Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine • Hacker News Board

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#781

Post by scaramanga » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

mecsred wrote: post #511

scaramanga wrote: post #501

"I am concerned that the cotton gin will make slavery obsolete and all my slaves will lose their value" Insert similarly ridiculous and offensive comment about women being replaced by any number of domestic labour-saving devices.

Is this an attempt to conflate... Negative AI speculation with racism and misogyny? Yes this technology could be used to reduce the need for human labor. Technology usually isn't actually used in that way and instead just used to concentrate wealth. That's what's being discussed here. The issues you are bringing up have much more to do with the discriminatory practice of forcing particular demographics to do the meni…

No, quite the contrary, it's to conflate hype around AI with racism and misogyny.

The idea that AI is going to replace humans is anti-human rubbish. You're basically saying humans are shit and we don't need them. That's why tech companys are going to be laying people off.

The fact is, it is tech CEO's who are going to be out of work, as their business models are failures and society are going to realise it and move on.

We've been four months without the world being in thrall to mass-hysteria about something from silicon valley. Better gin up the next ridiculous hype train.

Meanwhile, the job of a developer now is basically the same as it was 15 years ago, 30 years ago, or even 45 years ago. And the only way we can imagine an end to their "slavery" (okay, not slavery, but meaningless toil on the hairbrained fantasies of well-financed frat-boys) is to turn around and tell them "you are nothing more than a machine." Just as tech bro's now condescend to cleaning staff by telling them they'll be replaced by "Suckio" - silicon valley's new AI vacuum cleaner. All the time, lacking any insight or sense of irony, that LLM's are much better suited to replacing the jobs of CEO's.. producing endless puffery that lacks factual merit. Cleaning is the last job the AI's will take.

Edit: for grammar

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#782

Post by 6510 » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:25 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #616

6510 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learn in a different topic on HN that with a sophisticated chat bot lurkers dare ask support questions. As many developers I've often asked people how to do things. Before asking I try to find answers in google (as asking questions easily googled is lame) but if the chat channel is busy and I've already asked for help in the last 30 minutes I do more google searches. Each next question feels more expensive. Technic…

I don't think in 40-ish years I have ever asked a manager what's a good day or week for me to take off. I probably have certain constraints and I can look at my calendar. And have a general sense for good and less-good periods.

There are questions that should be asked but wont be and ones that could be asked but shouldn't be. It depends a lot on the persons, their relationship and the context where the lines are but if its just a bot you can ask anything. The answers would somewhat depend on your role but they wont depend on who you are or how few or how many questions you've used up in the last hour, today, this week, this month and this year. Humans are like that, we are like: I've never asked for anything! as if its an important metric.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#783

Post by scaramanga » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:31 AM UTC

jordanpg wrote: post #386

> Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the tools. Sure, but the aspects of the job that some people enjoy may be closely linked to the tools. If software development becomes less about coding and more about creating prompts, test suites, or specifications, then some may lose interest in the work. At least for me, it was never really about delivering value. If I am honest, I…

Sure, but they'll still be doing work they hate, for well capitalized people with no imagination and very little to offer. And they'll be equally unhappy.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#784

Post by scaramanga » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:35 AM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #303

The super power I value - and rarely see in my peers - is the ability to hear wants and discuss them to define needs. The initial stated wants are rarely the actual needs. "But they said _____." Yes, they did. That doesn't mean they got it right. People say a lot of ambiguous things. A client with a product or feature in mind is no different.

Right. But you're missing the whole point. The allure of the AI hype-train is that you can turn around to your most talented and insightful developers and say "stop undermining me" and then get the machine to produce the nonsensical garbage that you would have had to spent days, weeks, months getting your crew to produce, all the while enduring their silent looks of judgement :)

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#785

Post by scaramanga » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:37 AM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #224

there was a point in time when being an average musician was a viable middle class career technology decimated that

And the same goes for taxi driver, postman, or jobs in hospitality.

The technology isn't the culprit here.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#786

Post by scaramanga » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:42 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #125

I have no idea why the lump of labour fallacy is still so ingrained in people. AI which is not AGI or whatever sci-fi panic people have on twitter, is a slightly fancier autocomplete, and thus it's a productivity tool. Nobody has been replaced by their debugger or their intellisense, even if it makes coding 10x or 100x easier. It just means software development gets faster and cheaper. On net if anything that'll like…

Yes, in the past, the "toolbag" metaphor was used to sell us extremely expensive productivity tools like IDE's and the like. But as any developer who doesn't use them and still makes a perfectly fine living has realised, it was a hype-train setup by a small group of people that was used to accumulate wealth. But the end result was very modest or zero improvements in actual productivity.

Now these things are practically given away for free to drive people towards websites where you can be sold software you won't ever own (SaaS/cloud) which was the next hype-train that was setup by a smnall group of people and that was used to accumulate wealth. But the end result was very modest or zero improvements in actual productivity.

Here we are on the next hype train. And I think you've very much spotted the pattern. What these things are good for is driving up demand for new products and services that have increasingly marginal, zero, or sometimes even negative effects on human wellbeing overall.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#787

Post by bitwize » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:49 AM UTC

kaashif wrote: post #685

antupis wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if GPT or copilot make developer 5-50x more productive then you need just 2 good programmers instead of team of 10-100 person, so out of window goes all formalized agile processes, safes etc so you don't need anymore those managers who are doing communicating, process planning and other big business stuff. Of course this will also affect for developers but I bet less because there is huge need for software developers…

If C makes developers 5-50x more effective compared to writing assembly, then you just need two devs instead of a team of 10-100. Obviously that didn't happen. And people actually made predictions like that once upon a time. As software becomes cheaper, and the production of software can be done with fewer people, demand has always increased and I don't see any reason that's going to stop. Reminds me of this: https:/…

I recall seeing a video in which a senior vice president of Symbolics (yes, the Lisp machine people) claimed that their aim was to put the largest software projects within reach of a small team, and everything smaller would be feasible by a single person.

Had Lisp machines (as an idea) remained viable, we might've come close! But managers just love having large teams to command, and we've invented process and ceremony to fill up the spare time necessary to do the work of ten programmers with a hundred, as well as rejecting technologies like Lisp and Smalltalk that give individual programmers tremendous leverage over the problem space.

Should AI actually make people more productive, instead of being an endless generator of messes for fleshbags to clean up, I imagine some successor of Scrum to come along to tie up most of staff programmers' work days with meetings. Hell, that may happen anyway.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#788

Post by scaramanga » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:59 AM UTC

99miles wrote: post #286

So many people focus on their "stack", and all these things that have little effect on the outcome. Customers don't know or care how something is built, they just want it to provide value and solve a problem.

If this were true then the history of capitalism and free enterprise would be radically different. Many of the most valuable items bought and sold today simply would not exist. This is the myth of free enterprise in it's purest form: that the consumer is an infallible rational operator with perfect insight into his or her own self-interest.

The fact is that markets are based on our existing as fallible human beings in a completely poisoned information landscape that induces in people an endless stream of irrational wants which drive them into frenzied purchasing activity. And as soon as one want is satisfied, or turns out to be a big scam, another one is concocted. This applies equally well to IT purchasing choices in B2B sectors.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#789

Post by pcthrowaway » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 3:15 AM UTC

ChatGTP wrote: post #759

ilaksh wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can accept about 4k tokens, maybe 3000 words or 3500. GPT-4 can now accept 8k or 32k. The 32k version is 8 times larger than the one you tried. And these advances have come in a matter of a few months. Over the next several years we should expect at least one, quite easily two or more orders of magnitude improvements. I don't believe that this stuff can necessarily get a million times smarter. But 10 times? 100? I…

So people want to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, I think these things should probably live on the moon or better yet Mars. That should be the place for experiments like this. Lowery latency links back to Earth and first see how it goes. Also you don’t think there will be resource constraints at some stage ? It’s funny we yelled at people for Bitcoin but when it’s ChstGPT, it’s fine to run probably tens of thous…

Personally I don't think AI tools energy usage are comparable to BTC yet.

Also, with BTC it's literally burning it in an unproductive way for "improved security". It's like lighting a forest on fire to keep warm.

All the AI tools combined, last I heard, aren't consuming 0.5% of the world's energy usage. And even if they were, it would be absolutely bonkers to argue we should keep doing that when there were alternatives that accomplished similar goals without the energy usage (proof of stake)

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#790

Post by hnfong » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #214

hnfong wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not, it can only give out known answers to known problems based on language statistics. Are you sure you actually tried, or is this an a priori argument?

I use it on a daily basis.

I notice you said you used it, but did you actually intentionally test its reasoning abilities by giving it "known problems" and equivalently difficult (whatever that means) "novel" problems, and observe the difference in the quality of results it gave?

(btw, apparently GPT-4 does much better on mathematical reasoning, I've yet to try myself though)