The real take away is that he’s out front shaping regulation before it impacts him.
In the US he knows it’s easy to manipulate our policy with a little song and dance because our policy makers don’t understand what they are looking at.
It’s a different story in the EU where you have competent leaders.
That seems to be the reason for the inverse approach.
US: “let me help you write the regulations ;)”
EU: “you’re gonna be behind it you regulate me :0”
As a EU citizen, I really wish we had competent leaders, particularly in Brussels. Have never seen any evidence that is the case, specially with regards to tech.
The last EU initiative at sweeping regulation in the tech space (GDPR) was disastrous. It imposed huge compliance costs for all entities, from large multinationals to small startups and business and even some individuals and nonprofits. For the multinationals that is totally fine with me, they can afford it, but for the other ones it is far from clear that the benefits outweigh the costs. They could have just made it not apply to small entities (either in revenue, number of users or some other metric) and it would have been arguably great. The way they did it they just gave a big advantage to large incumbents and put a strong handicap on EU based tech start ups (as well as other businesses to a lesser extent).
Years after the roll out, I still occasionally come across international websites that have opted to ban European visitors than figure out how to comply with GDPR.
Don't get me wrong, the GDPR was meant to address real on going abuses of personal data, and did some things right, but it could have easily had most of the benefits for a fraction of the cost if they did things right. Unfortunately, like all almost all regulators, Brussels tends to pay a lot more attention to hypothetical benefits of regulation than its predictable costs.
I agree, there are some stupid bureaucratic loop holes, i.e., Find a public data set without consents which you want to use. This is not allowed, but this is what you can do:
* Try to contact owner of data to ask for consent of all people (maybe thousands)
* They ignore you because it's an insane task to arrange all those consents...but...
* Now you have shown that you did a reasonable effort to obtain consent and...
* Now you can use the data for research purposes.
You can't use it for making/creating anything related to IP though. But you can get creative of course.
I could see a world where if you create the right architecture then complex tasks can be broken into smaller individual tasks where your only concern is the outcome and not the underlying code. Very deterministic
Essentially all the things we developers care about might not matter. Who cares if the LLM repeats itself? DRY won’t apply anymore because there might not be a reason to share code!
LLM go brrrr until it gets the right output and the code turns into more “machine learning black box” stuff
If you look at what the prompter had to know in order to get a useful output you can see how far away we are from replacing that individual with a business stakeholder.
That’s why I view these tools as “productivity enhancements” rather than a straight replacement of a job. In some cases maybe, but not for coders just yet…
I think the most underrated and useful parts of this process is the ability to get going.
For me the starting energy of a project is the thing that blocks me. With chatgpt, it’s a simple prompt to get the conversation going. Once in motion I can put the puzzle pieces together while chatgpt can help me keep momentum
I used to build random weird things all the time (mostly centered around connecting physical devices up to the internet to accomplish something silly) - but lost my mojo once I had kids and didn’t the ability to pull all nighters to “hack” something together.
Now I feel like the barrier might be low enough that I could create again. Will have to try this out and see how it goes.
