111–120 of 808 posts
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Do you base your entire worldview purely on your own personal experience?
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Don’t close your eyes and plug your ears and pretend you didn’t hear anything.
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If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.
> What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end. "reliability" can mean multiple things though. LLM invocations are as reliable (granted you know how program properly) as any other software invocation, if you're seeing crashes you're doing something wrong. But what you're really talking about is "correctness" I think, in the actual text that's been responded wi…
the quality of being able to be trusted or believed because of working or behaving well
So for generating text, LLMs are very reliable. And they do a decent job at categorizing too. But code is formal language, which means correctness is the end result. A program may be valid and incorrect at the same time.
It’s very easy to write valid code. You only need the grammar of the language. Writing correct code is another matter and the only one that is relevant. No one hire people for knowing a language grammar and verifying syntax. They hire people to produce correct code (and because few businesses actually want to formally verify it, they hire people that can write code with a minimal amount of bugs and able to eliminate those bugs when they surface).
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…
Are you sure about that?
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Nah it's pretty bad, but congrats on being an outlier.
Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find. If you don't trust me, give a non-programming job a try for 1 year and then come back and tell me how much more comfy $JOB was :)
A lot of non-programmer jobs have a kind of union protection, pension plans and other perks even with health care. That makes a crappy salary and work environment bearable.
There was this VP of HR, in a Indian outsourcing firm, and she something to the effect that Software jobs appear like would pay to the moon, have an employee generate tremendous value for the company and general appeal that only smart people work these jobs. None of this happens with the majority of the people. So after 10-15 years you actually kind of begin to see why some one might want to work a manufacturing job.
Life is long, job guarantee, pensions etc matter far more than 'move fast and break thing' glory as you age.
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…
> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor qua…
This is just not happening anywhere around me. I don't know why it keeps getting repeated in every one of these discussions.
Every software engineer I know is using LLM tools, but every team around me is still hiring new developers. Zero firing is happening in any circle near me due to LLMs.
LLMs can not do unsupervised work, period. They do not replace developers. They replace Stack Overflow and Google.
So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"? The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself. What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these. Now let's wind back. Why r…
> What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these. perhaps a being that has the capacity for intention and will?
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If a calculator gives me 5 when I do 2+2, I throw it away. If a PC crashes when I uses more than 20% of its soldered memory, i throw it away. If a mobile phone refuses to connect to a cellular tower, I get another one. What I want from my tools is reliability. Which is a spectrum, but LLMs are very much on the lower end.
Except it's more a case of "my phone won't teleport me to Hawaii sad faec lemme throw it out" than anything else. There are plenty of people manufacturing their expectations around the capabilities of LLMs inside their heads for some reason. Sure there's marketing; but for individuals susceptible to marketing without engaging some neurons and fact checking, there's already not much hope. Imagine refusing to drive a c…
That’s very much a false analogy. In the 60s, cars were very reliable (not as much as today’s cars) but it was already an established transportation vehicle. 60s cars are much closer to todays cars than 2000s computers are to current ones.
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…
> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now. But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it. Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor qua…
I agree in the sense that those of us who work in for-profit businesses have benefited from employer’s willingness to spend on dev budgets (salaries included)—without having to spend their own _time_ becoming increasingly involved in the work. As “AI” develops it will blur the boundaries of roles and reshape how capital can be invested to deliver results and have impact. And if the power dynamics shift (ie. out of the class of educated programmers to, I dunno, philosophy majors) then you’re in trouble.
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…
There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…
Negativity spreads so much more quickly than positivity online, and I feel as though too many people live in self reinforcing negative comment sections and blog posts than in the real world, which gives them a distorted view.
My opinion is that LLMs are doing nothing but accelerating what's possible with the craft, not eliminating it. If anything, this makes a single developer MORE valuable, because they can now do more with less.