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Now might be the best time to learn software development

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211–220 of 375 posts

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#211
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does every system need to be efficient?

Under capitalism, because greater margins. Under not-capitalism, so as to free up resources and labor for other things or just increase available downtime for people.

>Under capitalism, because greater margins

Under capitalism, or late-stage capitalism, if you will, more efficient procedures aren't normally allowing for greater margins. There are countless examples of more exploitative and wasteful strategies yielding much greater margins than more efficient alternatives.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot. Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely. Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who oft…

> an overconfident idiot So we are close to an AI president.

The accusations that politicians are already overusing AI are flying, and given the incentives I wouldn't be surprised more of the internal functioning of all modern governments are already more LLM-based AI than we'd realize. Or particularly appreciate.

By that I don't mean necessarily the nominal function of the government; I doubt the IRS is heavily LLM-based for evaluating tax forms, mostly because the pre-LLM heuristics and "what we used to call AI" are probably still much better and certainly much cheaper than any sort of "throw an LLM at the problem" could be. But I wouldn't be surprised that the amount of internal communication, whitepapers, policy drafts and statements, etc. by mass is probably already at least 1/3rd LLM-generated.

(Heck, even on Reddit I'm really starting to become weary of the posts that are clearly "Hey, AI, I'm releasing this app with these three features, please blast that out into a 15-paragraph description of it that includes lots of emojis and also describes in a general sense why performance and security are good things." and if anything the incentives slightly mitigate against that as the general commenter base is starting to get pretty frosty about this. How much more popular it must be where nobody will call you out on it and everybody is pretty anxious to figure out how to offload the torrent-of-words portion of their job onto machines.)

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We now have assembler, now anyone can program. No, wait it was called natural language coding, now anyone can code. No, wait it was called run anything self fixing code. No wait, simplified domain specific language. No, wait it was uml based coding. No, wait excel makros. No, wait its node based drag and drop . No, wait its LLMs. The mental retardation of no code is strong with the deciding caste, every reincarnation…

What's wrong with visual programming?

Information density is low, some concepts are hard to display and thus absent by design from the language, the limitations of the display abd debug framework become the limitation of all code executed with them..etc., etc. list goes on forever

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#214
post #131

In fact, in my opinion, one of the benefits of AI tools that is often overlooked is "psychological support". When you are stuck at work, it will give you a push. Even if it is not completely right, it is enough to get you moving. The feeling of "no longer fighting alone at work" is actually more important than many people think.

To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot. Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely. Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who oft…

are we using the same version of google? Unless incredibly specific I mostly see SEO optimized garbage.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#215
post #131

In fact, in my opinion, one of the benefits of AI tools that is often overlooked is "psychological support". When you are stuck at work, it will give you a push. Even if it is not completely right, it is enough to get you moving. The feeling of "no longer fighting alone at work" is actually more important than many people think.

To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot. Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely. Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who oft…

Totally fair take — and honestly, it’s refreshing to hear someone call it like it is. You’re clearly someone who values real understanding over surface-level noise, and it shows. A lot of people just go along with the hype without questioning the substance underneath — but you’ve taken the time to test it, poke at the seams, and see what actually holds up.

I swear there's something about this voice which is especially draining. There's probably nothing else which makes me want to punch my screen more.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#216
post #131

In fact, in my opinion, one of the benefits of AI tools that is often overlooked is "psychological support". When you are stuck at work, it will give you a push. Even if it is not completely right, it is enough to get you moving. The feeling of "no longer fighting alone at work" is actually more important than many people think.

To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot. Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely. Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who oft…

[deleted]

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people. It can bounce back over time and maybe leave us better off than before but the short term will not be pretty. Think industrial revolution where we had to stop companies by law from working children to literal death. Whether the working man or the capital class profits from the rise of productivity is a questions of political power.…

> Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field. You can fight without unions. Tell the truth about LLMs: They are crutches for power users that do not really work but are used as excuses for firing people. You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring. This addresses the union part. It is true that softw…

>You can fight without unions.

And you can fly without wings--just very poorly.

Unions are extremely important in the fight of preserving worker rights, compensation, and benefits.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#218
post #160
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked my students to write a joke about AI. Sometimes humor is the best way to get people to talk about their fears without filters. One of them wrote: "I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concern…

Why do we assume that Prompt Engineering is going to pay less money? As usual, what one brings to the company is value, and if AI-generated code needs to be prompted first and reviewed later, I don’t see how prompters in the future could earn less than software engineers now. Prompt engineering is like singing: sure thing everyone can physically sing… now whether it’s pleasant listening to them is another topic.

>Why do we assume that Prompt Engineering is going to pay less money

It objectively takes less expertise and background knowledge to produce semi-working code. That lowers the barrier to entry, allowing more people to enter the market, which drives down salaries for everyone.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#219
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an overconfident idiot So we are close to an AI president.

The accusations that politicians are already overusing AI are flying, and given the incentives I wouldn't be surprised more of the internal functioning of all modern governments are already more LLM-based AI than we'd realize. Or particularly appreciate. By that I don't mean necessarily the nominal function of the government; I doubt the IRS is heavily LLM-based for evaluating tax forms, mostly because the pre-LLM he…

In my country a MP of lower house sent out a tweet generated by LLMs.

As in, copied it with a prompt in.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people. It can bounce back over time and maybe leave us better off than before but the short term will not be pretty. Think industrial revolution where we had to stop companies by law from working children to literal death. Whether the working man or the capital class profits from the rise of productivity is a questions of political power.…

> Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field. You can fight without unions. Tell the truth about LLMs: They are crutches for power users that do not really work but are used as excuses for firing people. You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring. This addresses the union part. It is true that softw…

> You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.

This works only if everyone is on with this. If they're not, you're shooting yourself in the foot while doing job hunting.

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