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"People who don't use AI will be left behind"

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Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#111

Post by bluegatty »

jerhewet wrote: post #87

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…

It's a bit arrogant and borderline Luddite to suggest that 'your era was legitimate' and that somehow these new things which you don't understand are somehow 'lesser' or illegitimate.

In the long arc of history, I'm doubtful we'll see 'the last 50 years' as 'the Golden Age' - that's just a personal, contemporary romanticization. More than likely, the advent of computers -> web -> AI etc. will be one block of the 'informational industrial revolution'.

The people who made the ostensible 'Golden Era' were pioneers, just as those breaking new ground are pioneers today, it's honestly 'depressing' that people who consider themselves 'Engineers' wouldn't see that as clear as day, an be hopeful for the future on some level.

AI is very real phenom, obviously vastly over-hyped in many ways, and it doesn't feel nice to have to get caught up in a tectonic shift against one's will, but it is bringing about legitimate progress in every sense that the Engineers and Creators before us did.

In the exact same spirit as DaVinci or Babbage.

If one wants to keep a horse in the stable, or a typewriter around for posterity or any other reason that's fine, but not under the notion that somehow they are better or more useful.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#112

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

keithnz wrote: post #89
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought people here got excited about technology. I am passionately excited about technology that serves people , but the current hype around AI is not that. LLMs are, fundamentally, a super cool development. That we can now generate large regions of text that are statistically likely to be perceived as accurate is phenomenally neat. But that's all they are: statistical text prediction engines. They do not think…

I find the people who go "its just statistical" "its just picking the next word" have probably not really understood what the actual tool can do. Ultimately its arguable whether humans are just statistical also, our brains are pattern matching machines. It's just not sensible to boil it down complex behavior to a fundamental building block. It's not hype (though there is hype), vast amounts of people are getting real…

I don't think anywhere I said they weren't useful tools; I said that a lot of people fail to recognize the limitations, and that even aside from limitations/utility there is a discussion to be had about broader impact.

LLMs are not hype, but "AI" is. AI is a marketing term, and always has been.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#113

Post by AlexandrB »

joe_mamba wrote: post #99
jerhewet wrote: post #87

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…

[flagged]

It's not about us older folk, but the computing environment itself. We're heading into a world of centralized control where your personal computer is mostly a "thin client" for a bunch of online services. Combined with omnipresent age/identity verification and you will basically need permission from someone to do anything interesting with a computer. Especially on the internet. This is in contrast to the 1990-2010 era where software was generally "buy once use forever" (plus kept working regardless of what politician you support online) and general purpose, open hardware was the norm. You could hook your homemade server up to the internet with a minimum of fuss and start running a service or forum or website or whatever.

There are plenty of bright kids out there, but they're going to be operating from a position of dependence on the OpenAIs, Googles, and Apples of the world if they want to ship a product.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#114

Post by buffalobuffalo »

jerhewet wrote: post #87

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…

I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been.

The fact of the matter is, a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person. It makes research faster. It makes experimentation faster. It makes output cleaner. And this is true across many disciplines, not just tech.

Also, it is a skill. Yes, anyone can chat with an LLM. But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult. Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined.

If i had to guess, I'd say we'll probably see major breakthroughs across multiple disciplines within the next decade, largely because researchers and engineers can cover much more ground individually now, freed from the slow moving coordination mechanisms that team dynamics require. Pretty good for "spicy autocomplete" as you put it.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#115

Post by dudisubekti »

mawadev wrote: post #55
dudisubekti wrote: post #7

Black-and-white thinking like this is not healthy. You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal. Some mathematicians like Terence Tao are comfortable doing this, for example.

I feel like I use AI this way, but a majority of my peers lean too much into it. There used to be the sentence "we don't think, we google", and I see that with ai usage. As soon as a roadblock appears, the situation is pasted in GPT without further engaging with it, then they pick up the phone and open an app while GPT does its thing 0_o

I have a coworker like that too, my pet theory is that they're not passionate about their job to begin with. It's just something that can pay their bills.

While waiting for Claude to finish, we talked about our hobbies outside of work, and the same guy will go into deep details on how steroids and the HPG axis works, and even gave me a spreadsheet with several NCBI PubMed links on the topic.

I think we are all naturally be more creative and opinionated in things we are interested in.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#116

Post by bluegatty »

sdevonoes wrote: post #62

Any engineer (any person actually) can “learn to use AI” in a couple of days. It’s not rocket science; there’s no chance of left behind. If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry

A weekend is enough to get going, but not nearly enough to 'be on par' with everyone else.

That said - what we have learned in the last year could be compressed quite a lot - there are a lot steps we could skip, and 'learn by failure' that need not be repeated.

It takes a while to get the subtleties of it, it's among the most highly nuanced things we've ever encountered.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#117

Post by joe_mamba »

AlexandrB wrote: post #113
joe_mamba wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not about us older folk, but the computing environment itself. We're heading into a world of centralized control where your personal computer is mostly a "thin client" for a bunch of online services. Combined with omnipresent age/identity verification and you will basically need permission from someone to do anything interesting with a computer. Especially on the internet. This is in contrast to the 1990-2010 er…

>It's not about us older folk, but the computing environment itself.

Whether you like it or not, the computing environment of today is a product of the labor and financial participation of older folk of the past. Google, Facebook and Microsoft weren't built by Zoomers. Everyone contributed to the current state of things, either direct thought labor and fiance or indirectly by just using the products.

>We're heading into a world of centralized control where your personal computer is mostly a "thin client" for a bunch of online services

And who built those online services?

People make it sound like Azure, AWS, Facebook, X, etc were just snapped into existence one day by Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk, and aren't decades of labor by hundreds of thousands of workers who voluntarily did this in exchange for cash.

> This is in contrast to the 1990-2010 era where software was generally "buy once use forever" and general purpose, open hardware was the norm. You could hook your homemade server up to the internet with a minimum of fuss and start running a service or forum or website or whatever.

I know, but how does remanenceing help here? You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube same how you can't turn back housing affordability back to how it was in 1995, or bring back those lucrative union manufacturing jobs that could support a family from just bolting bumpers to a Chevy on an assembly line.

Those are all one-time things of the past now, never to return again in the same form. You have to work with the cards you've been dealt today, not moan about how much better the past was since that doesn't help anyone.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#118

Post by skydhash »

furyofantares wrote: post #60
moron4hire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LLMs mean I never have to open a PowerPoint from a client to pull out their "data" again, that'd be great. I gain nothing from being a manual data entry monkey for people who don't understand the concept that presentation-ready output formats are not data transmission formats. But if I'm to be expected to employ vibecoding in my day to day job as a software engineer, I'll dismantle my house and go live off grid so…

For now at least, I think it really depends on what type of coding that is. I don't have any particular predictions going forward about it, but something I think about right now is, do I want to focus my time where the interesting decisions, the valuable contributions I make, are product-level thinking about what to build and what problems to solve? Or do I want to focus my time where the interesting decisions are te…

There’s still a lot of place for both. Because they are just a shift of perspective around the same thing: Solving a problem for someone.

Product is when you’re seeing things as the one who have the problem and designing the solution in a way that is usable. Technical is when you shift to see how the solution can be implemented and then balancing tradeoffs (mostly costs in time and monetary resources).

While the code is valuable (as it is the solution). Building it is quite easy once you have a good knowledge on both side.

The issue with AI is not in their capabilities, but in people rushing to accept the first version when there are still unknowns in the project. And then, changes costs almost as much as redoing the project properly.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#119

Post by CamperBob2 »

pydry wrote: post #100
giancarlostoro wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better you are at architecting or even directing a junior developer, the better your output too. Dont let AI make decisions, its supposed to take your decisions and turn those into code. When AI makes decisions, well the unexpected outcome is always on you.

i always found it to be easier to write code myself than to direct a junior developer. the level of teaching involved would always mean the overall velocity of work slowed down. some people say you can throw them the drudge work but i find that if you're doing coding right (e.g. you dont let your code base degenerate into a mess of boilerplate), there is barely any drudge work to do.

i always found it to be easier to write code myself than to direct a junior developer.

Me, too. But that doesn't mean I'm a great developer, just a shitty manager.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#120

Post by saltcured »

stevenou wrote: post #45

I think not using AI is a manifestation of one's inability or unwillingness to LEARN. To your point, if you can't learn, you will fall behind.

Or a manifestation of having risk aversion that isn't easily swayed by peer pressure...

Everyone seems to know you can't trust the AI output, and that it is on you to review it. But whenever I talk to people who claim to be getting big benefits, there is always a moment they reveal that they are not really reviewing the output. They are just going with it.

Similarly, so many who claim to use AI as a search index eventually seem to just trust the summary instead of checking the references to figure out whether it is regurgitating fact or fiction.

I don't really know if these users always had low quality standards or low diligence, or whether the tool usage degrades them. But I see the correlation among the friends-of-friends network I can observe.

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