They're already very cheap, almost free when you buy used. I got one for $50 that makes pretty good prints. For $300 you can buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon that is a really high end consumer printer. Don't forget that we're talking about CNC machine tools with precision movements here. An entry level manual milling machine from Precision Matthews in Taiwan will cost you $250 shipping alone. Even good linear rails by themselves are more than $300 on ebay. A lot of innovation has been happening in the 3D printer space to make all these machine components cheaper which has also benefited other applications like hobbyist milling.
Nowadays, we are so used to all the injection molded plastic crap, and also so much poorer, that we can't understand why precisely manufactured products made from solid metal or wood are so expensive.
It's not awesome, not for us. 30% productivity gain would be enormous. Just imagine 30% of developers losing their jobs, in addition to outsourcing and all the new graduates flooding out of colleges after CS has been hyped so much in the recent years.
I really doubt that 30% productivity gain would result in 30% developers losing their jobs. Believing this would require an assumption that businesses and economies will never grow.
It also doesn't mathematically make any sense. If you now have 130% developer capacity, then the percentage of developers you need to keep is `x` defined by 130%*x = 100%, x ≈ 76.9% implying you'd lay off about 23.1% of developers.
Percentage increases are not the same as percentage losses.
Good tooling, high level languages, faster computers and sane standards also enabled enormous productivity gains. I predict very few positions lost to LLM's, rather I'd say that just with any technical "revolution" we'll just set a new baseline for productivity, get rid of some bottlenecks, and have a new situation where we need even more engineers to maintain upkeep.
Most jobs lost to AI is just companies that want / need to lay people off and shareholders like "Replaced 30% of our workforce with AI" more than any other conceivable reason.
The fact that you got a syntax error at all is pretty telling. Are you not using agent mode? Or maybe that's just the experience with inferior non-statically typed languages where such errors only appear when the application is run. In any case, the key is to have a feedback mechanism. Claude should read the syntax errors, adjust and iterate until the error is fixed. Similarly, you should ask Claude to write a test for your landscape/portrait mode bug and have it make changes until the test passes.
The burger cook job has already been displaced and continues to be. Pre-1940s those burger restaurants relied on skilled cooks that got their meat from a butcher and cut fresh lettuce every day. Post-1940s the cooking process has increasingly become assembly-lined and cooks have been replaced by unskilled labor. Much of the cooking process _is_ now done by robots in factories at a massive scale and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up. In the past 10 years, automation has further increased and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English. In conclusion, both the required skill-level and amount of labor needed for restaurants has been reduced drastically by automation and in fact many higher skilled trade jobs have been hit even harder: cabinetmakers, coachbuilders and such have been almost eradicated by mass production.
> and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up
This is correct. This also is a lot more complex than it sounds and creates a lot of work. Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled.
> and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English
Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me". Want to add Mac sauce? Get the wrong order in the bag? Machine took payment but is out of receipt paper? Add up all these "edge cases" and a significant amount of these "contactless" transactions involved plenty of contact!
> It will happen to you.
Any labor that can be automated should be. Humans are not supposed to spend their time doing meaningless tasks without a purpose beyond making an imaginary number go up or down.
> Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled.
Okay so the job of "cook" just became "grease disposal engineer"?
> Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me"
That hasn't stopped some places I've visited from only allowing people to order from the kiosk. Literally I've said something to the person behind the counter who pointed to the iPad and when I said I wanted something else, shrugged and said we can't do that.
> Okay so the job of "cook" just became "grease disposal engineer"?
That is the current way the job works. The idea that even the most basic "burger flipper" job is isolated into a single dimension (flipping a burger) is false. That worker has to get supplies, prepare ingredients, stage them between cooking, dispose of waste product, etc.
> Literally I've said something to the person behind the counter who pointed to the iPad and when I said I wanted something else, shrugged and said we can't do that.
That's because corporate told them to maximize kiosk usage or because the employee was lazy. That's always going to happen. The McDonalds in Union Station DC has broken glass on the floor, because it's a shithole and the employees don't care, but it means not much else IMO
Does anyone want this? Speed has never been the problem for me, in fact, higher latency means less work for me as a replaceable corporate employee. What I need is the most intelligence possible; I don't care if I have to wait a day for an answer if the answer is perfect. Small code edits, like they are presented as the use case here, I can do much better myself than trying to explain to some AI what exactly I want done.
Quickly and concisely? In my experience, Claude drivels on and on forever. The answers are always far longer than Gemini's, which is mostly fine for coding but annoying for planning/questions.
That sounds about right to me, maybe a tad too low. In my experience it's more like 2-3 rounds of interviews and 70-75k€/year with 5 YoE and a college degree, which amounts to 3700€/month net income and you can't expect much improvement on that even with 25 YoE unless you become some sort of corporate middle manager.
Nowadays, we are so used to all the injection molded plastic crap, and also so much poorer, that we can't understand why precisely manufactured products made from solid metal or wood are so expensive.
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