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Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
41–50 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#42Why are you interested in CS in the first place? Computer _Science_ will not be affected by LLMs and other technologies at all. I friend of mine once said that if all computers were wiped off the face of the Earth, her Computer Science research would be unaffected (except that she would have to use typewriters for her papers). One can reason that - barring development of AGI - that improved AI capabilities won't affe…
> I friend of mine once said that if all computers were wiped off the face of the Earth, her Computer Science research would be unaffected (except that she would have to use typewriters for her papers
Somehow I think having no computers on the planet might affect the funding for her CS research.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#43Stay and ride out a potential economic problems. This is assuming the cost isn't too high.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#44Wait until it automates even customer service or insurance claims processing. The great employment apocalypse of AI has been just a few years away for a decade now. More likely it will be slow and gradual. People used to say that computers themselves were going to cause mass unemployment.
Now we get to say they’ll cause mass extinction.
And, to be fair, they did end a bunch of jobs but also created more new ones so people didn’t really notice all that much. How many companies still have typing pools?
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#45We always overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.
When I was young, people told me that if I didn't study engineering or medicine I risked a life of poverty or suffering in dirty, dangerous, or degrading jobs. So I studied computer science (and was lucky to find I do enjoy it).
Well now that LLMs can write code I can tell you that if you study CS you might still end up unemployed. I doubt it, but the possibility is there and it's real.
If I was 17, I would want someone to tell me the field that is so challenging and in demand that no AI could ever master it and my future will be secure. I don't have know any off hand.
So I think you need to look inward and read more about these fields you are considering, reach out to current students and/or professors, and see which one will make you want to get out of bed in the morning and be your best self even if you had to do it for minimum wage because AI has destroyed the labor market.
(But I don't think will happen for a couple decades at least.)
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#46Stay in CS and finish your degree. If in doubt, get more mathematical. The main thing is to finish the degree, whatever you do.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#47Is my understanding of GPT's "coding" ability wrong? From what I've seen, GPT isn't architecting systems. It writes code snippets--basically the stuff you can copy/paste off stack overflow. The only difference is now instead of Googling and searching for the code snippet, GPT will sometimes just give it to you. But once you need something unique, or something that's not just one little piece of the puzzle, it can't d…
The thing is... we've only seen a few months of these LLMs. And it is not unknown in the world of software for the early versions to seem laughably primitive a few years later.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#48Study as much math and physics as you can. Study business, accounting, finance, and marketing. Study the classics and philosophy.
Once school winds down and life picks up, you'll have less time to sit down and deeply read anything.
Build your mental toolkit while you have the luxury of time.
At least, that's what I'd tell my younger self.
I'm not saying not to study computer science, but a lot of it is free and its applied foundations are in the open (free and open-source software).
Novel ideas come from the synergy of thinking and implementation.
Mathematics is the baseline.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#49I think you are worrying yourself about LLMs for no real reason. Dispite what the large LLM investors and irrational fanboys claim, it won't displace _skilled_ workers that evolve themselves like I'm positive you are. That said, you should specialize to some balance of what pays well and your interests.
You should consider majoring in something other than CS, not because of LLMs or anything like that but because there is tremendous value in having an intersection of trades that you are good at. I went for Electrical & Computer Engineering in school for this reason (and the fact that I didn't want to waste my time&money taking formal classes for the vast majority of things I've already learned before entering college).
Electrical/Computer Engineering is a sweet spot because you get to learn hardware very intimately but also usually take upper-level CS classes. Learning the hardware also makes much better software engineers. I've yet to run into a single employer in the tech space that doesn't treat the degree as the same or better than a CS degree.
Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?
#50Why are you interested in CS in the first place? Computer _Science_ will not be affected by LLMs and other technologies at all. I friend of mine once said that if all computers were wiped off the face of the Earth, her Computer Science research would be unaffected (except that she would have to use typewriters for her papers). One can reason that - barring development of AGI - that improved AI capabilities won't affe…
> I friend of mine once said that if all computers were wiped off the face of the Earth, her Computer Science research would be unaffected (except that she would have to use typewriters for her papers Somehow I think having no computers on the planet might affect the funding for her CS research.
I think the opposite - if all the computers currently disappeared, computer scientists would be in high demand to help develop new ones.