not for payments.

Mind you, you often can pay stuff online in Europe via bank transfer if it’s within the Eurozone (and the fact that it works from anywhere to anywhere in the Eurozone for the same cost as a local transfer, rather than just locally in each country is exactly because SEPA has been standardized and the regulator has forced banks to charge the same for transfers between different countries in the Eurozone as they do for transfers within their own country), but it’s not reliably available in sellers and is a bit more convoluted than pure payment systems (basically you have to use your bank’s online site or app to transfer money to the account the seller provides you).

No actual payment systems are standardized across Europe yet, though various country-specific ones have been getting together and setting up cross-compatibility, but none of those covers more than a handful of countries.

Sure mate, your logic is flawless and you’re not at all pretty much just using falacies and axiomatic statements to make the case that “this is going to be the greatest thing ever (invest now!)” like all the other types selling their book on some tech hype as has become common since the 90s and anybody pointing this out is really just insulting you by not accepting your clear genius.

Life must be hard for the benevolent AI Investor just trying to share with others how the tech domain they’re invested in is CERTAIN to become the greatest thing ever because it’s made on top of elements which are CERTAIN to be the elements that will one day deliver the greatest thing ever, only to get insulted by people daring to point out that all that certainty isn’t backed by anything but “trust me”.

That doesn’t even make sense - it’s not merely the there being multiple elements which add up to a specific tech that makes it capable of reaching a specific goal, just like throwing multiple ingredients into a pot doesn’t guarantee you a tasty dish as output and you have absolutely no proof that “we finally have the hardware and the software to make breakthroughs” hence you can’t anchor the forecast that the stuff done on top of said hardware and software will achieve a great outcome entirely anchored on your assertion that “it’s made up from stuff which can do greatness”.

As for the tech being a composition of multiple tech elements, that doesn’t mean much: most dishes too are a composition of multiple elements and that doesn’t mean that any random combination of stuff thrown into a pot will make a good dish.

That idea that more inputs make a specific output more likely is like claiming that “the chances of finding a needle increase with the size of the haystack” - the very opposite of reality.

Might want to stop using LLMs to write your responses and engage your brain instead.

Like the guy whose baby doubled in weight in 3 months and thus he extrapolated that by the age of 10 the child would weigh many tons, you’re assuming that this technology has a linear rate of improvement of “intelligence”.

This is not at all what’s happening - the evolution of things like LLMs in the last year or so (say between GPT4 and GPT5) is far less than it was earlier in that Tech and we keep seeing more and more news on problems about training it further and getting it improved, including the big one which is that training LLMs on the output of LLMs makes them worse, and the more the output of LLMs is out there, the harder it gets to train new iteractions with clean data.

(And, interestingly, no Tech has ever had a rate of improvement that didn’t eventually tailed of, so it’s a peculiar expectation to have for a specific Tech that it will keep on steadily improving)

With this specific path taken in implementing AI, the question is not “when will it get there” but rather “can it get there or is it a technological dead-end”, and at least for things like LLMs the answer increasingly seems to be that it is a technological dead-end for the purpose of creating reasoning intelligence and doing work that requires it.

(For all your preemptive defense by implying that critics are “ai haters”, no hate is required to do this analysis, just analytical ability and skepticism, untainted by fanboyism)