The basic problem is that the reporting and accounting rules are double plus bureaucratic and you need to have on hand multiple registers that show the financial situation at any time, submit them to the tax authority etc.
To give you a small taste: you need to issue an electronic invoice for each unique customer, and submit on the fly the tax authority - but these need to correlated monthly with the money in your business bank account. The paid invoices don't just go into your bank account, they are disbursed from time to time by the payment processor, on random dates that don't sync with the accounting month, so at end of month you have to have correlate precisely what invoice is paid or not. But wait, the card processor won't just send you the money in a lump sum, it will deduct from each payment some random fee that is determined by their internal formula, then, at the end of each month, add all those deducted fees (even for payments that have not been paid to you) and issue another invoice to you, which you need to account for in you books as being partially paid each month (from the fees deducted from payments already disbursed). You also have other payment channels, each with their fees etc. So I need to balance this whole overlapping intervals mess with all sort of edge cases, chargebacks and manual interventions I refuse to think about again.
This is one example, but there are also issues with wages and their taxation, random tax law changes in the middle of the month etc. The accountant can of course solve all this for you, but once you go a few hundred invoices per month (if you sell relatively cheap services) you are considered a "medium" business, so instead of paying for basic accounting services less than 100€ per month (have the certified accountant look over your books and sign them, as required by law), you will need more expensive packages which definitely add up to thousands in a few months.
> I don't know what to think. These blog articles are supposed to be a showcase of engineering expertise, but bragging about having AI vibecode a replacement for a critical part of your system that was questionably designed and costing as much as a fully-loaded FTE per year raises a lot of other questions.
I agree. But most of the time the people responsible for the codebase / architecture do not want those questions raised. AI is greatly appreciated emergency exit for those situations. Apparently.
> But most of the time the people responsible for the codebase / architecture do not want those questions raised.
I don't know if that matches my experience. I've seen plenty of places where the dev teams complain about tech debt and other kludges costing too much, slowing them down and causing other problems, but management don't want to "waste time re-writing working code".
But now that management read on linkedin they can jump on the AI bandwagon by having the team use AI to fix tech debt, there's suddenly time to work on it.
Eliminating manual toil seems like a huge win for LLMs. There are a ton of straightforward-but-tedious projects that no one wants to fund because they take 2 dev weeks to implement and the result is a hard to quantify quality of codebase improvement. Some of these can now be handled by an LLM in a day and so they suddenly become extremely tractable. You don’t have to embrace vibe coding to benefit from cheap debt pay down.
That's pretty optimistic. First of all, the people who were manually toiling are getting laid off - LLMs aren't exactly making their lives better.
And I'm not talking about cases where an AI can do things faster. We have a few tech debt tickets at work right now where using an AI will take the same amount of time, because the "hard part" isn't writing the code but working with other teams to organize or roll out the changes. But since we can use AI, management is suddenly interested.
It's silly, and I can't wait for the AI bubble to burst.
> First of all, the people who were manually toiling are getting laid off
I was referring to the sort of work that just never gets funded. Cleanup, refactoring.
If you have business critical toil being done by people who now get laid off, that is obviously a cause for concern.
> the "hard part" isn't writing the code but working with other teams to organize or roll out the changes. But since we can use AI, management is suddenly interested.
So AI has convinced your management to let you pay down tech debt? Seems like a win.
at least they‘re not trying to play the „our tech is too dangerous“ card as the sunset reason (again [yet]).
also, for a company carrying „open“ in their name, that pretends to still remember its origins, they could open source at least the projects they sunset…
> There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?
Please don't. The reason we're still enjoying the bit of the old world as we know it, is just because nobody has really figured it out yet. Enjoy the moment, while it lasts.
What does this even mean? By definition, we have been enjoying "the moment" for quite a while now. What is so special about it that we should work to prolong it, and to avoid moving forward?
I know it's gonna be a very unpopular opinion. I do like, appreciate, respect & admire that they are ready to die on a hill. I just don't think it's the right hill. I do not have an issue with the legality of it. Rather I think age verification is actually not bad. Sure i see the potential danger. But there is potential benefits, that'd counter the danger, by a lot.
In different times, i might have argued differently. I'm not saying it's not worth protecting the world you deem worthy of protection. But no matter what that world is to any of you. The one we all share is changing for sure. Uncontrollably fast. And many things are gonna change. And many things won't matter that much anymore, if we actually end up going where we're headed.
I mean a this is just a super small part of it all, but i assume in this specific case, for graphene, it's a battle for privacy... and they're right. But we're still going into a future where we got 5,10,20,30 more years of "AI", even just keeping the same level of overall sophistication for most, but costs decreasing immensely... I don't know about you, but I don't think the ways we protect our privacy can be unaffected, already because we're going to learn all new aspects about which data is private. Just out of practicality. Extreme example: but if generating hundreds of obscene deepfakes of any person as easily as taking a photo with your iPhone... ah, i can't keep having this discussion, i hope i am just an insane moron who is wrong. But, just to be sure: instead of arguing if we should close the windows on the train that's burning, or leave them open, as some are smart and others need help, let's just get off the fucking train.
And yes of course. One might argue (I actually would), we should not start implementing laws like that or start making personal information a requirement to digital access.
But this might be the first step to a different future, or not. As i said, who cares where the train is headed. It's burning and nobody even really wants to be on it. Let's please get off the train.
Not saying the battle is lost. I have tried working on something because I still have great hope. But someone seriously must act. I tried, getting off the train. Or at least start standing up from my seat. Realizing it's not that easy to get off. It's embarrassing, but i can't even get off the train by myself... i tried anyway... but here i am, sitting again (currently on the floor, lost my seat, damn...)... i have been building something for the past 2 years. Well, trying to build something, an attempt to change course... ruining my life over it. And currently i failed, before i even got to a point where my prototype or any of the theoretical work even remotely represents the vision. But maybe i just learned, i was wrong about all of it. I hope i'll make it back being able to afford working on it and someday a way to make enough money to pay smarter people than me to join. But currently, it's insane for me for me to even dare dreaming about that. I have really dug myself a hole. Next time, it should at least be a hill...
So in the meantime: can people like the dudes & dudiñas from graphene please chose a wiser battle. If just some of all these people got together & worked on getting off the train, instead of working on things that seem meaningful now, but wouldn't even be considered worthy of being mentioned in the future... we'd have a shot.
Damn. I still just can't accept it, even though i've literally lost everything believing that. And i am ashamed so deeply believing in what i saw, and in friendly moments still see, as a future... thinking i could change it, without changing myself... but please god, in the end, let me not have been just bonkers, but convicted.
I appreciate the thought, but I personally disagree having seen the patterns of the past 2-3 decades. There is zero real benefit to it save powers that be. Honestly, the only reasonable move forward is non-compliance. Everything else results in steady inching towards full blown panopticon ( and some would argue that we are already there ).
GOS is not going to compromise on user privacy and security. This is not a technical problem, it is a social one where parents refuse to do what they should have done from the start. The internet is not for kids. Presuming users to be guilty until proven innocent is unacceptable. Making mechanisms to obtain user data, even if it is completely and perfectly functional and achieves what it sets out to do, risks malicious parties obtaining that information. The only way to win the game is not to play, to not ever provide that data, and children shouldnt be playing the gane in the first place.
(I'm genuinely asking)
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