Curious if today's Berkeley's professors would still wear Alphabet (former Google) t-shirts while holding presentations, I now realise that things have changed a lot in the last 10 years.
I've also not gone through the whole presentation, but does he at any point talk about the moral choices one will most definitely have to make during a career in tech? (this is related to the previous paragraph). Is it a "bad career" if people choose not to work for companies (such as Alphabet) that have gone all in behind AI? Seeing as now AI is used by State-entities for very nefarious reasons. Like I said, 2026 is way different compared to 2016.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about this lately. Big Tech today is far more powerful than 1990s Microsoft and 1970s IBM ever were. I’m not anti-AI, but the sheer power major players like OpenAI, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta have make me very nervous.
The challenge for computer science researchers who have qualms about working for Big Tech is finding an alternative career path. Speaking from an American point of view, academia has always been competitive, and the immediate future of research funding is uncertain given the political climate. This uncertainty also extends to government labs. The challenge with industry research is that there are not a lot of non-Big Tech employers of computer science researchers. This leaves starting a business, but business is very different from research.
I’m a tenure-track professor at a community college in the Bay Area. While I’ll never be able to afford to purchase a home near my job, I am able to live well as a single man renting an apartment. I have a great career teaching and using my long summer breaks for research and side projects. I like not having to worry about “publish or perish,” and I enjoy teaching and mentoring students. While this might not be considered “successful” for some people who are aiming for a professorship at an R1 university or an industry job at a top company’s top lab, I love my job and believe it’s a fantastic route for someone who enjoys teaching and who also wants extended time during the summer for research and side projects.
Big Tech today is far more powerful than 1990s Microsoft and 1970s IBM ever were.
In aggregate, sure, but no company today comes within an order of magnitude of the power an IBM of the ‘70s and ‘80s or a Microsoft of the ‘90s and ‘00s had over the tech landscape.
1970s IBM and 1990s Microsoft were formidable monopolies, but I was thinking in lines of influence over society and not necessarily in terms of market share. The consequences of social media and centralized Web services are much more impactful on society, for better and for worse, than dominance over 1970s mainframes and 1990s desktop operating systems, Web browsers, and office suites.
15 - 20 years ago i was a total Google fanboy, i liked what they did with their search, i loved their overall ecosystem and perceived culture. I even have a - now orphaned - googlemail email address.
Nowadays? I wouldn't touch anything that comes from Google (granted also not from any other big tech company) with pliers.
Maybe it's my own bias (after working for a big tech company for 5 years), but it's certainly not the dream job I thought it would be. Soulless corporations with questionable impact on society, lot of turnover, increasing pressure every year, fear of layoffs. Even the tech isn't that exciting, there's lots of tedious work, technical debt, hacked solutions, no time for researching and building quality solution.
That being said, it's certainly different for researchers. I can imagine that being a researcher at Google is more fun than being a median SWE in another FAANG. But still, I find these companies less enticing in general, even the products tend to degrade as they keep pushing the monetization.
I’m an ex-industry researcher with experience at FAANGs, albeit as a software engineering intern (Google) and a production engineer (Facebook).
I think it depends on the interests of the researcher. If a researcher is comfortable being a “brain for hire” who is comfortable solving research problems that are driven by business needs and where there needs to be short-term or medium-term results, then I think there are plenty of opportunities at large companies, including the FAANGs. I find research more fun than software engineering, but researchers are far from immune from pressures to ship.
If a researcher is more interested in curiosity-driven work and who wants to work on a longer time frame, I’m afraid that there’s no place in industry, except for maybe Microsoft Research (which I’ve heard changed under Satya Nadella), that supports such work. The days of Bob Taylor-era Xerox PARC and Unix-era Bell Labs ended many decades ago, and while there were still curiosity-driven labs in industry well into the 2010s, I have witnessed the remainder of these old-style labs change their missions to become much more focused on immediate and near-immediate business needs.
My experience as an L5 Google Research research scientist is that I have a lot of freedom as long as I can show I've made progress on one or two things the company cares about at each annual review. IMO, this is about as much research freedom as is reasonable for me to request.
Why would you ever want to do that? Why wont' you stop and live life for a moment?, stop delegating stuff to your phone, especially when it comes to personal trips. Really bleak, this "always optimizing stuff" thing, really, really bleak. Tech-bro culture has done a good one to mainstream culture, because I see the same mindset seeping through to mainstream life.
I travel a lot and it's extremely time consuming. I don't even do much research beforehand anymore. I really wish I got a notification like "I know you're heading that way, how about this waterfall? It only adds 15 minutes of driving."
The reality is that I do not enjoy at all sorting through tickets and booking emails and apps, I just want to ask my phone "show me tonight's booking" and then hand the phone to the hotel's front desk.
There's so much an assistant can do and Siri is just so far from it.
It doesn't, but I'd rather book a hotel with full confidence and go to a restaurant that will be actually open, given all the information that is available to me at the time of planning, than having my trip ruined by a dumb bot because it cannot tell imagination from reality. All you get is "you're absolutely right".
Yeah what I do when I'm on a holiday is just walk out and see what's around, what places look good and have a good vibe. Maybe then check their rating but usually I don't bother do do even that. I'm not a minmaxer, I care more about living in the moment.
I do have pretty bad ADHD though and as such I thrive on chaos and hate planning so there's that...
> Jeffrey Emanuel and his 22 accounts at $4400/month
Paying $4.4k per month for the privilege of writing code is absolute madness, I'm not quite so sure with how we got to this point but it's still madness. Maybe Yegge is indeed right, maybe this is just like regular gambling/addiction, which sucks when it comes to being a programmer but at least it gets the dopamine levels higher.
It's not per se madness; companies pay much more than that for code. Instead it's an empirical question about whether they're getting that value from the code.
The difference is that if those companies were to rely only on the AI part, and hence to transform us (computer programmers) only in copy-pasters and less, in about one to two years the "reasoning" behind the latest AI models would have become stale, i.e. because of no new human input. So good luck with that.
But my comment was not about companies, it was just about writing code, about the freedom that used to come from it, about the agency that we used to have. There's no agency and no freedom left when you start paying that much money in order to write code. I guess that can work for some companies, but for sure it won't work for computer programmers as actual human beings (and imo this blog-post itself tries to touch on that aspect).
Good driving instructors make you aware of that early on, at least mine did.
I'm not saying that I'm a good driver, because I make mistakes like any other driver out-there, it's just that I oftentimes go with the "maximize the flow" thing instead of just following my individual "well-being" as a driver as a result of what my driver instructor told me some years ago.
> Let's tell all the physicists they can close up shop now.
Yes, that's part of the plan. I mean, not to all the physicists, just to those whose work doesn't bring in results anymore, and it hasn't for 30 to 40 years now. At some point they (said physicists) have to stop their work and ask themselves what it is that they're doing, because judging by their results it doesn't seem like they're doing much, while consuming a lot of resources (which could have been better spent elsewhere).
> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality
The difference is that the computer only talks back to you as code because you’re paying its owners, with you not being part of the owners. I find it really baffling that people put up with this. What will you do when Alphabet or Altman will demand 10 times the money out of you fir the privilege of their computer talking to you in programming code?
Which are those open ones? And how are they going to get their billions of dollars worth of investment back? Even Google Maps used to be virtually free until it wasn’t, at a fraction of the investment cost.
How they run their business is none of my business. I can download the weights right now and use them as I see fit under the open source license terms.
Google Maps was never a self contained binary you could download. But even now it remains free to use.
I’m only familiar with Llama, but as far as I understood it’s in no way at the same level as Claude or Gemini, so in fact you’d still be a lot less productive compared to those using those products directly.
That’s the thing, us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users, but I do agree that that has been changing as of late.
They are not the same level, but that may be fine. As for productivity, I don't take that as a given. Maybe in a few years we'll be at the point where AI is better than AI + human, but we aren't there yet. The other models may be faster are pumping out code, but if you're building in the wrong direction more code is more bad.
> us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users
But that's a false dichotomy. As a programmer I am very much a consumer of the language I use, the IDE, the compiler, and of most of my dependencies. (to say nothing of the OS and the hardware).
I, and I'd wager most people around here, haven't and are aren't individually building at all layers of that stack at once.
> How did toy languages start getting used for serious work?
Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
Nobody is stoping anyone on putting a quick project up-and-running using Rust, let's say. But good luck finding people to maintain it in the long run. And good luck finding the "batteries included" stuff. And good luck on many other things. We're all building bazaars, not cathedrals, and that's ok, even though we oftentimes seem to forget that.
True, nobody is stopping anyone and that's why I am gradually moving my stuff from bash/zsh to Golang and might even further migrate it to Rust in the near future -- LLMs make these things almost trivial and my only hurdle was how verbose can Rust feel for a basic CLI app. That hurdle no longer exists.
But don't look at me, I never liked Perl, PHP, Ruby. They were, and still are, hacks. I was aiming at people who just accept the status quo and shrug.
Anyone aware of people doing something like over here in Europe? And how legal/illegal it might be? I'm talking about putting government-operated security cameras on a map, for the general public to be aware of their locations.
The TV series Person of Interest [1] becomes more on point as years go by, even though by now it has been 15 years since its S1. One of the scenes [2] from that series where "terrorist" are shown as being in control over ghoulish CEOs like the one from this posted video.
I've also not gone through the whole presentation, but does he at any point talk about the moral choices one will most definitely have to make during a career in tech? (this is related to the previous paragraph). Is it a "bad career" if people choose not to work for companies (such as Alphabet) that have gone all in behind AI? Seeing as now AI is used by State-entities for very nefarious reasons. Like I said, 2026 is way different compared to 2016.
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