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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#171

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #122
hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us. That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. People will tinker with those things as hobbies and they'll broadcast that out too. Worst case we hobble along until we get better at it. And if we have to hobble along and it's i…

Because they may have studied history... There are countless examples of eras of lost technology due to a stumble in society. Where those societies were never able to recover the lost "secrets" of the past. Ultimately, yes, humans can rediscover/reinvent how to do things we know are possible. But it is a very real and understandable concern that we could build a society that slowly crumbles without the ability to rel…

And we're still here right? We have more books and knowledge and capabilities than ever. Despite theoretically losing knowledge along the way, we're okay (mostly).

Society can replace the systems it relies on. The replacement might not be the best, but it'll probably handle things until we can reinvent a newer, better system. It probably won't be easy, but you can't convince me that humanity suddenly cannot adapt and fix problems right in front of them. How long does history have us doing that?

These are extraordinary claims that all of society will just become dumb and not be able to do any of this. History is also littered with people fretting about the next generation not being smart enough or whatever, and those fears rhyme pretty closely with what we're talking about here.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#172

Post by sd9 »

muskstinks wrote: post #147
sd9 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least have the grace to show new hires Rich Hickey lectures or something. Uncle bob is nonsense.

I'm giving them a lot more but I assumed people know uncle bob. Like the Open Source Architecture Books, Googles SRE Books, 1:1 mentoring every week. But yeah there is one person made of teflon. Nothing sticks. And i could tell you that teflon person in every company i worked so far.

I know what you mean. Tbh I just think this isn’t for everyone. I’ve been in your position before, you can try everything but some people just can’t get it. And maybe they do and they become a little more productive, but they can’t produce production quality stuff that isn’t brittle.

I’ve never found a way around it, and I don’t want to believe that some people can’t grok this field, but that is what I’ve experienced. Maybe other people can educate better.

I’ve just found that at some point you have to limit the blast radius and move onto more productive uses of your own time.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#173

Post by latexr »

inanutshellus wrote: post #101
Thanemate wrote: post #84

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…

Ok but if you're a person that likes HN discourse but thinks "eternal september" has happened ... what's your plan? You'll still come here, read the comments, see something engaging and want to reply and... feel sad because shakes fist at [datacenter] clouds it's all just bots talking to each other anyway. Seems lame. Keep talking anyway.

You’re making a lot of assumptions. They could just stop visiting HN. They don’t even need a “plan” or an alternative, they can just stop.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#174

Post by xyzal »

sdevonoes wrote: post #64

Can’t we just sabotage AI? We have the means for sure (speed light communication across the globe). Like, at least for once in the history of software engineering we should get together like other professionals do. Sadly our high salaries and perks won’t make the task easy for many - spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it) - be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons o…

Generate hundreds repos of plain old spaghetti code and put it on github. Easiest thing you can do.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#175

Post by lstodd »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #60
malwrar wrote: post #47

I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, no…

I think the immediate term action is to viciously block all crawlers. Writing a blog yes, feeding the beast no.

Yeah, everyone went on "blocking all crawlers" end result being half of internet inaccessible over vpns. Good job, people.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#176

Post by mxkopy »

pfisherman wrote: post #131
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…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

I don’t think it could be the most important skill to have. The most common, and the most standardized one for sure, but if coding agents are doing fundamental R&D or running ops then nobody needs skills anyway.

> As it turns out, neural nets “won”

> The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much.

I get the feeling you don’t know what you’re talking about. LLMs are impressive but what have they “won” exactly? They require millions of dollars of infrastructure to run coming around a decade after their debut, and we’re really having trouble using them for anything all that serious. Now I’m sure in a few decades’ time this comment will read like a silly cynic but I bet that will only be after those old school machine learning losers come back around and start making improvements again.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#177

Post by coldtea »

>It’s never been more important to blog. There has never been a better time to blog. I will tell you why. We’re being starved for human conversation and authentic voices

The supposedly starved don't seem to care much for such food. Blogs are kind of a wasteland.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#178

Post by mchaver »

jdefr89 wrote: post #90
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,…

I agree that humans should continue to value various forms of literacy even in the face of AIs that can do everything better than us. I too will continue to dig deeper into tech literacy. There was a Terence Tao paper recently that mentioned we are in a shift similar to the end of heliocentrism. It made clear that Earth is not the center of the universe, but Earth is still deeply valuable and important for humans. Much the same way that AI may supersede our understanding and intellect and make the are limitations more apparent, but our human intellect is still important to humans. Plus, what are you going to do when the price of LLM tokens are through the roof or you get messages like "burn an extra 1,000,000 tokens for a better implementation!".

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#179

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pfisherman wrote: post #131
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…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

Using a coding agent seems quite low skill to me. It’s hard to see it becoming a differentiator. Just look at the number of people who couldn’t code before and are suddenly churning out work to confirm that.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#180

Post by jpfromlondon »

keybored wrote: post #160
jpfromlondon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hoped for something useful in your link, found drivel.

Given your shattered hope and the fact that you came to it from the same author must have meant that something in this latest comment appealed to you. Sorry to disappoint! Can I interest you in some of my other musings instead? To salvage that hope of yours.

Oh absolutely, I'll have a poke around.

For the record I'm not an ai doomer, but I am pragmatic, and the lack of hope is merely a foundation.

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