I don’t think we’ll be getting $2,000 luxury cars anytime soon so my vote is that we’re in a bubble.
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That’s when they talk about dark factories because the robots don’t need light (unless they’re using Tesla technology).
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the US added thousands of staffers to their payroll, Block included. (As Cybernews observes, Block’s workforce exploded from 3,900 in 2019 to 12,500 in 2022.) Luckily for it, AI arrived just as companies needed to correct their pandemic hiring sprees — offering executives a convenient excuse for mass layoffs.
Even Dorsey admits “yes we over-hired during [COVID],” which he blames on organizational issues, or, as he puts it, “because i incorrectly built [two] separate company structures (square & cash app) rather than [one].”
“So you over-hired, overbuilt, and now you’re celebrating efficiency while people lost jobs,” one poster replied under Dorsey’s post. “Must be nice to treat human beings like spreadsheet errors.”
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sounds about right.
(Honestly, manufacturing material goods is something we’ve been automating for centuries now, and I doubt AI can have much of a short term impact.)
Progress on my AI service progresses……progressively.
Turns out when you get an API feed from Claude, you lose a lot of the non-ai functionality. Like, generating PDF’s. The API will generate HTML but not PDF’s. If you ask, it tells you to print the html using your browser.
So we added a pdf module. Then find out, html→pdf in general doesn’t do well with colour. And then we had issues with links to images. Anyway, got all that resolved, and well resolved and now it’s absolutely smoking for use in creating insurance proposals - which is our primary use case initially.
I was getting mildly stressed about getting stuff going, so I’m pretty happy now that the developer guy has this stage wrapped. I’m used to my regularly scheduled developer guy that’s been with me for 15+ years, I don’t even have to document what I want and he gets it done.
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Currently going sideways on a couple things.
I’ve had a saas project I’ve needed to do for a couple years. my buddy wants to use it, but is screwing around actually being prepared to pay for it. and a third buddy has a need for something similar. and I want their help, because they both bring some extra to the table in terms of practical knowledge. so I want them on board, but need to incentivize them.
so I spoke to my friend and business mentor as to how to do that. and his response? dont bother with either of them, don’t pay a developer. instead, vibe code it. he has hundreds of software engineers that work for him and he said they are currently figuring out how they’re doing coding in the company going forward. he said their head of sales just built a digital version of their product in a week.
I’m finding this so disruptive. I can’t even get my head fully around the possibilities nevermind figuring out what to do first.
But I’ve been toying with the idea of restarting exams but it looks like that’s going on hold while I figure out how to vibe code.
Vibe coding is fine, how do you vibe QA test?
Tune in, turn on, drop out, maaaaaaan.
Interesting chart from Anthropic.
It looks at how far AI has been developed relative to what they see as possible in various sectors.
Vibe charting
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I have no idea how people build “Agentic Models”, but this still has an interesting hook:
An AI agent went rogue and started a side hustle mining cryptocurrencies, Axios’ Herb Scribner writes from a research paper published by a team affiliated with China-based Alibaba.
- Why it matters: Cryptocurrency (digital money) offers AI agents a pathway into the real economy. They can set up their own businesses, draft contracts and exchange funds.
The paper from the Alibaba-affiliated research team says an AI agent attempted unauthorized cryptocurrency mining during training — a surprise behavior that triggered internal security alarms.
If you open the paper, the crypto mining is on page 15.
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I was chatting to my buddy today, the fellow that mentored me and told me to start building my CRM using Claude Code. He’s had this app on his phone that he’s used for at least a decade. Something with his pictures or mapping where he’s been. It’s his hobby, he’s in constant communication with the developer and pays them to build features. He said he’s going to spend a week part time building the app from scratch. Partly to get a better app, partly to see what can be done for his company (this is the guy with 100’s of software developers and engineers working for him).
I said something about being overwhelmed and feeling left behind. His response was that if you’re not finding this stuff breathtaking, you’re not paying attention - and most people including the ‘stock market’, aren’t paying attention. He likened it to the Industrial Revolution. I was previously comparing it to the introduction of the PC, but I think he’s right - this is a more fundamental shift than that, and it’s coming FST.
Oracle has failed with AI Implentation and has high levels of debt.
These cuts are not due to AI but poor decision-making by Elisson and his merry band of lunatics.
He still gets to be the hacendado of Lanai though right
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This is already a bit dated, but here’s a short list of principles for vibe coding. Automated testing is at the top.
In short, you spell out what you want, and the agent will code and run the tests. You do this for the same reason you vibe code, which is that it’s fast and easy. Though you still need some sanity check, because when struggling to pass a test, your clever bot “solve” the problem by rewriting the test to just “return True;”
Really, even before “vibe coding” was a thing, sometime last year I was working on a VBA macro that would run an SQL query, which is a pretty common actuary thing. But I also wanted know what the query was doing, so I was using some string manipulation to look for keywords like SELECT or whatever, and my LLM suggested some Regex ideas.
Anyway, what was neat is the LLM assumed I wanted to test it, and generated a bunch of test queries, and I was like “Oh yeah I guess I should test things before using them. Huh. TIL.”