As one of my friends put it - driving in the US is like being in Whacky Races.

15 years ago there were fewer content farms trying to get your clicks.

I think that played a somewhat smaller role than Google seemingly gradually starting to take its position for granted and so everything became more focused on revenue generation and less focused on providing the highest quality experiences or results.

Beyond result quality it's absurd that it took LLMs to get meaningful natural language search. Google could have been working on that for many years, even if in a comparably simple manner, but seemingly never even bothered to try, even though that was always obviously going to be the next big step in search.

Google could afford to manually exclude the content farms if they didn't morph from a search company to an advertising company.

Fun fact - Atari threatened to sue me for my “clone” of Battlezone.

https://youtu.be/bf7Ert1wkg4

That's hilarious. God bless the old Atari who wanted to sue the world. The irony now of course is that Atari no longer own Battlezone's IP. Rebellion managed to grab it when Atari went bankrupt in 2013.

15 years ago... They had just released a remake in 2008 for the Xbox, so the IP was certainly fresh in their minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(2008_video_game)

Did they eventually drop the threat or did something else happen?

I removed my app from the US App Store and all was good.

I worked on some software that was used by telcos around that time - you were probably hacking our dongles :)

Even more amazingly - that software I worked in is still being used and sold. Probably still has some of my ropey old code on it…

There was also STAC for the Atari ST - absolutely loved it. Unfortunately my artistic skills were not up to making anything good.

https://www.ifwiki.org/STAC

I would also point out that a lot of real world problems don’t need a complex architecture. They just need to follow some well established patterns.

It is a pattern matching problem and that seems to me to be something AI is/will be particularly good at.

Maybe it won’t be the perfect architecture, or the most efficient implementation. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped many companies before.

I think this is sadly going to be the case.

I also used to get great pleasure from the banging head and then the sudden revelation.

But that takes time. I was valuable when there was no other option. Now? Why would someone wait when an answer is just a prompt away.

Worst case - you could at some point rip out the brains and replace them.

CNC machines are somewhat basic machines really.

Creating PCBs is surprisingly straightforward and there are a ton of good resources available.

It’s probably one of the few area of YouTube that is actually still useful. Probably a high enough barrier to entry to stop most slop.

Much of the western (at least in the UK/US) way of life is/was predicated on being able to have some trust in the government and officials.

Politicians have always been seen as venal and corrupt. But the institutions have always been trusted. This is being rapidly eroded.