31–40 of 182 posts
Thinking bigger is a practice to hone.
I envy this optimistic. I am not the opposite (im a sr engineer with more than 15 years of experience), but I am scared about my future. I invested too much time in learning concepts, theory, getting a Master degree, and in a few years all of my knowledge can be useless in the market.
Being able to write code that compiled into assembly, instead of directly writing assembly, meant you could do more. Which soon meant you had to do more, because now everyone was expecting it.
The internet meant you could take advantage of open source to build more complex software. Now, you have to.
Cloud meant you could orchestrate complicated apps. Now you can't not know how it works.
LLMs will be the same. At the moment people are still mostly playing with it, but pretty soon it will be "hey why are you writing our REST API consumer by hand? LLM can do that for you!"
And they won't be wrong, if you can get the lower level components of a system done easily by LLM, you need to be looking at a higher level.
Probably right at the end of your career is where this tool would be the most useful An undergrad using the hottest tech right of the bat? Cooked. It's like giving the world 128gb of ram and 64bits in 1970, we would have just maxed it out by 1972.
People using this phrase should probably stop, it's become extremely tiresome as a cliche
I recently discovered that some of the Raspberry Pi models support the Linux Kernel's "Gadget Mode". This allows you to configure the Pi to appear as some type of device when plugged into a USB port, i.e. a Mass Storage/USB stick, Network Card, etc. Very nifty for turning a Pi Zero into various kinds of utilities. When I realized this was possible, I wanted to set up a project that would allow me to use the Pi as a b…
Please, I would be delighted if you published that code... Just yesterday I was thinking that a two-faced Samba share/USB Mass Storage dongle Pi would save me a lot of shuttling audio samples between my desktop and my Akai MPC.
This guide was a huge help: https://github.com/thagrol/Guides/blob/main/mass-storage-gad...
As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the right abstraction (they seem good at ”zooming out” to big picture of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and ”zoom in” quickly. Another way…
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Very probably not somebody who blindly picked a position, easily somebody who is quite wary of the downsides of the current state of the technology, as expressed already explicitly in the post:
> It’s downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning
As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the right abstraction (they seem good at ”zooming out” to big picture of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and ”zoom in” quickly. Another way…
Yes. LLMs are the perfect learning assistant. You can now do literally anything. Literally. Going to take a while for everyone to figure this out but they will given time.
> You can now do literally anything. Literally.
In practice, not so much. Not in my experience. I have a drive littered with failed AI projects.
And by that I mean projects I have diligently tried to work with the AI (ChatGP, mostly in my case) to get something accomplished, and after hours over days of work, the projects don’t work. I shelve them and treat them like cryogenic heads. “Sometime in the future I’ll try again.”
It’s most successful with “stuff I don’t want to RTFM over”. How to git. How to curl. A working example for a library more specific to my needs.
But higher than that, no, I’ve not had success with it.
It’s also nice as a general purpose wizard code generator. But that’s just rote work.
YMMV
> I am now at a real impasse, towards the end of my career and knowing I could happily start it all again with a new insight and much bigger visions for what I could take on. It feels like wining the lottery two weeks before you die I envy this optimistic. I am not the opposite (im a sr engineer with more than 15 years of experience), but I am scared about my future. I invested too much time in learning concepts, the…
Having an LLM next to you means there is never a stupid question, I ask the AI the same stupid questions repeatedly until I get it, that is not really possible with a smart human, even if they have the patience, you are often afraid to look dumb in their eyes.
As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the right abstraction (they seem good at ”zooming out” to big picture of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and ”zoom in” quickly. Another way…
About language (point (1)), I get a lot of "hypnotism for salesmen to non technical managers and roundabout comments" (e.g. "which wire should I cut, I have a red one and a blue one" // "It is mission critical to cut the right wire; in order to decide which wire to cut, we must first get acquainted with the idea that cutting the wrong wire will make the device explode..." // "Yes, which one?" // "Cutting the wrong one can have critical consequences...")
> I am now at a real impasse, towards the end of my career and knowing I could happily start it all again with a new insight and much bigger visions for what I could take on. It feels like wining the lottery two weeks before you die I envy this optimistic. I am not the opposite (im a sr engineer with more than 15 years of experience), but I am scared about my future. I invested too much time in learning concepts, the…
IT is never static. I have had to take several forks in my career with languages and technologies often leading to dead-ends and re-training. It is amazing how much you learn doing one thing directly translates to another, it can often lead to you not having a specific/narrow mindset too. Having an LLM next to you means there is never a stupid question, I ask the AI the same stupid questions repeatedly until I get it…
Forking to different technologies and languages is one thing (I've been there, I started with PHP and I haven't touch it for almost a decade now), but being replaced by a new tech is something different. I don't see how I could pivot to still be useful.