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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#241

Post by titzer »

nicksergeant wrote: post #72
titzer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…

I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past. I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know…

Learning calculus by watching the professor solve integrals on the board for an hour doesn't result in the same level and depth of understanding as working through homeworks every week for a semester. If you ran off to your TA to solve every problem in your homework, you just won't learn calculus.

I've vibe coded plenty. I mostly don't look at the crap coming out. Don't want to. When I do I absorb a tiny bit, but not enough to recreate the thing from scratch. I might have a modicum more surface-level knowledge, but I don't have deep understanding and I don't have skills. To the extent that I've fixed or tweaked AI-generated code, it's not been to restructure, rearchitecture, or refactor. If this is all I did day in and day out, my entire skillset would atrophy.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#242

Post by circlefavshape »

jnovek wrote: post #229
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel . What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one: - Able to review the ou…

> Able to review the code output of coding agents That probably won’t be necessary in a few years.

It's necessary for devs right now, no matter how good they are, and it's those devs' code the models are trained on

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#243

Post by abeppu »

I think the "Leave them Behind" section at the end sort of ignores the whole "they will ruthlessly copy your material, and put aggressive extra load on your server while repeatedly stealing your work" dimension.

You can try to avoid consuming AI-generated material, but of course part-way through a lot of things you may wonder whether it is partly AI-generated, and we don't yet have a credible "human-authored" stamp. But you can't really keep them from using your work to make cheap copies of you, or at least reducing your audience by including information or insights from your work in the chat sessions of people who otherwise might have read your work.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#244

Post by rafterydj »

jnovek wrote: post #229
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel . What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one: - Able to review the ou…

> Able to review the code output of coding agents That probably won’t be necessary in a few years.

I see this line of thought put out there many times, and I've been thinking: why do people do anything at all? What's the point? If no one at all is even reviewing the output of coding agents, genuinely, what are we doing as a society?

I fail to see how we transition society into a positive future without supplying means of verifying systemic integrity. There is a reason that Upton Sinclair became famous: wayward incentives behind closed doors generally cause subpar standards, which cause subpar results. If the FDA didn't exist, or they didn't "review the output", society would be materially worse off. If the whole pitch for AI ends with "and no one will even need to check anything" I find that highly convenient for the AI industry.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#245

Post by giancarlostoro »

damnitbuilds wrote: post #234
giancarlostoro wrote: post #206

I find it funny how clanker took off and everyone uses it. It was edited in a video where someone was otherwise saying something extremely racist (the more offensive version of the n-word). For those curious it involves a burger king hat, schizophrenia and an airplane, someone edited the n-word out and put clanker with AI (because why not insult AI by using AI?). I do wonder if the AI uprising will involve robots kil…

Years until we are forbidden from writing Clanker and have to write C***r: 3

I had Claude write me some lyrics about Clankers after that one guy had an AI write a hit piece about him over denying his PR.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#246

Post by rglynn »

bicx wrote: post #21
cl0ckt0wer wrote: post #3

Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.

When they invented cars (and cars became popular and affordable), people did stop walking everywhere. Jogging wasn’t popularized until the 1970s, when we all realized we needed to be intentional with fitness in our car-based society.

This is a US-centric take, in Europe, particularly in cities, we walk everywhere.

There is perhaps some relevance to the analogy however, because the US is designed in such a way that makes walking difficult to impossible. I am already seeing this pattern in vibe-coded areas where engineers will just use AI because it's too difficult to parse and edit by hand.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#247

Post by justonceokay »

keiferski wrote: post #201

I think it's probably accurate to say that the vast majority of writers throughout history were writing for an extremely tiny or nonexistent audience. My favorite example of this is Nietzsche, who basically had zero readership during most of his life, beyond a few close friends, and even had to personally pay to get his books published. He only posthumously became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th cent…

There are a lot of arts that were funded for a short time in our recent history that previously were absolutely not funded at all under almost any circumstance. Centralized media created centralized stars with centralized incomes

For the vast majority of history it was all community theater, carnies, and “that guy in the square guy who knows the lute”.

Fun fact, in medieval Europe acting was considered a sin so great you could not get a Christian burial, as you were channeling the spirit of others. Realpolitik it was probably because actors were mostly queer in the cities and Roma in the countryside. What’s old is new…

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#248

Post by PurpleRamen »

Supermancho wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

Care to explain a bit more?

With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#249

Post by TeMPOraL »

niek_pas wrote: post #220
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…

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it. I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

Dog in the Manger.

I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share".

There's hardly any other way to read all the proclamations of quitting to do anything because "cognitive dark forest" (itself a butchering of the original idea of "dark forest" across so many orthogonal dimensions in parallel, that it starts to look like a latent space of a transformer model).

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#250

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

lsaferite wrote: post #225
oblio wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you include consulting that could easily be 10 companies a year...

Why would a company you are consulting for invest in training you up exactly? They are paying a consultant with the expectation that they are bringing the knowledge.

Eh, consultants are brought in not for the knowledge or advice! Management already knows what todo and where to go- they just want somebody external sanctify the decision!
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