221–230 of 319 posts
I sure picked the worst time to be unemployed and look at a coding career again after a decade
Learn about things you missed. double check everything it says.
Good luck.
My fear isn't that I'll be replaced, it's the technology becoming so good that it'll be kept far out of reach of the common person. I genuinely believe OpenAI knows what a GPT 5+ type world looks like, and they're probably having a lot of debate on how best to monetize it. They could practically charge anything in the world for it assuming it still undercuts the cost of hiring a human. One Nvidia super cluster runnin…
it is not widely appreciated that openAI will at some point finish training one of their models and there, in that room where the terminal is, total power will exist and be under the control of whoever happens to be in there. “GTP10, please recreate NSO exploits and launch a campaign to download all data of the global population. hack and commandeer other data-centers if necessary, discreetly of course. begin an oper…
Is programming even the hard part about programming? In all seriousness, what we would really need from an AI to start really saving me time would be for it to interview all the customers/partners involved on the project, determine the scope of function needed, boil all that down to a set of sensible domain models that make sense to everyone, identify where/when messages need to be passed, determine which things can…
i'm honestly not worried at all about LLMs because most of my jobs have consisted of fixing problems in other peoples' code, and i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future. I have, however, seen evidence that chatgpt will create many more problems and make my job harder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't need it to write code. I don't need it to interview customers. I need it yourself attend endless, pointless, weekly zoom meetings where a manager with zero understanding of the task being done, why its being done, and with no idea how to do it, nevertheless is happy to review open tickets and discuss them. This task will take 2 months. I'm busy working on it. If you want a 5 minute email every week on how its…
> I need it yourself attend endless, pointless, weekly zoom meetings where a manager with zero understanding of the task being done. You don't need AI for that, you need to brush up your resume and find another job - The biggest regret of my career is not having left places early when the organisation/management style sucked the enjoyment/productivity out of what you do, particularly if everyone else there agrees wit…
Survival may require getting out of the mainstream. LLMs are going to get really good at stuff that's been done thousands of times and they can train on that data. Like web front end work. If you're doing industrial embedded work and have an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer on your desk, and spend part of your time going into the plant and working directly with the machinery, you're in better shape.
How to survive in an AI world? Shift your mindset from “I write code” to “I deliver value”. Now instead of AI replacing you, it’s helping you get more done (in theory). Everyone wins. Staking your career on being a pair of hired hands that executes somebody else’s exacting specifications was always a long-term losing proposition. And we are very very far away from AI being able to ask the right questions to help busi…
You're seemingly claiming that:
"Taking an incomplete customer brief and asking relevant questions to make it clearer and complete is the largest value in programming"
And... you're not seeing the possibility that large language models, i.e. AI that is specifically built to take in fuzzy bad language and provide a neat completion/reply, is ever going to be able to say "I'm sorry Dave, but your brief is a bit unclear, could you tell me why you want 3 download buttons on the Projects screen?"
I have worked with outsourced offshore coders a lot over the years and I can guarantee you that a lot of the "programmer workforce", agencies and teams, just won't ask any of those questions.
They'll blindly "start the work" on terrible incomplete briefs, build something that (predictably) won't work, and charge you for this broken software.
Do you really not think that putting a "Product Team Assistant" AI (which might even be doable with today's GPT-4 with a few loops and clever prompting) between the client and the coding would drastically increase/replace the value of such teams?
Occurs to me as a retired 69 year old former coder that AI makes us old geezers and geezesses somewhat competitive again with our younger colleagues. Need to learn yet another new framework? Let AI do the nitty gritty bit. Capitalize on your experience and higher level know how.
It doesn't work. I asked GPT-4 to migrate the following PHP code to JS: $csv = array_map('str_getcsv', file($argv[1])); And this is the result: const csv = readFileSync(filename, 'utf-8').split('\n').map(line => line.split(',')); You can't parse CSV this way, because you need to respect delimiters. Counter example: 1,"1,5",2 "1,5" being the German notation for "1.5". Hence, a simple split(',') will break this thing.…
$csv = str_getcsv(file($argv[1]))
If you worry about "staying ahead of generative AI" in it's current state, then I think you are not a good coder and you should learn more instead of worrying about that. LLMs are only good in writing new code without surrounding context. They are pretty useless in legacy codebases and in codebases with a lot of internal solutions. I've used Copilot for 2 months at work and maybe 10% of suggestions were useful, and f…
I am not sure if its that simple and/or so black and white. Everyone is bad when they start, and even stay okay for a while. So fear is very rational, the fear of getting replaced by someone or something better is very humble. No matter how good or bad one is, theres always someone better than them.
I think for most people its smart to adapt to using AI in their workflows to make them better and more efficient, so I think everyone benefits from learning no matter what skill level they are on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"democratizing this technology" = working closely with government > unless governmentally mandated, they could keep guardrails from regular folks accessing it That's not what's going to happen. Government will mandate that regular folks can't access it. Government will also do its best to make sure LLMs concentrate at a few companies, which it will often refer to as "partners."
the main inflection point will be when it becomes socially taboo to express an anti-ai sentiment. just like with certain medicines or whichever war is being launched currently, the media will play lapdog for the government. the true inflection point comes when the federal government recognizes whats going on and enters into the AI arms race. suddenly the media will be flooded with talk of how AGI saves lives, discove…
If people get left behind, it mightn't be such a bad thing − the cheaper software will lower the cost of living, making UBI more feasible. The glut of unemployed people will hopefully popularise UBI rather than trying to jump back on the treadmill of GDP maximisation, exploiting each other and destroying our planet. https://nonhuman.party/post/replacing_capitalism/