Markus Oberlehner

I have some sympathy with the anti-AI crowd, yet I think they do more harm than good. Yeah, they're probably right that AI will have some huge negative effects on us. As were the anti-Internet people or the anti-car people. Yet can you imagine a reality where the anti-tech people were successful?

If the anti-car crowd hadn't fought the losing cause of boycotting cars altogether, but instead had thought more about how to compensate for the long-term negative effects they bring, we might not live today in cities drowned in car noise and exhaust. While still reaping their benefits.

I have some sympathy with the anti-AI crowd, yet I think they do more harm than good. Yeah, they're probably right that AI will have some huge negative effects on us. As were the anti-Internet people or the anti-car people. Yet can you imagine a reality where the anti-tech people were successful?

Computers, as a mass-market phenomenon, were a happy accident in history. I can't think of any other recent invention marketed to consumers that's primarily made to create, not to consume.

Sure, a big part of why PCs were successful was that they enabled consuming video games. But even there, the same device could also be used to create or at least modify. Many PC games came with map editors, for example.

Apple is the champion of providing magical experiences THAT JUST DON'T WORK. Just now, my girlfriend started typing in our new Wi-Fi password on her iPhone; *magically* a pop-up appeared on my phone asking if I wanted to share the password with her. I pressed yes, but it didn't work.

Copy and paste between devices? Copying text on the laptop and pasting it on the iPhone feels like magic! But again, in 50% of cases, it just doesn't work.

Apple is the champion of providing magical experiences THAT JUST DON'T WORK. Just now, my girlfriend started typing in our new Wi-Fi password on her iPhone; *magically* a pop-up appeared on my phone asking if I wanted to share the password with her. I pressed yes, but it didn't work.

AirPods should automatically switch between devices, and when they do, it really feels like magic. But in 10% of cases, they don't, and it is super annoying, whereas my regular Bluetooth headset just works.

I've completely changed my mind on this recently: **You don't need to become a software company!** (and you definitely don't need to become an AI company)! Stick to your core competency!

If a couple of car makers would collaborate by financing work on an open source Car OS, everybody would benefit. Eventually, the open source Car OS will be better and more stable than any closed-source competitor.

I've completely changed my mind on this recently: **You don't need to become a software company!** (and you definitely don't need to become an AI company)! Stick to your core competency!

You have nothing to gain and everything to lose in the software arena. You don't gain new customers with good software, but you're going to lose customers if your software is bad! And ultimately, the whole industry will suffer!

I've completely changed my mind on this recently: **You don't need to become a software company!** (and you definitely don't need to become an AI company)! Stick to your core competency!

On the flip side: Without people like the other Steve, the one who didn't develop emotionally past the age of 13, Woz wouldn't have had the money to fund museums and arts groups. And you and I wouldn't be staring at some Apple device reading this. Would it be a net benefit after all? Maybe.

Is AI able to write code? I think we can stop asking this question: yes, it can! Actually, it is way too good at writing (a lot of) code. In a surprising number of cases, when I ask an AI to write a moderately complex piece of code, it will produce an output that works.

Yet I've had great success using agents with prompts like, "Here is how I've implemented X, please implement Y in the same way," or for refactoring tasks that can't be 100% automated by the IDE.

Is AI able to write code? I think we can stop asking this question: yes, it can! Actually, it is way too good at writing (a lot of) code. In a surprising number of cases, when I ask an AI to write a moderately complex piece of code, it will produce an output that works.

But what I find is that AI-generated code is anything but simple. This not only makes the code very hard for a human to debug, but the AI itself will also struggle to iterate on the code it has written.

I’m in both screenshots. I wonder if there should be two types of commits: 1. Quicksave: part of what I’m trying to achieve works, I want to be able to safely go back there and diff new changes against this state. 2. End-of-Level Save: I’ve finished a piece of work that is fully usable.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Amsterdam, I began chatting with a Swiss neuroscientist. At the end of our chat, I was more convinced than ever: always choose Open Source software!

For maintenance, hosting, training, etc., you can select between different service providers that are truly competing with each other on price and service. When one such service provider goes bankrupt, you can go to another one. When your proprietary software vendor goes bankrupt, you're screwed.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Amsterdam, I began chatting with a Swiss neuroscientist. At the end of our chat, I was more convinced than ever: always choose Open Source software!

This means, at a certain point, all proprietary software vendors don't compete on product, but mostly on sales tactics. If you want or need certain improvements made to the software, you're at the mercy of the software vendor, and they can charge you however much they sense you're willing to pay.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Amsterdam, I began chatting with a Swiss neuroscientist. At the end of our chat, I was more convinced than ever: always choose Open Source software!

While talking about the intricacies of diagnosing psychosis, how to apply machine learning and AI in the field of neuroscience, and, of course, blockchain, we eventually arrived at the topic of how horrible their software system is.