> Show me something truly life changing Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?
That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society.
It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.
I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.
Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things. You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of…
> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic. Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white t…
I recommend learning how to splice/fuse fibre.
Knowing that you hold gigabits in your hands and only your skill matters is priceless.
Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things. You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of…
Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors. Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern f…
"We have this thing that's awesome that we can convince people to buy" eventually becomes "We can convince people to buy". It's unfortunate that "convince people to buy" can be successfully used independently of the quality or appropriateness of the item being sold.
The same attitude has been directed at points through history for people "who depend on the internet," "who depend on computers," and "who depend on machines." I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.
> " I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it. " While I think the person you are responding to has made a low quality comment, I will say that it is very, very revealing that so many AI advocates actually seem proud of their absence of basic math skills.
Never said I was bad at math, but I am aware of the fact that computers can do math better and faster than me - and with our powers combined...
The same attitude has been directed at points through history for people "who depend on the internet," "who depend on computers," and "who depend on machines." I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.
> " I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it. " While I think the person you are responding to has made a low quality comment, I will say that it is very, very revealing that so many AI advocates actually seem proud of their absence of basic math skills.
lol, they literally said nothing about their math skills
As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then market…
let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do. how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built? it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departme…
> how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies [..]
Or they aren’t building a SaaS with React or a TUI with Typecript, which is about the only thing that LLMs have “solved”.
They're literally doing novel research. The smartest mathematicians in the world couldn't solve Erdős' planar unit distance problem for 80 years, and OpenAI's models knocked that out a couple months ago. This stuff is moving fast, and if you aren't evaluating SoTA on at least a quarterly basis, you're going to have a bad time.
I admire your efforts here, but you’re tilting against windmills with your comments here. There’s a loud contingent of AI skeptics on HN who haven’t updated their tired arguments in years. Their fervent hatred of AI is mere religious dogma at this point, not anything empirical.
The upside is that we’re competing against these folks. Let them continue to stick their heads in the sand.
Something a lot of folks struggling with these systems don't get is that the instruction and management of them is often quite important - just because they're capable doesn't mean they're mind readers. Most of the skepticism I encounter on this front is due to lack of proper direction, process involving planning and review before execution, and appropriate attention given to evaluation and feedback loops. If you ask…
This seems to be a very generic/common response to any ai critique. It kind of reinforces my point there’s a lot of situations where the appropriate harness isn’t some agent that’s set to ultra high thinking mode. Chat mode gives the better response and answers the question more quickly
That's fair, I do agree that you don't need a harness or ultra-high thinking mode for many problems. Many folks evaluate without those things on a task that would benefit from them leading to the sort of attitudes in this article and its comments section, which is where my comment was coming from.
If you're just saying different tools are best suited for different problems, apologies - that's my take as well.
AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive. The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features). But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved…
Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that such a prolific developer has only managed to produce a PR for a new Redis type, and a olama fork, despite having a 100x productivity booster machine for the last 8 months?
There are several other examples that come to mind, of prolific and respected developers turning to AI-based workflow and ever since then just constantly producing mediocre content and code. The spark is gone, the taste, the genius - whatever you call it, the human quality that made them interesting in the first place. Sure they may be more "productive" superficiallly, but they all sound the same now. Any other decent dev with access to a corporate code-generation service can get basically the same result.