31–40 of 328 posts
I pity those who need to contend with that as ICs, though.
In concrete terms, AI isn’t all that useful for writing a personal blog, because no one wants to read obvious AI slop. But it is useful for creating boilerplate product pages, FAQs, and other types of writing that weren’t very interesting pre-AI.
So it’s not really a huge deal to me that my skill for writing descriptive product page text or FAQs is atrophying, assuming that it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We love our open source models. GLM 5.2 came out recently and the timeline for closing the gap to closed source shrank to something like 2 weeks by popular measurements. Edit: Mis remembered the timeline I saw not 2 weeks, 3 months, but still I think my point stands.
Just to make sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that today's open source models are on par with frontier closed models of two weeks ago? By what criteria?
https://x.com/yaroslavvb/status/2067367657272422584 https://x.com/voratiq/status/2067667800643268928 https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent
Is this a situation where AI will go away and we will regret the loss of skills? At worse, we will be forced to use open weight models instead of the cutting edge, so I don't think it's a big deal. I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator.
I don't think the real threat is at the individual level, but at the societal level. Building skills over time leads to insights that lead to innovation. AI does many interesting things, but it doesn't innovate (yet). The real threat isn't that we'll all lose our skills (possibly) and then lose access to AI (unlikely), it is that AI will remain at roughly currently levels and we'll dull our skills due to reliance on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We love our open source models. GLM 5.2 came out recently and the timeline for closing the gap to closed source shrank to something like 2 weeks by popular measurements. Edit: Mis remembered the timeline I saw not 2 weeks, 3 months, but still I think my point stands.
Just to make sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that today's open source models are on par with frontier closed models of two weeks ago? By what criteria?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48567759
Commenters there were saying GLM 5.2 was roughly equivalent to Opus 4.8 in coding prowess, based on personal experience of the people commenting. Opus 4.8 came out on May 28 this year (so more like 3 weeks ago), GLM 5.2 came out 2 days ago.
The two senior engineers in my org (in a FAANG) who vibe-code the most have lost literally all of their skills. Their code has become terrible and their judgment even worse. A very similar topic was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 and I make the exact same conclusion: All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs i…
My friends can't ride horses as well as they used to, they've been using cars to get around too much. Sure horses are more efficient, but cars are faster and more convenient, and allow you to get a lot more done. Also cars will get better in our lifetime, horses are horses.
Perhaps it would be better to compare somebody who drives a car vs someone who used to drive but now uses Uber.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tools aren't owned by a cabal of state-adjacent parties. Specific implementations are. But open-source models have saved the day here.
If they can keep up. Unfortunately, we learn from previous technology shifts that the masses will always favor ease of use (to the point of infinite scroll 5 second videos dopamine puddle, or echo chamber social networking in lieu of critical media consumption), which does not bode well for the market for alternative hardware: one which is already expensive. I fear on-prem AI is likely to become as popular as on-prem…
I'm not sure if we'll become less intelligent. I think our sacks of neurons are gonna keep on making associations, just across a different set of topics.
My compiler writing skills atrophied with the advent of high-level languages, but in exchange I got more done. There is still a very well paid market for compiler writers, but the fact that not everyone needs to be one has made the world richer overall.
1/ When dealing with High level language I am not seeing assembly or the language it compiles to. It's not a leaky abstraction
2/ It's deterministic
The day my markdown file is the thing I deploy on AWS your analogy will stand
The two senior engineers in my org (in a FAANG) who vibe-code the most have lost literally all of their skills. Their code has become terrible and their judgment even worse. A very similar topic was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004 and I make the exact same conclusion: All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs i…
Unfortunately FAANG incentives this behaviour with their token leaderboards and general push for velocity over anything else (other than goog maybe)