41–50 of 918 posts
Why use a spade? Even those construction workers use the right sized tools. They ain't stupid.
While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?
Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing how to do the math for any of those things. (My total involvement at the source level was fiddling with the neighbor distance.)
https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output
Then I turned them into weird proteins
https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output
(As a side note, the loss of meaning of "self" and "doing" overlaps weirdly with my meditation practice...)
While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…
I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97
it’s never been easier, better or more accessible time to make literally anything - by far.
Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping you AND even that is easier.
Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally couldn’t in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine.
It’s not even close.
This “I’m a victim because my software engineering hobby isn’t profitable anymore” take is honestly baffling.
"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.
This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet? Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?
While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...
I never thought or felt myself as or my work as someone or something that "will automate your job away".
I don't mourn or miss anything. No more then the previous generation mourned going from assembly to high level languages.
The reason why programming is so amazing is getting things done. Seeing my ideas have impact.
What's happening is that I'm getting much much faster and better at writing code. And my hands feel better because I don't type the code in anymore.
Things that were a huge pain before are nothing now.
I didn't need to stay up at night writing code. I can think. Plan. Execute at a scale that was impossible before. Alone I'm already delivering things that were on the roadmap for engineering months worth of effort.
I can think about abstractions, architecture, math, organizational constraints, product. Not about what some lame compiler thinks about my code.
And if someone that's far junior to me can do my job. Good. Then we've empowered them and I've fallen behind. But that's not at all the case. The principals and faculty who are on the ball are astronomically more productive than juniors.
I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…
We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.
> ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed
Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comment.)
I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough™ to find me an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish generating a response.)
There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus, but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think actually is an improvement.
Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. Either the company went under, or I left and someone else showed up and rewrote it to suit their ideals. Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and its gone.
Code in and of itself should never have been the goal. I realized that I was thinking of the things I build and the problems I selected to work on from the angle of code quality nearly always. Code quality is important! But so is solving actual problems with it. I personally realized that I was motivated more by the shape of the code I was writing than the actual problems it was written to solve.
Basically the entire way I think about things has changed now. I'm building systems to build systems. Thats really fun. Do I sometimes miss the feeling of looking at a piece of code and feeling a sense of satisfaction of how well made it is? Sure. That era of software is done now sadly. We've exited the craftsman era and entered into the Ikea era of software development.
Great post. Super sad state of affairs but we move on and learn new things. Programming was always a tool and now the tool has changed from something that required skill and understanding to complaining to a neural net. Just have to focus on the problem being solved more.
This is the narrow understanding of programming that is the whole point of contention.