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To my students

ozark.hendrix.edu

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Re: To my students

#161

Post by Trav5 »

hgoel wrote: post #28

I agree with the points made, even if personally I am okay with LLMs (as long as they're used with appropriate caution). Especially relevant for students I think, since they are hurting themselves most by relying on LLMs. Just like how young children are forced to do math by hand instead of using calculators to build intuition and memory, students should aim to do things manually to build their skills. Go make that t…

I totally agree and have been thinking about this lately. My son has been been doing an incredible amount of engineering work on a fun side project manually including 3D design and printing, soldering etc. But he used Ai to program an arduino. I want him to understand the code but I'm trying to find the balance between the school classes, and all the other things needed for this project. He doesn't have time dive into it all right now. This project is giving him exposure but maybe the coding doesn't need to be done manually just yet.

Re: To my students

#162

Post by dijksterhuis »

ryandrake wrote: post #142
hgoel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about it differently. I understood the potential harm on paper, but I think I was still pretty immature. I thought I would be willing to put aside morals (eg working for companies like Palantir) to work on interesting cutting edge things. But when I started working and found myself doing equally cutting edge research, but genuinely for the public benefit, I realized I definitely wouldn't be comfortable…

We are kind of seeing in real time what happens when an entire generation of engineers grows up without having seen Real Genius .

funnily enough i'd never heard of that film before o_o so i guess i know what i'm watching next! thanks!

Re: To my students

#163

Post by [deleted] »

nikcub wrote: post #131
tptacek wrote: post #11

"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are t…

* real programmers write assembly, not FORTRAN * real programmers manage memory, it's a craft * real programmers don't drag and drop * real programmers don't use intellisense * real programmers don't need stack overflow * real programmers don't tab-complete * real programmers don't need copilot * real programmers don't use llms <- you are here

[deleted]

Re: To my students

#164

Post by beej71 »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #100
gipp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddy... The whole point of the post is that he wants his students to question whether "succeeding in this market" is really the right choice.

i was writing a bit of a lengthy reply, but yeah this is the whole point really. making that money, getting that job title, being at that company, working on that project -- are these success? or is success simply doing the best job possible when writing code?

The irony is that writing the best code possible is now a recipe for unemployment.

Re: To my students

#167

Post by gnabgib »

erdaniels wrote: post #166

Did this get yanked off the front page?

It's presently #48, what's your definition of front page?.. that's still high ranking (bots and flame-war discussions generally drag a story down, although all posts must endure this)

Re: To my students

#168

Post by fooqux »

lukan wrote: post #95
gipp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddy... The whole point of the post is that he wants his students to question whether "succeeding in this market" is really the right choice.

The right choice is rather to strive for perfect - and be unemployed? To me it was actually not clear what his point was. "Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear." Sounds great. But not that practical.

Why isn't it practical? In my life, I've encountered many SWEs that have changed careers. I've met them in national parks working as rangers. In real estate, grocery store butchers, and yak ranchers. Yet I've never once encountered a SWE that was once doing something non-technical and decided to switch.

Purely anecdotal, I know. But still, I prefer to think that all those people discovered this practical advice and are far happier for it. I've never met one that regretted their decision.

Re: To my students

#169

Post by erdaniels »

gnabgib wrote: post #167
erdaniels wrote: post #166

Did this get yanked off the front page?

It's presently #48, what's your definition of front page?.. that's still high ranking (bots and flame-war discussions generally drag a story down, although all posts must endure this)

Based on the number of comments, upvotes, and recency, I expected it to stay up longer! I think you're right on the flame war part.

Re: To my students

#170

Post by danny_codes »

GaryBluto wrote: post #62
danny_codes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tired, weak, and pathetic argument. Opposition to technology is very reasonable if that technology is doing more harm than good. In the case of present-day LLMs, the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Why accept a decreasing quality of live instead of sensible regulation?

> the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Examples of ridiculous and incorrect beliefs once held by majorities: - Spontaneous generation - "Miasma" causes disease - Earth is at the centre of the universe - The heart is the seat of thought and the brain is useless - Cold weather causes colds Don't trust "the vast majority" to get anything right, ever.

Examples of reasonable beliefs held by the public:

Killing is bad. Kids should be protected.

I mean you have a point it’s just not particularly useful or helpful for the conversation

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