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To my students

ozark.hendrix.edu

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Re: To my students

#71

Post by gipp »

cdfalcon wrote: post #46
danny_codes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.

Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice…

Buddy... The whole point of the post is that he wants his students to question whether "succeeding in this market" is really the right choice.

Re: To my students

#72

Post by WatchDog »

infotainment wrote: post #58
simonw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remain hopeful that some day someone will train an LLM which is tolerable to people who take this stance (which I respect, much like I respect food vegetarians despite not being one myself). I've been tracking models trained entirely on out-of-copyright data, for example. I've not yet seen one of those which appears generally useful and didn't chuck in a scrape of the web or get fine-tuned on examples generated by…

> Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587 I suspect that even if you reduced the cost of training or any other real world metric, the goalposts would immediately move. It seems to me that it has never been about those things, b…

It's that but also the narcissistic injury caused by seeing an LLM practice the craft you have spent your life trying to perfect.

Re: To my students

#73

Post by bbor »

For context, the author is an anti-AI radical. Maybe justified, maybe not — but definitely explains this essay.

The author is getting some grief in this thread from the Eng side, but I’d like to add a bit of grief from the direct opposite side: the philosophical one. It will never not baffle me to see academics assume they are the first people to ever think about topics like ‘what if technology was used for ill’!

Re: To my students

#74

Post by bbor »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #8

> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was abou…

FWIW: I had a mandatory ethics class in my US program (Vanderbilt, a rich private school in the American south). It was mandated for all engineers AFAIR, and taught by an engineering prof.

Pretty good experience, too! Sometimes got distracted with general tech ethics rather than strictly professional ethics, but tbf that’s a very fun+timely topic

Re: To my students

#75

Post by bbor »

hgoel wrote: post #13
dijksterhuis wrote: post #8

> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was abou…

In my computer engineering undergrad ~8 years ago in the US, an ethics class was mandatory, but IIRC the CS curriculum did not have it, despite both leading to similar careers. My memory may be wrong though. Edit: they do seem to have one now, so either I remembered wrong or they added it. Edit 2: I remember enjoying my ethics class, we covered some of the usual examples, and also things like basic contract negotiati…

Yeah I was wondering about that… I got one, but prolly only because my uni put CS under the engineering school.

I don’t think scientists usually have mandatory ethics classes and mathematicians certainly don’t, so if it falls under either of those departments it might’ve gotten skipped!

Re: To my students

#76

Post by slabity »

ActivePattern wrote: post #70
danny_codes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fads come and go in industry. This version of LLMs will come and go as well, as will the coding languages and paradigms we used before (and, presuming you want your code to actually run, still do with some decent frequency). Will LLMs in their current ergonomics have staying power? Perhaps. Nobody can predict the future. But I don’t think it’s a given in the least

Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad". I don't think you need to be Nostradamus to predict that we're never going back to manual coding. Sure, the systems will evolve and improve, but they're certainly not going anywhere.

> Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad".

Which is why they very carefully worded it more as 'LLMs in their current form', twice.

Re: To my students

#77

Post by uejfiweun »

jmward01 wrote: post #20

'Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time.' I find that when I get back into exercise and reading so much more of my life falls into place. These are things that I never have enough time for until I start doing them regularly at which point I realize that they actually enable me to have more time to do things, not less.

It is very weird how that happens. I hardly expected starting a marathon training program to drastically increase my day to day energy. But here we are.

Re: To my students

#78

Post by nopinsight »

cdfalcon wrote: post #19

There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…

From the author’s earlier essay:

“A good way to describe myself is as a generative AI vegetarian. You can find a fuller explanation—and many, many links—at the above essay by Sean Boots, which I agree with almost 100%.”

—-

Given the capabilities of upcoming LLMs, I suspect that by mid-2027, most competent companies, outside specific niches, will not hire and might fire any non-senior “generative AI vegetarian” software developer.

Re: To my students

#79

Post by wanderingmind »

No disrespect to the person, but this seems to be written by someone who has spent their life in academic bubble, without having to deal with people and entities with diverging interests and the impact of time on any decisions. I'm sure many artists will love to spend more time perfecting their art, based on their subjective interests. However, if they prioritize that, without understanding what their customer wants, they will go bankrupt. Nourish your interests through your hobbies. If they align with money making capability, you are one of the lucky few. For a significant majority, they do not align.

Re: To my students

#80

Post by cdfalcon »

DJBunnies wrote: post #60
cdfalcon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice…

How do you know they didn't? My college professor was formerly at NASA, where this stuff is important. I recognize not everyone's work is [as] important, but we should still strive for excellence (and safety.)

One check of their LinkedIn.
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