The worst part are other parents that don't give a shit. You wouldn't have to fight if everyone would keep their kids off socials.

Cannot agree.

Whole TFA doesn’t take into account reason why software development was actually so valuable.

Single specialist in any domain is not that valuable. You may charge $200 for hour of his time sure. But to grow company you now need N specialists.

What software was doing was not making specialist obsolete replacing a specialist by encoding his knowledge - well many tried to do so but failed even in 80’s “expert systems”.

What software was doing was making it possible to structure specialist work, make it possible for a single specialist to serve more customers at the same time, make it possible to hand over work in a structured way to junior specialists, making it easier for senior to take over edge cases and spot check work of those junior specialists.

This setup allows company to not being tied to number of specialists to grow, this setup allows company to charge less per customer but take over more of the market share.

Whole premise that now each specialist will waste time dabbling in AI software development is ludicrous, especially if each specialist would be building his own tooling somehow.

That sounds more like the extractive setup of corporations like IBM, where return/specialist must be maximized against the number of clients that can be juggled simultaneously.

Whereas in larger technology firms, yes that happens to some degree, but only with the highest level specialists such as PEs, fellows, etc.

They are already so wildly profitable and valuable by the simple nature of computing itself: it scales second only to money with regards to compounding effects. Once you have software someone can use, it scales near infinitely to more users, thus value is extracted from the work of a single specialist for all time. No need to complicate it with trying to abstract work juniors can do (and fail) and then have seniors correct. What would they be doing in non-extractive firms?

Not only deeply inconvenient but also a lot of times actually making more things worse.

OP writes about doing stuff ”properly” and how “using frameworks” was somehow worse.

Having a framework that is built by actual experts is much better than every “self proclaimed expert” building his own crooked thing.

Being able to switch developers between projects easily is also good for developers. I can switch companies on a whim without having to learn “crooked way of self proclaimed specialists”.

Sorry but AI is already revolutionary.

It is not AGI but current SOTA/Frontier models can do stuff that was never possible before. Even like 2 years ago AI was starting to disrupt whole industries.

I think you might have higher expectations to call something “revolutionary”. But for me revolution is already happening right here right now.

Revolutionary in the Internet sense, not revolutionary in the Skynet sense.

Tell that to copywriters and translators, all those tech workers that were fired in thousands.

The current wave of tech layoffs is much like those that preceded it (e.g. after the pandemic), except this time AI is used as a scapegoat.

For over a decade there were talks of an academia bubble in the US and that choosing a trade job actually puts you in a financially better position compared to almost all college and univeristy degrees except finance and computer science.

People have to understand that they are merely cells in a bigger organism at work. As some types of cells can be more easily be replaced by AI agents than others, some earlier, some later.

People have been replaceable forever in capitalism. It's what makes it run, turning workers into a commodity or replaceable assets.

Now the big fantasy of the big AI companies is of course that almost everyone will be replaced by THEIR products. They are in the scaling business, large models, large compute, no optimization because scaling is faster, they are in a sprint, not in a marathon. The sprint will end eventually.

But AI will stay. The future will be decided between large scaling which means data centers, subscription models, centralized control, or decentralized, local, smarter more optimized lean models, with curated training. Tech has already anticipated that owning hardware that is capable of neuronal computing is the key to the future. The battle for hardware ownership has just begun and it's immensely important.

And a similar battle is happening inside corporations right now. Big tech wants to implant their subscription/cloud model into the economy, into as many businesses as possible. If they succeed we are in trouble. Because even though their fantasy will fail, forcing it unto us will do a lot of destructition to human society.

I can only encourage people to DIY, to learn a trade as a backup and be hands-on when it comes to computing. Don't aim for a high paying job and buy gimmicks that do things for you, that manage your life with "personal AI" or some bullshit. While actually you would have the skills to build the work or personal tools for yourself, share your designs or even start a company that does things differently. You all can shape things.

AI is so new, almost nobody has an idea of what it could do for them. There isn't a demand yet because people don't know what it could do. So big tech tries to create demands in all sorts of ways. This is what's happening right now, it's not set in stone.

yeah, there'll be loads and loads of disruption, but it'll take a lot longer than many people expect (much like the internet disruption did).

I thought you meant „as internet” that it is superficial and not real world consequences. Clear now.

Apologies, I see lots of similarities between the dotcom bubble and the current bubble. It'll be interesting to see if the same similarities are seen on the downswing (if and when that happens).

People start businesses all the time yes.

But like 80% shuts down before reaching 2 years as they run out of money.

If the rate of failure is slightly consistent then more layoffs will lead to more startups, so more will get on top. Many companies business are easier to attack than it looks. Look early 2000, early 2010 have both brought their set of amazing startups. 5 years ago people were most motivated to switch companies for more money.

But then you loose market share to ESP32 where people just get USB C on their own.

Comparing an RP2350 to the ESP32 family (which is broad) is very much apples to oranges; they each have feature sets which make them ideal for completely different use cases.

I just got ESP32 C6 on a custom board, with micro python it pretty much made all RPi's obsolete for a quarter of price for I2C, GPIO, UART, SPI communication while having WiFi 6 and BLE.

There is no more use case for RPi if I can have ESP32 C6 for $10 - maybe I have to do some soldering on my own.

Then if I need a minicomputer I'd rather go with MinisForum PC that is in price range of RPi and if I need I2C or GPIO I can pair it with ESP32 like as many as I want ESP32 instead of single one like RPi. Then communicate over wireless as much as I want with BLE or WiFi.

Oh yeah?

Remind me how many PIO channels does the C6 have?

Also, could you confirm that the RP2350 consumes 2-3x less power when idling?

If you have the contact details for any certification labs that don't charge extra for radio modules even if you're not using them in your product, that'd be super helpful as well.

Unnecessary confrontation.

I am just hyped about ESP I have. I also have bunch of old RPi’s.

I guess power consumption can be lower on C6 if I turn off BLE and WiFi.

It's not a question of "unnecessary". You just don't like it when someone points out that you're making shallow statements and you don't even realize it.

When you frame two MCUs intended for different purposes as competition, you're completely missing why there are so many different useful MCU families in the first place.

If you need a programmable IO state machine (or twelve) then you need the RP2350, period. It's a feature that enables entire domains of functionality that wouldn't otherwise be possible. For example, I'm using it to perform a real-time 12 output MIDI THRU that doesn't tax the CPU cores. Nothing like that exists on the ESP32 family.

Yeah every "hardware hacker" I know has pile of ESP32 at home now instead of pile of raspberry pi's.

The pi, particularly the pi zero is still useful if you need something that can run normal software but not a full mini pc. One example I've seen is using a Pi zero as a "wireless usb" where you can plug it in to a machine that accepts files over usb, and can now drop files on to it over the network.

Maybe you could do this with a ESP32 but it's easy on linux where you can use all the normal tooling and filesystem drivers.

ESP32 can run FreeRTOS, and I think people nowadays have no idea how much stuff we could do in MS-DOS PCs even with all their limitations for the epoch.

ESP32 hardware is much better than they used to be.

Not everything needs to be under Linux monoculture, thankfully.

I have yet to even get started with ESP32, mainly because software-defined radio is my main use case. Once you start getting into absurdly high sampling rates, you start to need a lot of horsepower, and that's where the more powerful SBCs shine.

As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)

I think you have to take into account context of the blog post where author was in the interview for “mental health startup”.

You have engineers that can say “hey this DB change might be risky let’s take second person to review it”.

No one is forbidding reviews.

But if you have a junior pushing code that can cause unrecoverable data loss his code should be reviewed.

It is a bit frustrating when you want to do risk based approach but then it is much more work to explain it to people who don’t know better but they want a checkbox or read on the internet “that’s proper way of doing things”.

Another example is password complexity rules, we try to use latest recommendations with no forcing of PW change, no requirements beside length - but then there will be customer that will make fuss that we don’t have it as as it is compliance check box to have complex PW.