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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#131

Post by jghn »

sd9 wrote: post #112

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. In contrast to the current top comment [1], I don't think this is a wise assessment. I'm already seeing companies in my network stall hiring, and in fact start firing. I think if you're not trying to take advantage of this technology today then there may not be a place for you tomor…

> between 0.5 and 10

Hopefully not too many people are "enhanced" to the tune of 0.5x!

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#132

Post by keiferski »

bastawhiz wrote: post #115
keiferski wrote: post #56

I actually think the opposite approach might be the most optimal one, at least from a monetary perspective. That is, be on the cutting-edge of something, but be willing to bail out at the moment its future starts seeming questionable. Or even more specifically, maximize your foothold in it while minimizing your downside. Bitcoin is a good example: if you bought it 15 years ago and held it, you're probably quite wealt…

How do you know what not to invest in then? Bitcoin wasn't the only cryptocurrency fifteen years ago. It wasn't even the first digital currency. If you hop on every bandwagon, you'll go broke far more then you become wealthy. Just look at all the people who poured money into NFTs or digital real estate in the metaverse or Dogecoin or whatever. It's easy to say "well of course I would have invested in Google in 1999"…

I don't think you're understanding my point. Hopping on the bandwagon is explicitly not "maximizing your foothold while minimizing your downside," nor is it early-stage almost by definition. An early stage technology with an uncertain future cannot have a bandwagon.

I think the logical thing to do is to invest a minor amount of time/money across a broad spectrum of new promising tech. If you had been aware of and bought $500 of Bitcoin in 2010, you'd be a billionaire today. The early people involved with NFTs also did very well.

The Flash example is specifically the opposite of my point. Flash was a lucrative skill for a period of time, but at a certain point it became very clear that it didn't have a future.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#133

Post by draftsman »

samiv wrote: post #62
bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

I cannot but agree. It's a massive skill leveling where software development is transforming from high skilled coding to low skilled prompting. For an old dog like myself it feels an unjust rug pull.

LLMs have lowered the bar for the unskilled person to create shit software. I have used Opus 4.6 on a number of projects, and it still spits out buggy, and sometimes, flat out broken code. I was actually surprised when it completely hallucinated the names of query params for an HTTP request in my code, when in the prompt I had explicitly given it the exact names it needed to use. I thought these frontier models were supposed to be game changing.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#134

Post by hparadiz »

aduwah wrote: post #72
A_Duck wrote: post #22

Crypto isn't bad because it failed to make early adopters rich — it did make them rich. It's bad because it has horrible externalities in scams, war crimes / sanctions evasion, organised crime — which most of those early adopters were well aware of.

Not to defend crypto, but this all applies to fiat too

For whatever reason the folks on here refuse to understand that for a big chunk of this planet people get paid in inflationary currencies that they used to have to immediately convert to dollars and then stuff under a mattress because the local banking system is corrupt. In that environment cryptocurrency is a god send.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#135

Post by butILoveLife »

techblueberry wrote: post #11
butILoveLife wrote: post #4

This would hit harder if Bitcoin didn't win and AI coding didn't completely change our jobs. Why not simply evaluate things instead of ignoring them until its too late? Sure, we don't have infinity time, but the fact that OP mentions these two things, means the pattern showed up enough.

What is too late? If you want to use cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange, go ahead, it’s right there! There’s this irony to the FOMO in crypto, which is people argue the “sensible” thing (it’s the future of money) to create FOMO for the insensible thing (it’s a lottery ticket). You’re right it’s too late to buy a lottery ticket, but the vision wasn’t a lottery, it was a medium of exchange! AI assisted coding is th…

I never said Crypto. I said bitcoin.

And with AI... I am genuinely afraid my job will be automated. I'm trying to become a manager before we are relegated to minimum wage workers.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#136

Post by bdcravens »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #52

I’m suprised nobody has mentioned that Claude is the realization of all this blockchain work - an internet computer you rent time from where the computation is measured in tokens :)

You just described time-sharing. Cryptocurrency mining is much different, in that you can commit computation resources and never get paid.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#137

Post by sd9 »

jghn wrote: post #131
sd9 wrote: post #112

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. In contrast to the current top comment [1], I don't think this is a wise assessment. I'm already seeing companies in my network stall hiring, and in fact start firing. I think if you're not trying to take advantage of this technology today then there may not be a place for you tomor…

> between 0.5 and 10 Hopefully not too many people are "enhanced" to the tune of 0.5x!

That was deliberate. Some people report that it slows them down - fine.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#138

Post by butILoveLife »

mehagar wrote: post #9
butILoveLife wrote: post #4

This would hit harder if Bitcoin didn't win and AI coding didn't completely change our jobs. Why not simply evaluate things instead of ignoring them until its too late? Sure, we don't have infinity time, but the fact that OP mentions these two things, means the pattern showed up enough.

You make it seem like AI coding has already "totally changed" our jobs. This is exactly the FOMO the article talks about ("until its too late"). It hasn't. I'm still using the same workflows without AI tools, and so are most of my teammates.

To be fair, I would have talked like you in January 2026. But things have changed since Feb.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#139

Post by darkhorse13 »

dakolli wrote: post #92

I love the Cryptocurrency analogy. The LLM hype monkeys are the same people that were screaming that NFTs/Digital Art was going to replace all the traditional art in gallaries in 10 years. They are literally the same people, and they are all addicted to money and hype. Ignore them.. Did handmade Swiss watch movements lose all demand when Asia started mass manufacturing watches? No. There is always going to be more de…

There's a shocking amount of overlap between AI & Crypto/NFT bros:

https://mystudentfailedtheirmid.substack.com/p/theres-a-shoc...

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