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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

#181

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

dakolli wrote: post #121
dakolli wrote: post #32

The kid who showed his work in detail in math class is doing better in life 9/10 times than the kids that only knew how to use a calculator. Now consider how well the people who think you just need to know how to yell at the calculator are going to do? When Maps apps came around, people totally lost the brain muscle for being able to navigate. Using LLMs is no different, people over reliant on these tools are simply…

Who the hell downvotes this lol

I think that framing your observations in terms of "Billionaires who are screaming" about a "brain nerfing machine" doesn't help think about the issues clearly or contribute to a healthy discussion.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#182

Post by GeoAtreides »

jghn wrote: post #47
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…

> But will companies start hiring again? Anecdata, but the few people I know who were looking to switch gigs all had multiple offers within a few weeks. One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks. Not spamming thousands of resumes into the ether.

so you either are well connected or you starve, got it

guess it's death and destitute for introverts

edit: please explain the downvotes, i'm curious why you think i'm wrong

if what op says it's true, that today only networking works, then it easily follows that if for some reasons you do not have a network then you don't get hired

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#183

Post by foolserrandboy »

postalcoder wrote: post #173
stavros wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with you, which is why I think it's a straw man. How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?

The executives are, not the devs.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#184

Post by smugma »

stiiv wrote: post #68
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!

> 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 right, it's possible. But you might be both overestimating the ease of onboarding and underestimating the variety of tasks and constraints devs are responsible for. I've seen Claude knock out tri…

Waiting may not be “unwise” but acting now may be optimal. Even though tooling may be much better in 12 months, if it can improve quality or time now, that’s a net benefit.

Bikers in the Tour de France used to not wear helmets. They were seen as uncouth (“why jump on the bandwagon?”). Helmets today are way better than they were then. But if the utility provided is greater than the cost, of course it makes sense to act sooner.

I’m not explicitly arguing for investing in AI or other newfangled tech, I’m arguing that the premise of waiting may be “sounded” but also “leaves money on the table”, or in some cases, lives.

The author talks about vaccines as a counter example but doesn’t really address the cost/benefit in any detail.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#185

Post by monsieurbanana »

pennomi wrote: post #155
xondono wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends very much on your line of work. As a freelancer I do a bit of everything, and I’ve seen places where LLM breezes through and gets me what I want quickly, and times where using an LLM was a complete waste of time.

For sure. The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you. Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster. Designing a new SLAM algorithm? Probably LLMs will spin around in circles helplessly. That being said, that was my experience several years ago… maybe state of the art has changed in the computer vision space.

Specialized is probably not the word I'd use, because llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics. For example I've never randomly heard people talking about the dicom standard, llms have no trouble with it.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#186

Post by Tade0 »

To me the main question is the long term pricing.

It is said that major providers more than break even on what they're charging.

But at the same time that's not the point of capitalism, is it? The point is to charge close to the value you're providing.

My lunch money is approximately $10 and I often blow through as much in Claude tokens generously provided by the company which hired me. But I'm not getting $10 value from those tokens, but much more.

The cost of entry to this market is extremely high. Should Anthropic win and become an almost monopoly, it is bound to keep increasing prices to the point, where the value it's providing matches the cost.

That's the endgame of every AI company out there. It's worth using these tools now, while there's still competition and moats weren't established.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#187

Post by WolfeReader »

0xblinq wrote: post #67

Comparing these tools to the crypto or NFTs hype is so out of touch with reality. This is more on the scale of the invention of the press, the telegraph, or the internet itself. "I'm ok being left behind, I will join this Internet thing when it really becomes useful"... Ok... you do you. Hope you don't get there too late.

The behaviors of NFT advocates and AI advocates are shockingly similar.

Remember how NFTs were supposed to be the future or art ownership, and all it amounted to was awful pictures of bored apes and ahegao lamas? The NFT bros proudly displayed their shitty art - not because it was good, but because it signaled their allegiance.

Now go on to any pro-AI blog. Look at the images. They've stopped trying to edit out the AI errors - they proudly display images with garbled text and bad anatomy. Just like before, it signals allegiance to AI consumption.

Even the last sentence of your post is the same sentiment as "have fun staying poor" was for the crypto bros.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#188

Post by locknitpicker »

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…

> Feels like a false equivalency.

It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias.

In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history.

It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time.

And coding is the lowest of low hanging fruits.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#189

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

There is infinite amount of software to be made. Desires and wants never get satisfied. There will simply be more software, more features, more supported platforms, more bug checks, more tests, more CI/CD, more docs, more websites, more services, more more more. Once we solve something, we have a million new desires that we want to solve. There will be plenty of work in software, up until the time when really all knowledge work can be replaced. At that point all bets are off.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#190

Post by layer8 »

augusto-moura wrote: post #164
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…

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool.

It has often been the case for technologies though, like “now we’re doing everything in $language and $technology”. If you see LLM coding as a technology in that vein, it’s not a completely new phenomenon, although it does affect developers differently.

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