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Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

#11

Post by SoftTalker »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #2

The LLM frenzy is only unmasking something that happened long ago. The dilution started 20+ years ago when people with no real interest in CS were attracted to the software profession by the high pay and low bar to entry. Posts on Hacker News by people who liked their profession and CS topics were often met by "I'm just in in for the paycheck" and IMO that's gradually increased over the years. I've often remarked on…

The CS building at my local university used to have banners bragging about the average starting salary of their graduates. It was a very naked attempt to attract students based on the money they would be able to earn.

Re: Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

#13

Post by davorak »

From "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"

"One note on wording. Below, I write that these systems “seek” or “try” things. This is shorthand for a mechanism rather than a claim about consciousness or human-like intent. We use similar shorthand when describing many other situations, like a plant seeking sunlight. A system trained by trial and error behaves as if it were pursuing whatever its training rewarded, and that as-if description is what makes its behavior predictable."

https://yoshuabengio.org/en/publication/why-are-ai-agents-ly...

So there is some attempt to remain grounded. Using shorthand wording makes it easier to reach more people with your message, the whole goal of writing a post like that, but also likely means more people are mislead into treating the short hand as the truth rather than for what it is.

Re: Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

#14

Post by seanmcdirmid »

I’ve had to move away from thinking to meta-thinking. Most of my engineering effort is now focused on figuring out what information and process to feed a model, and then observing how it runs and tweaking the results until it’s not crap. You also stop worrying about the time it takes to code things and start worrying about tampering down on tech debt aggressively. Things that you would have never had time for before (refactoring to make the system slightly better) become incredibly possible and easy now.

Re: Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

#15

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

Absolutely. There is no question.

At my place of work we've recently hired several 'engineers' who have been exposed as frauds who know nothing but how to beg the chatbot to do things. When you bring actual issues that require critical thinking or technical knowledge, they fold like a stack of cards and meat-proxy a Teams reply to you.

Re: Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

#16

Post by smugglerFlynn »

petra wrote: post #6

I'm not saying they are alive, they have consciousness, etc. But do we really know how LLM's(and the layers above, harness, RL, etc) work, or is there some emergent, surprising phenomena in those systems?

There was an emergent and surprising phenomena in collaboratively writing Linux kernel and low level backbone of modern operating systems, or developing mobile apps, or scaling Internet to broader population.

What is different about LLMs? Is it their social aspect and influence? All three examples above were also social to a different extent.

Re: Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

#18

Post by beej71 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #11
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #2

The LLM frenzy is only unmasking something that happened long ago. The dilution started 20+ years ago when people with no real interest in CS were attracted to the software profession by the high pay and low bar to entry. Posts on Hacker News by people who liked their profession and CS topics were often met by "I'm just in in for the paycheck" and IMO that's gradually increased over the years. I've often remarked on…

The CS building at my local university used to have banners bragging about the average starting salary of their graduates. It was a very naked attempt to attract students based on the money they would be able to earn.

Our class sizes have tanked. But I'm looking forward to working with students who are in it to become excellent engineers!

Re: Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

#19

Post by tennisflyi »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #2

The LLM frenzy is only unmasking something that happened long ago. The dilution started 20+ years ago when people with no real interest in CS were attracted to the software profession by the high pay and low bar to entry. Posts on Hacker News by people who liked their profession and CS topics were often met by "I'm just in in for the paycheck" and IMO that's gradually increased over the years. I've often remarked on…

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?

#20

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tennisflyi wrote: post #19
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #2

The LLM frenzy is only unmasking something that happened long ago. The dilution started 20+ years ago when people with no real interest in CS were attracted to the software profession by the high pay and low bar to entry. Posts on Hacker News by people who liked their profession and CS topics were often met by "I'm just in in for the paycheck" and IMO that's gradually increased over the years. I've often remarked on…

[flagged]

That is an uncharitable mischaracterization of what they said.
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