Is every modern piece of software going to have `OPENAI_API_KEY` environment variable somewhere inside it ? uhoh
In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#12I am an existentialist: I am perfectly comfortable in a world with no inherent meaning. Sheer existence and action brings me joy. I spend hours of my day tinkering with computers not because of utility, but for the pleasure it brings. I think if we could elicit this persons thoughts thoroughly we would find "meaning" underlying their perceived joy.
You can elicit my thoughts to your heart’s content. Of course there’s meaning. That’s different from inherent meaning (imbued into our world via a god or something).
But that is not what the author stated. They didn't allude to a god like meaning. They cited utility as an example of meaning for which they had no association.
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#13All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore.
Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$/month for a faster/less jittery copilot.
ChatGPT is cheap at 20$/month but not even worth that price.
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#14In a way, people who are concerned about skills atrophying are repeating the cycle of previous generations, shaking their fist at higher level programming languages or drawing digital images. How dare you not keep the skills of those who came before you! Time will not be so kind to this view.
Some skills will atrophy, as article mentions we don't really care about road navigation anymore. But this is not a bad thing, we can focus our concerns elsewhere. Do you care exactly how your home is heated? Do you know how to maintain every part of your car? Do you spend every weekend keeping your skill on sewing up to date? Some of you might do all of these, but the point is we have let so many skills become things relegated to experts/tech that once used to be common.
It's this relegation that has allowed experts to become even deeper experts in their niche. So I don't worry about skills atrophying at all. There will always be a new crop of nerds (affectionately) to obsess over whatever niche can exist.
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#15Much like the evolving layers of abstraction in technology, the necessity for individuals to master the intricate, underlying layers wanes as time progresses. The article brings to mind the analogy of Assembly programming; while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the comp…
> while there are undoubtedly experts in this domain whose contributions are indispensable, the majority of programmers can comfortably rely on higher-level abstractions without delving into the complexities of Assembly. True. You don't need to be an assembly expert to be a great programmer, but I do think you need to have a solid understanding of how computers work all the way down to the CPU level in order to be a…
I don’t know anything about assembly and I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#16All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…
> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations
Are you using GPT3 or 4?
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#17Is every modern piece of software going to have `OPENAI_API_KEY` environment variable somewhere inside it ? uhoh
Most of my customers already asking for it. They pay me i do it. Talk about job replacement, i'm raising rates by the day
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#18I propose the complete opposite. Just surrender and enjoy the freedom. Of course you can always choose, just like you can choose to remember people’s phone numbers and driving directions. But you don’t need it.
Freedom? You've got a weird definition of "freedom" if you think surrendering your autonomy to whoever happens to be running the services you rely on is "freedom." The problem is that long term, you won't have any idea if what it's spitting out is reasonable or not. We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand. Solving that with "more complexity we can't understand" doesn't s…
We already have more than enough problems with systems being too complex to understand.
Indeed, aligns with my own thoughts on the impossibility of AI alignment.
"However, each new layer and new tech that we add becomes a greater separation between what we can perceive and the complexity of the machine that becomes ever more incomprehensible. So we build ever more tech to help us understand the existing tech with each part being another component of complexity and potential problems."
https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#19I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself". However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today…
Funny to hear that. I'm closer to 60 than 50, and it never occurs to me to use GPT to write my code. So I wonder if it's partly based on how long someone has been doing something. In retrospect, I never copied code from StackOverflow either (have used it occasionally to get ideas, but mostly felt the code I'd find there just wasn't very good, or at least was too different from my personal coding style to be something I'd want to use verbatim.
In the end I agree with you though -- if GPT code is "good enough" then paying people to write code will soon be looked at like using horse-drawn wagons to get from place to place.
Re: In the age of AI, don't let your skills atrophy
#20All this talk about chatgpt replacing programmers and skill atrophy - meanwhile all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations. Copilot is amazing at boilerplate, but that's about it - I don't even read any suggestions that don't fall into that category anymore. Copilot is amazing because it lets me stay in the flow when I need to churn out stuff (when I already know what I want). I would pay over 100$…
> all I'm getting out of chatgpt is bullshit and hallucinations Are you using GPT3 or 4?
I'm using 4 and I still am constantly having to babysit it and challenge it to get a working result out of it. Don't get me wrong it is absolutely saving me time, but it is very much like being the teacher of a very fast typing junior dev.