Peter Steinberger: belief

Transcript context

…You’ll still be a programmer. It’s just the activity of a programmer is, is different. Yeah, and because on X, the bubble, I mean, is mostly positive. On, on Mastodon and Bluesky, I don’t… I also use it less because oftentimes I got attacked for my blog posts. And I, I had stronger reactions in the past, now I can sympathize with those people more ’cause, in a way I get it. It… In a way, I also don’t get it because it’s very unfair to grab onto the person that you see right now and unload all your fear and hate. It’s gonna be a change and it’s gonna be challenging, but it’s also… I don’t know. I find it incredibly fun and, and, and gratifying. And I can, I can use the new time to focus on much more details. I think the level of expectation of what we build is also rising because it’s just now… The default is now so much easier, so software is changing in many ways. There’s gonna be a lot more. And then you have all these people that are screaming, “Oh yeah, but what about the water?” You know? Like, I did a conference in Italy about the, the state of AI, and m- my whole motivation was to push people away from, don’t see yourself as an iOS developer anymore. You’re now a builder, and you can use your skills in many more ways. Also because apps are slowly going away. People didn’t like that. Like a lot of people didn’t like what I had to say. And I don’t think I was hyperbole, I was just like, “This is how I see the future.” Maybe this is not how it’s going to be, but I’m pretty sure a version of that will happen. And the first question I got was, “Yeah, but what about the insane water use on data centers?” But then you actually sit down and do the maths, and then for most people if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the, the CO2 output, or, like, the water use in equivalent of tokens. I mean, the maths is, is… the maths is tricky, and it depends if you add pre-training, then maybe it’s more than just one patty…. but it’s not off by a factor of 100, you know? So, so the… or like golf is still using way more water than all data centers together. So are you also hating people that play golf? Those people grab on anything that they think is bad about AI without seeing the potential things that might be good about AI. Mm-hmm.…

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