Hacker News

Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page.

If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them.

Your product has to be complex because that's where the software market is at. All of the low-hanging fruits have been taken by the time you identify them. Sure, someone will find a way to make money using new low-hanging fruits that arise due to technological changes but it's not going to be you. You probably don't have the business connections to make that work.

I like this analogy; raising children well like delivering products well pays dividends. They’re less likely to cause problems and if they do, they tend to be smaller in scope.

> Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work.

Then there's the technical debt!

Shipping is frankly the easy part. It's the operating overhead that often breaks you.

I liken it to free puppies.

> it's quite difficult to become a CEO

on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have.

What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them.

I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.

CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place.

I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that rhetorical executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.

what about zukerberg he didnt have to do any politics to get to ceo. yet he is the face of ai layoffs and bad ceo.

You don't need custom built anything, ChatGPT could generate corporate initiatives and PR statements all day and no one would notice.

I am building a project now and then will create an AI to manage it and be the CEO.

The code is human + AI, the management is only AI

You can get a lot of tokens for a CEO. I'd say it's worth a try.

Robotics aren't there yet, it needs to go on golf playdates with investors and board members.

Who takes responsibility when the AI does something unethical or illegal? Do we put the computer in jail? Or do we just look the other way like we do with human CEOs?

While I agree that AIs would do a good job…

Would you rather take instructions from a ruthless robot or ruthless flesh sack?

If L2 support work is the example then I doubt we’re near replacement.

L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix.

I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff.

They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).

I often use AI chatbot to generate step-by-step instruction for setting or repairing up some bit of tech. It's incredibly empowering, and saved me a a lot of money that would have been spent on buying replacement tech.

You know who can't do that? People who call L1 support.

Upper management material written all over them.

You bring in contractors.

Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility.

Even better if you get some management consultant to suggest the idea and/or do the subcontracting.

Definitely buys you a few quarters of bonus and some time to land your next gig.

Who wants to be CEO for that long? The company will be sold off to a larger conglomerate long before that happens.

Get your state governor to go on tv and ask for people who know how to program Cobalt.

Aircraft autopilot is over 100 years old, and Testla autopilot is an automotive version that fits the definition by analogy to what aircaft autopilot does and what the human metaphor means (doing simple tasks aithout higher-level cognition or handling of surprising stimuli). Autopilot is not end-to-end driverless.

> Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money?

This assumes that a mass consumer economy is necessary, when it isn't. Mass consumption is relatively new, for most of history economies functioned with just a small consuming elite and large underclass that consumed very little. We are already approaching that again in the states given that the top 10% of earners are already responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending.

There's a floor even in a mostly automated economy where some services are resistant to automation simply because the human element is the product. Luxury hospitality, personal care, etc. That billionaire is going to want a human masseuse, not a robot.

A highly automated economy could stabilize like this with a small elite population consuming luxury goods & services, served by a low-wage economic underclass human workforce.

Its certainly not a pleasant society, but its also not unsustainable given enough oppression or pacification (bread and circuses anyone?)

It's not exactly a misconception, when companies are pitching AI as a full and complete replacement for human employees. People are just reading the billboards on the side of the road.

> though this is not an exact figure

You mean, this is an entirely made-up figure.

That sounds like 5 humans got replaced by AI. I don't think most people worry about whether all humans will be replaced, simply whether or not they will be replaced, or people they care about.