Live data from Hacker News

Expertise in the age of AI

moderndescartes.com

61–70 of 124 posts

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#61
post #27

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.

5 years ago it was web3. 5 years before that it was Haskell and monads. It’s how things work

Haskell wasn't threatening to dramatically transform the industry like AI is.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#62
post #21
post #17

Actually - to disillusion yourself from AI, try dabbling into something you do not know. Try writing a production quality 3D engine. Trust me, a 3D engine has its own domain knowledge besides just graphics. No, seriously. And then see how helpless you feel when you yourself do not have the expertise to judge whether the direction being taken is the right or wrong. At that time, you wish if there were some pipe throug…

> Try writing a production quality 3D engine. Actually I tried that and you are correct about this. With Claude it took me hundreds of iterations and I'm still not happy.

Yes, for fun I tried to make a Mahjong solver and NONE of the SOTA frontier models could understand what they were looking at to determine tile occlusion/geometry to build the DAG.

I had to spoon feed it an algorithm - here's how you determine if a tile is on top of another one, etc. etc.

Anything that involves, well, "3d space" they don't seem to do very well on it at all (which makes sense, of course)

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#63

Here is the fundamental issue. We use the word "intelligence" for different things. Can you follow a recipe for making sour dough bread? Pretty easy. Can you make sour dough bread? Not so easy. Does following a recipe require "intelligence"? Yes. If something can follow a recipe can it also make bread? Not necessarily. And another question, perhaps the most important. Can you determine that a recipe is flawed? In imm…

Reminds me of Moravec's paradox, that it is easy to get computers to ace complex math tests but difficult to teach them to walk. We are very excited that computers have mastered the "know the recipe" step and are underplaying the complexity of actual intelligence required to really replace people.

My fear in your above example would be that we offload more and more of the "know the recipe" intelligence to computers and humans are slotted in as replaceable manual labor and are left arguing with a computer about whether the starter needs to be fed or not (or whatever equivalent scenario).

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#64
Nice to see that HN is coming to its senses and people are realizing the flaws and BS in AI / LLMs. We are past-peak Bitcoin / NFT on the curve and I can't wait for this wave to end and move to the next thing.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#66
post #19

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.

I don't think you can ignore it. It's the biggest change to tech in 30 years I'd say. "I'm tired of all this internet talk" in 1990s?

Not wanting to read the same things over and over isn't ignoring it. And yes, it's often genuinely the same things being discussed.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#67

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.

Everyone is quite worried of their job. Many of us have made coding/IT our personality, what we were proud of, what the society made us feel valued. It's a big change in life... and there is no solution yet. So everyone feels the needs to talk about it, to either get rid of this anxiety by ranting or trying to prove that it would be an opportunity, or a non-event depending on the point of view, etc

Going off this thought tangent a bit, I think many engineers could be gatekeepers because it's a pretty hard industry to get into and it's just not everybody's cup of tea. Now that AI is assisting people who wouldn't necessarily make it in the old world, it turns out business just cares about results and the gatekeepers don't matter as much anymore. It's creating quite a big split between the old guard and people who just get stuff done even if it creates 10 times the bloat.

I've always been on the get it done side to the chagrin of my peers but I've also never impressed anyone with what I've came up with so who knows.

My personal opinion is that if you don't get with the program, you're probably going to get left in the dust or going to have to split off and do your own thing where you can control what's going on but I think in general in a capitalistic society, the business just wants to get to the next thing to make more money and subpar or middling quality is good enough.

I should caveat my comment that this doesn't apply to pacemaker software and higher end software engineering

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#68
post #17

Actually - to disillusion yourself from AI, try dabbling into something you do not know. Try writing a production quality 3D engine. Trust me, a 3D engine has its own domain knowledge besides just graphics. No, seriously. And then see how helpless you feel when you yourself do not have the expertise to judge whether the direction being taken is the right or wrong. At that time, you wish if there were some pipe throug…

Yeah ok. First of all, just because it sucks now, it doesn't mean we're still safe in just 24 months. Everyone was mocking AI 24 months ago.

Second, most of the work out there is not at all about "production quality 3D engine," that's the whole point. Most of us have been doing the same repetitive work for decades. Move this button here. Fix the bug here.

Sure it's not as easy as it looks, but if the average guy can spit out an acceptable app/page in 60 seconds, most people won't even be able to tell the difference.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#69
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s built with all that VC money is already built though; I don’t foresee a future a few years out where we don’t have access to an open-source model roughly as good as the current flagship models for the cost of the compute itself.

Variable costs - electricity etc. Current model is very resource intensive. You know when they build all those Olympic Venues and then once the Olympics is done the ongoing cost is too expensive and then they become derelict buildings.... like that...

Training is resource intensive. Serving gpt4o is not

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#70
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can ignore it. It's the biggest change to tech in 30 years I'd say. "I'm tired of all this internet talk" in 1990s?

Not wanting to read the same things over and over isn't ignoring it. And yes, it's often genuinely the same things being discussed.

That's exactly how it was in the 90s really.
Post reply on HN