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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#81

Post by stingraycharles »

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company.

Yet every company does it, except the worst sweatshops.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#82

Post by lmm »

kstenerud wrote: post #65

> The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all? Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere. You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfa…

> Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?

Available to all yes. Not available to the giant corpos while the lone hobbyist still fears getting sued to oblivion. In fact that's pretty much the opposite of what the free software movement wanted.

Also the other thing the free software movement wanted was to be able to fix bugs in the code they had to use, which AI is pulling us further and further away from.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#83

Post by kstenerud »

mmustapic wrote: post #69
kstenerud wrote: post #65

> The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all? Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere. You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfa…

No, the free software movement wants that the source code of the software you use be available to you to modify it if you wish. AI does not necessarily do that.

AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years.

Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.

Closed source is no longer the moat it was, and so keeping the source code to yourself is only going to hurt you as people pass you over for companies who realize this, and strive to make it easier for your LLM to figure their systems out.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#84

Post by Thanemate »

Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in.

We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone who cares how readable and easy to extend the code is.

I can only assume this is done on hopeful purpose, with the hope that the LLM's will "only keep improving linearly" to the point where readability and extendability is not my problem by it's "tomorrow's LLM" problem.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#85

Post by tonyedgecombe »

simonw wrote: post #55
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

Every company I worked for didn’t give a shit about my skills. They just wanted to solve the problem in front of them and if they couldn’t then they would hire someone in with the right skills. Improving my skills was seen as a risk as I might leave.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#86

Post by AnimalMuppet »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #48
ramon156 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confidently say that, yes, reading helps a lot. My mental model has shifted a bit that words are cheap (printing -> writing -> typing -> generating) and that we should accept there is something like high quality text. I haven't really been a reader, but I can definitely notice when a book/text is "hard". I'm currently reading the old testament, and I understand very little (even the oxford one that has a lot of…

For the first time in quite a while, I've started reading a challenging, non-computer book ("The New Testament in its World"). I'm trying to decide if my attention span has atrophied, or if I'm just more aware now of my ADD. Either way, I'm hopeful that my attention span for this kind of reading will grow with practice.

I too have noticed my attention span having atrophied. It was pre-AI, at least for me. Post-internet, though.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#87

Post by Lerc »

Blog posts are an interesting case, they are a very good example of something where abundance of supply outstrips any demand so much that it cannot be realistic to expect a median level contribution to receive any significant attention.

Setting aside the self delusion that makes a considerable number to erroneously rate themselves above average, the reason you create blog posts should not be for the attention you might gain, there simply are not the eyeballs. You create as a form of self expression, to organise your thoughts, to create a record of them.

AI can never challenge in those areas because it is, as it has always been, the act of creation is the goal.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#88

Post by rkomorn »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #86
CoastalCoder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first time in quite a while, I've started reading a challenging, non-computer book ("The New Testament in its World"). I'm trying to decide if my attention span has atrophied, or if I'm just more aware now of my ADD. Either way, I'm hopeful that my attention span for this kind of reading will grow with practice.

I too have noticed my attention span having atrophied. It was pre-AI, at least for me. Post-internet, though.

I think browser tabs and screen (the terminal multiplexer) did it for me.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#89

Post by 01284a7e »

simonw wrote: post #55
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

The opposite is true in my case - though 1 organization that had a small budget for things like AWS certs. I remember almost everyone who would get those certificates would never really learn anything from it either. They would just take the exams.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#90

Post by jdefr89 »

oompydoompy74 wrote: post #71

Good lord I’m going to have to figure out some way to filter Hacker News. I’m so tired of this same sort of article (and the opposite) being posted every day. AI isn’t going away. AI is better than you think it is. AI is probably also worse than you think it is. The world has nuance, so can we please all chill?

Sort of hard to do because AI it shoved down your throat in one form or another virtually everywhere you go. I also think a lot of us Hackers are mourning the fact we spent many years mastering machines and programming just to have the skill devalued (at least from the publics perspective) nearly over night. I personally think it is more important now more than ever to understand technology. To be able to write code, understand how a CPU works etc. Tech literacy will help prevent doom scenarios. A future where virtually everyone depends on AI and Computers but lacks people who actually understand them from a low level perspective seems bleak. I know thinking itself seems to have gone out of fashion and its given rise to misinformation and/or political nonsense like the rise of fascism etc... I think a lot of us just feel "empty" and are trying to express it.
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