Comment by davmar
16 hours ago
i wonder if this is how engineers felt when the first electronic calculators came out and engineers stopped doing math by hand.
did we feel uneasy that a new generation of builders didn't have to solve equations by hand because a calculator could do them?
i'm not sure it's the same analogy but in some ways it holds.
The analogy would hold if there were 2 or 3 calculator companies and all your calculations had to be sent to them.
If local models get good enough, I think it’s a very different scenario than engineers all over the world relying on central entities which have their own motives.
google/gemma-4-31B-it is honestly "good enough". It requires more than your current laptop for now, but it's not remotely inaccessible (especially if you're a SWE in the US)