Eh…like the saying goes “there are levels to this sh*t”
If you just want to play around as a hobbyist, sure, it can be treated as a simple task. But if you’re working on, say, space avionics it is much more detailed and complex.
Even if machines could do it, it doesn’t mean they could do it at or below the equivalent cost.
I also disagree with the automation point regarding what humans should do. As we see with current AI, many creative tasks can be automated but it doesn’t make them unfulfilling human endeavors.
If "attention is all you need" then it's something we do indeed lack, in comparison to LLMs! But it's an interesting question: might machine cognition benefit from similar bottlenecks in an attention algorithm? Advancements like Kimi Linear seem to indicate that we're far from the finish line: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26692
I think the development team's work in this scenario is more akin to basic research. There is still some chance they may discover something unexpected.
It’s not basic research in the vast, vast majority of business cases you’re describing. They aren’t Bell Labs doing novel work, they’re usually doing busy work on mundane apps. I’m not going to move our understanding of financial physics forward playing around with a social media or CRUD app. Hell, most work isn’t even testing a hypothesis other than “I hope this change doesn’t break shit”
It comes across as “everyone else’s work is trivial and low value but my, MY, work is difficult and important”. We shouldn’t be so precious.
I took “basic research” to mean “fundamental research”. Sqlite is not fundamental research. It’s an exception that proves the rule. It was literally designed for a solving a specific problem. Somewhat ironically, it also comes from the industry that originated the term “self-licking ice cream cone”. An occasional useful offshoot doesn’t justify massive amounts of otherwise less useful busywork
Basic research is research done without an obvious application. In the same way, development can be done without an obvious application. All those mathematicians studying prime numbers in the 1600s-1800s came in useful later when we invented good cryptography.
Right. As you said, sqlite was developed to fill a specific need, therefore it’s applied research and not basic research. (I wouldn’t even consider it research, but more development, but I’m trying to be generous to the discussion)
Is the fouling functionality more complicated than one would assume? From a naive perspective, it seems like it would just be a simple photo-eye sensor
Eh…like the saying goes “there are levels to this sh*t”
If you just want to play around as a hobbyist, sure, it can be treated as a simple task. But if you’re working on, say, space avionics it is much more detailed and complex.