Bas' Tech Newsletter: AI, Cloud, End of the Tech Boom?

Dec 06, 2022

🤯 AI: Stable Diffusion 2 and GPT-Chat released

A lot of buzz is around the hot kids on the AI block: Stable Diffusion and GPT. Both of them released new versions (Stable Diffusion 2, GPT-3’s new davinci-003 model and their ChatGPT interface).

Folks on Twitter are obsessed with generative AI art for their profile pics (in case you’re interested in generating some for your own for free, I have a little Twitter thread about an open notebook that can do it for you) and the funny replies you get from ChatGPT when you ask random questions.

Now that AI can “solve” problems on leetcode and Advent of Code, once more, the question arises whether AI will eventually replace us all. At least, there is a 20% chance for AI to develop fish-level intelligence in 10 years, according to philosopher David Chalmers.

My personal take on this is that AI is “just another productivity tool”, yet a very powerful one. There are still people required to think about how to leverage its potential to build new products. As with no-code tools, no one would expect a business owner to create their own apps – they will hire “no-code developers” or rather “consultants” to build it. But let’s see how well this statement will age.

In other news:

☁️ Cloud: AWS re:invent and Postgres 15 on Azure

AWS re:Invent took place from Nove 28 till Dec, 2, this year. While there hasn’t been too much buzz about it this time. This is probably because their announcements didn’t include some mindblowing new features, such as services for blockchain, satellites, or Image Recognition like in recent years. There were, however, some interesting talks. I found these ones very helpful:

Microsoft has announced the general availability of PostgreSQL 15 on their Cosmos DB platform. Interestingly, this happened just one week after the stable release of PostgreSQL 15. On their devblogs, Microsoft shares a little bit of the backstory on how they did it.

📉 Is the tech boom over?

We have seen a lot of reports on the economy (inflation!), significant layoffs in tech companies, and of course, Twitter’s situation of new ownership.

With years of low interest rates, we have seen the stock market rise tremendously. Add some exogenous shocks, like the aftermath of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and the dormant power of inflation was now unleashed. As a result, interest rates raised again, and equity became less attractive. With this mixture, even growth stocks like FANG, faced increasing costs of capital and sought to cut costs. Amazon, Meta, Google, and countless others have begun laying off tens of thousands of people. The Washington Post has an interesting view on how this situation may foster innovation again, as small startups benefit from lower salaries.

Twitter’s layoffs, however, are a bit different. Elon Musk, the new owner who has been forced to close the deal by a court, has been very radical in pulling off the layoffs at Twitter. He used personal assets, investment funds and bank loans to buy Twitter, and he even admitted that it might go bankrupt next year. Of course, there are a lot of discussions about a “cultural change” with Elon’s version of Twitter – my personal impression is that all of his actions boil down to the financial pressure he stands for a deal he wanted to quit before.

🚨 Ethical Considerations

While everyone is supposedly looking at the generative AI is capable of, like fancy profile pictures or engaging texts with Stable Diffusion, or GPT-3, a critical discussion is raised when AI is applied to more severe areas. In San Francisco, police are considering allowing robots to execute deadly force.

Still, people are discussing if it’s unfair if a black box AI model prevents someone from getting insurance or a mortgage (it is); having robots with the “licence to kill” is an even bigger question. The EFF has a clear standpoint on that, and I think it’s worth reading.

🎤 Lex Fridman interviews Guido van Rossum

In Lex Fridman’s podcast, he interviews Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language. They talk about Python (obviously!) and the future of programming. There is a lot to learn from this conversation, even for experienced Python developers. There is also some advice for beginners at the end of the interview.

If you have some time this week, I’d recommend listening to this episode (on YouTube, on Apple Podcasts, on Lex' website)!

🤣 Funny...

I found a funny piece on Hacker News last week. Although the article is from 2011, it really made me laugh: “If PHP Were British”.

Mike's perspective

This newsletter should not only be about my opinions. In each issue, I will set the stage for some fellow dev to share their goals, dreams, life hacks, and learnings. In this issue I asked Mike Driscoll.

Mike Driscoll has been a software developer for decades. He is the author of several Python books and shares his tips on Twitter since 2009. I asked him about what he learned the hard way the last year. Here is his answer:

Learning a web framework is a lot harder than I thought. However, part of the learning curve issue is caused by the fact that the code I'm learning from doesn't follow any of the best practices or even normal peactices of Django.

I think more junior developers need to hear about this kind of thing. Experienced, senior professionals struggle too. There is always something new in the engineering world for you to learn. The key is to never give up! Keep practicing and keep struggling. Sometimes it only takes a couple of hours, but other times it takes much longer. Regardless of how long it takes, you will succeed eventually.

What's next?

I will change this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format will not only contain curated news and insights from the tech world but also set the stage for fellow developers.

I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is a lot to learn from listening to other people's experiences, and I am excited to share that with you!

Of course, I need your help with this.

Please tell me if you want to share your story with my 400 readers!

What is something you learned?
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What do you want to share with others about your life, your productivity, your career, and your health?

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Best,

Bas' Take on Tech

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