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"People who don't use AI will be left behind"

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Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#211

Post by Barrin92 »

jckahn wrote: post #198
Barrin92 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mind you given the topic of the article I took the jobs in question to mean largely in the software industry, not talking about minimum wage workers here. But as a programmer I am quite baffled when peers my age, often without kids struggle in this kind of way. My essentials are rent, food, metro card, library card. When I hear people who make what I make say that living requires a lot of money that usually includes…

So, are you suggesting that an acceptable lifestyle would be an empty studio apartment with nothing inside of it, no pets, no partner, no meaningful possessions? Personally, I have pets, a partner, and thoughtfully selected and meaningful possessions. I don't collect crap, and nothing I own or do is particularly extravagant. But I'm not exactly living an ascetic life either. A pretty typical lifestyle, I'd say. And I…

I don't advocate living like a monk. I play in a band and play football every weekend, play chess, you can go to church, most of that is practically free.

I'm very much in favour of participating in culture, real culture though. You can ditch the 1k Taylor Swift tickets, Disneyland visits, and high end gym for the 20 bucks local jazz festival.

I think the people who live socially like ascetic monks are ironically the people who build themselves a home gym for 10k and then complain about not having any time for friends because everything is too expensive

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#212

Post by rstuart4133 »

sdevonoes wrote: post #62

Any engineer (any person actually) can “learn to use AI” in a couple of days. It’s not rocket science; there’s no chance of left behind. If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry

Others are disagreeing with you here, and I do too.

The difference is profound, and takes more than a couple of days to get your head around the implications. I'd summarise it as: "if you give a computer the same input it always produces the same output, but if you give a model the same input it always produces different output". Add to that the output is often wrong and it can't reliably follow instructions, and the difference is so great it breaks most of your intuitions.

The reward working with this piece of unreliable jelly is it can be far smarter than you (think the difference between a man with a shovel and a 20 ton excavator - they can literally find bugs in minutes that would take a human hours or days), and they know far more than you.

The engineering challenge is to make this near random machine produce a reliable product. It isn't easy.

The hype you see around them is it's trivially easy to get it to produce a feature rich but very unreliable product, as Anthropic demonstrates with their vibe coded claude-cli. I refuse to use it now. Among its other charms, it triggers a BSOD on windows: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/30137 (Granted, it's just another Windows bug: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/answers/questions/5814272/..., but if you are shipping to Windows you should be working around such bugs.)

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#213

Post by jeffbee »

embedding-shape wrote: post #26
jeffbee wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget your critical thinking skills, your unique voice you painstaking developed over your entire life, and your dignity.

I'm no AI-hypeman (nor the opposite, I guess), and I agree that replacing AI for critical thinking and writing will only turn out bad in the long-term. But "your dignity"? You mean like "I feel shameful over that people saw that my writing was actually AI?" or something else?

I meant the indignity of trying to have a conversation with someone who at first seems like a reasonable professional, but who at some point in the conversations insults you with something like "I asked Claude and ..."

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#214

Post by jckahn »

Barrin92 wrote: post #211
jckahn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, are you suggesting that an acceptable lifestyle would be an empty studio apartment with nothing inside of it, no pets, no partner, no meaningful possessions? Personally, I have pets, a partner, and thoughtfully selected and meaningful possessions. I don't collect crap, and nothing I own or do is particularly extravagant. But I'm not exactly living an ascetic life either. A pretty typical lifestyle, I'd say. And I…

I don't advocate living like a monk. I play in a band and play football every weekend, play chess, you can go to church, most of that is practically free. I'm very much in favour of participating in culture, real culture though. You can ditch the 1k Taylor Swift tickets, Disneyland visits, and high end gym for the 20 bucks local jazz festival. I think the people who live socially like ascetic monks are ironically the…

Well, I'm neither of those extremes. Like most people, I'm somewhere between two ends of a spectrum. ;-)

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#215

Post by raddan »

archagon wrote: post #196
btschaegg wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural o…

Kinda funny that you're quoting a real author who would never in a million years have resorted to using slop generators. "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." -Hayao Miyazaki

I’m not so sure. Douglas Adams was an avid technologist who worked on two interactive fiction games: the famously-cruel Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide and Starship Titanic. I don’t remember whether there was anything free-form about the dialogue in the HHGG game, but Starship Titanic had many bots you could talk to. It was immensely fun, and I suspect he would have loved the ability to spin out dialogue a little more naturally.

On the other hand, the HHGG universe is just packed to the brim with deranged robots. Everybody loves Marvin, of course, but my favorites were the sycophantic ones like the elevators that sigh with pleasure upon delivering you to your destination. Adams always seemed to do perfectly anticipate the insanity of marketeers, and I expect that we’ll actually get some of this someday…

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#216

Post by raddan »

LaGrange wrote: post #162
eleventen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope to make it within this year. What's your plan?

Changing flats so it's cheaper (it's hard but still possible here), then go for an entry-level "barista" job. It's gonna be very broke, but I'm not the first one in my friends circle to make the jump, so I have some support. Edit: I probably will keep coding. Just... nobody else is ever going to see or use my code again.

Why jump now?

If your worry is that you won’t be able to “keep up” and you’ll be laid off, or fired, just wait for that to happen. Keep making a paycheck until then. Then you can start your barista job.

If the problem is that you hate the work, then fine. But why barista? Fine, if that’s what makes you happy. But there are a million jobs out there _if you are willing to relocate_.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#217

Post by jckahn »

DANmode wrote: post #209
jckahn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a fancy car? News to me. I'm just trying to pay my bills and live a sensible and reasonably comfortable life. These days that requires a lot of money.

Leave the city.

I'd rather be poor in the city than rich and bored outside of it.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#218

Post by dudisubekti »

archagon wrote: post #203
dudisubekti wrote: post #7

Black-and-white thinking like this is not healthy. You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal. Some mathematicians like Terence Tao are comfortable doing this, for example.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Richard Stallman was unreasonable. So was Linus Torvalds. I'm hoping that something wonderful and entirely human-centered will come out of the anti-AI movement, up to and including a bifurcation of the internet.

But...

Take electricity adoption for example, with your adage then it means unreasonable pro-electricity people vs unreasonable anti-electricity people. We know how this turns out, I don't see a lot of people joining the Amish.

It's okay to have strong opinions (be "unreasonable"), but in the end humanity as a whole (the "reasonable" people) will judge whether your opinion is a good one or not. Only time will tell.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#219

Post by LaGrange »

raddan wrote: post #216
LaGrange wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing flats so it's cheaper (it's hard but still possible here), then go for an entry-level "barista" job. It's gonna be very broke, but I'm not the first one in my friends circle to make the jump, so I have some support. Edit: I probably will keep coding. Just... nobody else is ever going to see or use my code again.

Why jump now? If your worry is that you won’t be able to “keep up” and you’ll be laid off, or fired, just wait for that to happen. Keep making a paycheck until then. Then you can start your barista job. If the problem is that you hate the work, then fine. But why barista? Fine, if that’s what makes you happy. But there are a million jobs out there _if you are willing to relocate_.

Bluntly? Because working with y'all is becoming insufferable. Because I don't want to work in IT. Note this isn't "I don't want to program" or whatever. That's cool and fun. But the people in here? Oh gods.

Also I'm sick and tired of working on projects where the best social benefit from my work would be if I stopped. And IT has this talent of doing this to even most superficially useful projects. I worked on solar panel software that got turned into a scam by marketing. That takes a talent, of sort.

The best time to jump out of IT was to never get into it. The second best time is now.

As for why barista? People need food and drink and coffee is great.

Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"

#220

Post by Rekindle8090 »

simonw wrote: post #146
sdevonoes wrote: post #62

Any engineer (any person actually) can “learn to use AI” in a couple of days. It’s not rocket science; there’s no chance of left behind. If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry

Firmly disagree. Learning how to use these tools effectively is unintuitively difficult. They're great at some stuff and terrible at other stuff in ways that are very hard to predict. I'm figuring out new and better ways to use them in a daily basis, and I've been an almost daily user for nearly three years.

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