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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#161

Post by JumpCrisscross »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #150
heytakeiteasy wrote: post #14

Feels like a false equivalency. It's just my experience, but I've completely ignored crypto and the metaverse, and I don't get the sense I'm missing out on much. In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose…

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Feels like a false dichotomy. Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. Is it 10x or 1000x or 10,000x? Definitely not. I think actually in the past I would have leaned more on senior developers, books, stack overf…

> Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe.

The question isn’t if you’ve improved. It’s if the path you took to getting to your current improvement could have been shortcut with the benefit of hindsight. Given the number of dead ends we’ve traversed, the answer almost certainly is yes.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#162

Post by lopis »

eqmvii wrote: post #34

A lot of people feel this way. But IMO the most fruitful thing for an engineering org to do RIGHT NOW is learn the tools well enough to see where they can be best applied. Claude Code and its ilk can turn "maybe one day" internal projects into live features after a single hour of work. You really, honestly, and truly are missing out if you're not looking for valuable things like that!

You're only missing out if that's what you want to do. Not every software developer is interested in creating new software projects from scratch in an hour, or at all. It's totally find to do software development as a job, and then close your laptop and not see it until Monday. Learn the tools that suit when when you need them.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#163

Post by reaperducer »

yunwal wrote: post #75
bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

> A flat tire is a flat tire, no matter whether a recession is going on or whether LLMs are causing chaos in white collar work. There’s really not much stopping changing tires from being automated away. Further standardization of tires or wage increases would probably do the trick. There’s still plenty of software to be created. You’ll probably have to learn some ML tricks or whatever, but there’s nothing going away,…

There’s really not much stopping changing tires from being automated away.

Sounds like you've never changed a tire. Or at least not outside of a very controlled environment.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#164

Post by augusto-moura »

stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool.

It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#165

Post by slfnflctd »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #116
bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

You must be joking that being a car mechanic is anything like it was 20 years ago.

The vast majority of tires that need to be repaired or replaced (and the processes to do so) haven't changed much if at all, though. And there are entire franchises that pretty much only do tires. Same with many other manual labor tasks.

These are predictable jobs with very few variables that there is still no sign of automation replacing any time soon. They often don't suck as bad as people think. One of the most enjoyable jobs I had was on an assembly line, because my mind was mostly free to wander. It was almost like meditation.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#166

Post by Quarrelsome »

demaga wrote: post #117
wolframhempel wrote: post #50

There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an Acti…

None of those examples are useful. 1. 2016 was years after Bitcoin was developed. So you could still make 200x returns without being early adopter. 2. Is this even true? I'd bet scraping experts or people who can fine tune LLMs have easier time finding a job than classical ML academics. 3. Candy Crash was released when iPhone was on its 5th iteration. If anything, you just added to OPs points. Being an early adopter…

to be fair a friend of mine made one of the first flashlight apps on iOs and made a tidy sum out of it.

I think the question really is about how well you hit your timings. You can have held bitcoin but sold it went it hit $5k or less. You can have a technical advantage in a given field but somehow waste it (dead startup, serious illness) and lose your timing. Nobody knows what the right timings are, but I think the OP is pushing for a more consistent risk investment strategy and setting up the timings to raise the floor significantly at the cost of losing some of the best possible ceilings.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#168

Post by stavros »

postalcoder wrote: post #159
stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

The thing is, this post is hitting a straw man. ngmi culture was deeply toxic and pervasive in crypto. I think the people who are really into LLMs are having a blast.

I'm definitely having a blast, but I agree with the author. You're not going to get left behind, the "getting left behind" rhetoric was just cryptocurrency pump-and-dumpers. It's fine to wait and not engage if you don't want to.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#169

Post by [deleted] »

somenameforme wrote: post #125

The irony is that if LLMs live up to their potential then the value of software development as a skill is going to plummet, at least as far as something to do for others. I say it's ironic because obviously the people most interested in using LLMs for software development are software developers, and most are not working independently. It'd be like if we were all proactively getting involved in training our own repla…

[deleted]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#170

Post by [deleted] »

somenameforme wrote: post #125

The irony is that if LLMs live up to their potential then the value of software development as a skill is going to plummet, at least as far as something to do for others. I say it's ironic because obviously the people most interested in using LLMs for software development are software developers, and most are not working independently. It'd be like if we were all proactively getting involved in training our own repla…

[deleted]
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