181–190 of 232 posts
Why are technologists trying so hard to make themselves redundant? This is like the Luddites themselves creating milling machines, eager for the foreman to show them the door. What gives?
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You guys buy too much into the marketable fuzz. In the last 15 years we've had multiple other technologies that were supposed to change the way we live (3D printing, Crypto, VR, EV, self-driving, now AI). It's just the VC scheme: Over-promise/under-deliver = Profit AI is and will continue to be a search on steroids.
You're buying into too much market fuzz too. That internet thing going big never happened and cell phones turned out to be bust, all that hype for nothing..... See how cherry picking works. Also, EVs are a bust, wut?
EV aren't a bust either, but case in point... manufacturers are already anouncing scale downs because expectations were too high. Combustion will stay around for quite a bit given the battery production constraints.
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Ah, now you're talking price! How many years do you bet before this happens - three? Five?
I don’t believe it will happen at all. There will always be some problems that only a human can solve because it’s a human that defines them. It is always _by definition_ a game between humans where computers are just tools. At least as long as AGI does not happen…
Recall that things are true "by definition" if they're not true for any other reason; you're free to define yourself out of the race against the machines, but the real world need not pay attention to your definition!
Computers are "just tools" is certainly true, but I find it harder to automatically agree that the programs running on them are "just tools". Here is a rather bad analogy which is suggestive: in school we learn that there are seven features which are necessary and to some extent sufficient to identify a living organism ("movement, respiration, sensitivity to surroundings, growth, reproduction, excretion, nutrition"). Programs certainly move (thanks to Kubernetes, for example), are sensitive to their surroundings (think of self-healing clusters or load-shedding), grow (scale up in response to demand), and excrete (cleanup jobs on databases). They don't respire, but then that was only ever a contingent feature of how life evolved on Earth; they don't take in nutrients unless you really stretch the analogy; they don't currently reproduce, although LLMs being able to code means it's only a matter of time before an LLM can train another LLM (even Claude 3 Opus is able to train small ML models). All this is to say that the word "tool" is a very poor description of what an LLM is: "tool" calls to mind things which don't have any of those lifelike properties, whereas even large non-intelligent software systems such as Kubernetes have many of those properties.
I'm a software and product guy; what I don't get, is how we're going to replace us lowly engineers and not a substantial percentage of a company's Human stack. Close to engineering, what about the SCRUM masters? The testers. What about the product owners? What about devops? Further from us, what about the people signing up on our vacation? Or the ones signing up on our daily budgets when traveling, or hell, even the…
Agree. We developers try to create AI to replace ourselves first while making the bosses rich
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Because test define the behaviour. The hardest part of requirements is describing exactly what you want. Tests are great way of doing that. I think AI software development is going to involve writing tests, which the AI agents then get passing. Or some other requirements language that allows for exactness where English can fall down.
So we get to do the shitty part.
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What makes you so sure that problem solving and invention aren’t just engineering challenges that we can solve by combining LLMs with well designed algorithms? The way I see it, we’ve just discovered something fundamental like steam power or electricity and we’re currently in the very inefficient stage of brute force solutions like mine pumps driven by condensing engines that needed tonnes of cheap readily available…
You guys buy too much into the marketable fuzz. In the last 15 years we've had multiple other technologies that were supposed to change the way we live (3D printing, Crypto, VR, EV, self-driving, now AI). It's just the VC scheme: Over-promise/under-deliver = Profit AI is and will continue to be a search on steroids.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t believe it will happen at all. There will always be some problems that only a human can solve because it’s a human that defines them. It is always _by definition_ a game between humans where computers are just tools. At least as long as AGI does not happen…
I don't at all see why "How to redesign this particular database design (tables/partitioning/indexes/queries) so that it can handle expected load in next 5 years" is a problem that only a human can solve because only a human defined it. Forecasting load is in the realm of machine learning without even needing LLMs, and LLMs are already capable of designing database schemas and so forth, so this seems much more like a…
It is going to happen by definition - people by definition want more than they have today and want to solve unsolved engineering problems ("problems" that machines can solve are simply not problems anymore).
The only way it can end is creation of some overwhelming intelligence (AGI) that would govern (or some might say: enslave) people so that their demands are controlled.
It's really depressing to see that big tech is essentially universally pushing Snake Oil. AI is a lie. LLMs are a legit tech that have some purpose, but LLMs will never evolve into anything remotely resembling the actual definition of AI. They are flowery language generators and they will never be able to reason, understand, debate and criticize. They know nothing and therefore embody nothing. No matter how much comp…
> To Big Tech I say: Prove me wrong. That's asking to be skynetted. Is that really what you want?
You speak as if my internet shit talking will make an iota of difference.
Regardless of what I want, the future is what it is.
Deal with it.
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The problem is software development is 95% stuff that has been done a million times before. If you disagree you’re probably not exposed to enough of the industry to see this.
That would mean 95% of problems are already solved. I don’t agree with this - the space of problems to solve is as big as that of solutions (both are programs in the end). I don’t think suggestion about lack of experience deserves any response.
No, it means 95% of effort spent is spent towards already solved problems. This is, in part, why I hate capitalism. People are doing tons of work simply to compete with others instead of working together to solve meaningful problems.