Earlier quoted context omitted.
ai is bad because it's automated his job. luddites in tech. a real contradiction
Not really a contradiction, since the entire point of jobs and the economy at all is to serve the specific needs of humanity and not to maximize paper clip production. If we should be learning anything from the modern era it's something that should have always been obvious: the Luddites were not the bad guys. The truth is you've fallen for centuries old propaganda. Hopefully someday you'll evolve into someone who doe…
To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
241–250 of 278 posts
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why shouldn't AI be able to sufficiently model all of this in the not far future? Why shouldn't have it have sufficient access to new data and sensors to be able to collect information on its own, or at least the system that feeds it? Not from a moral perspective of course, but the technical possibility. And the overton window has shifted already so far, the moral aspect might align soon, too. IMO there is an entirel…
> Why shouldn't AI be able to sufficiently model all of this I call it the banana bread problem. To curate a list of the best cafés in your city, someone must eventually go out and try a few of them. A human being with taste honed by years of sensory experiences will have to order a coffee, sit down, appreciate the vibe, and taste the banana bread. At some point, you need someone to go out in the world and feel thing…
Granted, there's lots that's dystopian about that picture, I'm not advocating for it, but it does start to feel like the main value of the "curator" is actually just data capture. Then they put their own subjective take on that data, but I'm not totally convinced that's better than something that could tell me a data-driven story of: "Here are the top three banana breads in the city that customers keep coming back to have a taste orgasm for".
I don't know though, it's a brave new world and I'm skeptical of anyone who thinks they know how all this will play out.
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I have been building software and acting as tech lead for close to 30 years. I am not even quite sure I know how to manage a team of more than two programmers right now. Opus 4.5, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, can develop software almost as fast as I can write specs and review code. And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day. I have ban…
"And it's just plain better at writing code than 60% of my graduating class was back in the day". Only because it has access to vast amount of sample code to draw a re-combine parts. Did You ever considered emerging technologies, like new languages or frameworks that may be a much better suited for You area but they are new, thus there is no codebase for LLM to draw from? I'm starting to think about a risk of technol…
Try it. The pattern matching these things do is unlike anything seen before.
I'm writing a compiler for a language I designed, and LLMs have no trouble writing examples and tests. This is a language with syntax and semantics that does not exist in any training set because I made it up. And here it is, a machine is reading and writing code in this language with little difficulty.
Caveat emptor: it is far from perfect. But so are humans, which is where the training set originated.
> I'm starting to think about a risk of technological stagnation in many areas.
That just does not follow for me. We're in an era where advancements in technology continues to be roughly quadratic [1]. The implication you're giving is that the advancements are a step function that will soon (or has already) hit its final step.
This suggests that you are unfamiliar or unappreciative of how anything progresses, in any domain. Creativity is a function of taking what existed before and making it your own. "Standing on the shoulders of giants", "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps", and all that. None of that is changing just because some parts of it can now be automated.
Stagnation is the very last thing I would bet on. In part because it means a "full reset" and loss of everything, like most apocalyptic story lines. And in part because I choose to remain cautiously optimistic.
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up? It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just b…
> When it became cheaper to … did the quality go up? No, but the availability (more people can afford it) and diversity (different needs are met) increased. I would say that's a positive. Some of the expensive "legacy" things still exist and people pay for it (e.g. newspapers / professional journalism). Of course low quality stuff increased by a lot and you're right, that leads to problems.
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#245I’m already seeing colleagues at work using AI to generate documentations and then call it a day. It’s like they are oblivious to how _ugly_ and _ineffective_ the AI generated AI slops are: - too many emojis - too many verbose text - they lack the context of what’s important - critical business and historical context are lost - etc.. They used AI to satisfy the short-term gain: “we have documentation”, without fully…
I'm sure their slop looks FAR better than the garbage my coworkers write. I really wish my coworkers would use AI to edit their writing, because then it might actually be comprehensible.
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#246The best tech writers I have worked with don’t merely document the product. They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems. They are invaluable. The best also know how to start with almost no engineering docs and to extract what they need from 1-1 sit down interviews with engineering SMEs. I don’t see AI doing either of those things well.
AI may never be able to replace the best tech writers, or even pretty good tech writers. But today's AI might do better than the average tech writer. AI might be able to generate reasonably usable, if mediocre, technical documentation based on a halfheartedly updated wiki and the README files and comments scattered in the developers' code base. A lot of projects don't just have poor technical documentation, they have…
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up? It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just b…
> When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? Obviously, yes? Maybe not the median or even mean, but peak quality for sure. If you know where to look there are more high-quality takes available now than ever before. (And perhaps more meaningfully, peak quality within your niche subgenre is better than ever). > When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? Yes? The quality and variety o…
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
>you are likely overestimating your own contributions at work That’s the logical fallacy anyone is going to be pushed to as soon as judging their individual worth in an intrinsically collective endeavor will happen. People in lowest incomes which would not be able to integrate in society without direct social funds will be seen as parasites by some which are wealthier, just like ultra rich will be considered parasite…
> People in lowest incomes which would not be able to integrate in society without direct social funds will be seen as parasites by some which are wealthier, just like ultra rich will be considered parasites by less wealthy people. Your use of the word parasite , especially in the context of TFA, reminds me of the article James Michener wrote for Reader’s Digest in 1972 recounting President Nixon’s trip to China that…
All the more as part of the underlying representation is actually starting from a structuralist analysis. We try to clarify the situation through classes of issues. But then mid journey we see what looks like an easy ride shortcut, where mapping ontological assessment over social forces in interaction is always one step on the side away. Goat scape is nothing new.
So we quickly jump from, what social structures/forces lead to that awful results, to who can be blamed while we continue to let the underlying anthropological issue rules everyone.
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up? When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up? It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just b…
>When it became cheaper to x did the quality go up? ...yes? It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to rea…
Re: To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prove it.
I can do more, I told the AI to make it "better": The decision to stop hiring technical writers usually feels reasonable at the moment it’s made. It does not feel reckless. It feels modern. Words have become cheap, and documentation looks like words. Faced with new tools that can produce fluent text on demand, it is easy to conclude that documentation is finally solved, or at least solved well enough. That conclusion…