Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leave the city.
I'd rather be poor in the city than rich and bored outside of it.
What is sensible in a literal economic recession if not “boring”?
Anyway..
"People who don't use AI will be left behind"
221–230 of 283 posts
Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, now that's a reasoned though on how AI will affect us, but fortunately - the AI is not 'doing our thinking for us' any more that 'calculators did', and, that's not going to stop us from using AI. People not using AI will be about as useful as those refusing to use e-mail or computers. It's absurd.
Doing our thinking for us is the purpose of AI, isn't it? It's called artificial intelligence for a reason.
AI is a broad term and ML aglos for playing chess fall under that since the 1920s.
AI may replace some cognitive activity, it also required cognitive intelligence to use 'slide rules' - which have been replaced and we have not looked bad.
It's not a bad rhetorical question - but it's moot in the face of the question of 'should we use it or not'.
It will do a lot of things for us - that part is inevitable and unavoidable.
We'll have plenty to think about.
Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#223Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…
Good to see another Luddite (as they’d call us) on here! I am quitting tech in a month. I chose to go through 6 month of identity crisis, depression and reinventing my life after 20 years in software than having those bullshit generators imposed upon me to compete with those for whom thinking is démodé.
Meanwhile the front page is people complaining that using a particular word causes their evil genie to go haywire. You guys still call this stuff engineering? Writing requirements in prose, because programming languages are too hard? Fuck that, I’m out.
Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been. The fact of the matter is, a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person. It makes research faster. It makes experimentation faster. It makes output cleaner. And this is true across many disciplines, not just tech. Also, it is a skill. Yes, anyone…
Are they? I remember when heavyweight IDEs where all the rage, there was a similar sentiment that if you weren't using one of them then you would eventually be so much slower that you'd be out of a job. It only took maybe five years until people started asking themselves if the dependency on a big IDE (and cost) was worth it. I don't think anyone would look at someone who prefers a stripped down text editor today and…
Maybe it depends. If what you want to build is one-shot crap anyway, then micromanaging LLMs to make them vomit what you need for that is "productive". I wouldn't know, because I prefer real work over the make-believe and leave the AI coding acolytes to be left behind and die when their ingenious plans explode in their faces.
Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#225Earlier 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.
Respect. I moved countries for lower cost of living, and I’m gonna become a starving artist, so to speak, trying to use my software skills to make myself useful and earn enough to buy food, in a field where human ingenuity still reign supreme.
And if I ever find money under the mattress, I’ll make a solar farm. Something useful for the world, for once.
Better content and poor than living in golden handcuffs.
Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#226Trading practice of primary skills for indirect skills like AI is like a writer deciding they should stop writing directly and get really good at Microsoft Word.
That's why I write my own assembly language. Compilers just atrophy your skills!
Personally I just accept that all technologies are great and must be embraced! This way I do not have to think about ethics and potential implications for society.
Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
> working with y'all is becoming insufferable.
It depends on where you land. Not all programmers (and their managers) are brain-amputated zombies. But I do admit that finding that rare pocket of sanity requires a good portion of luck.
Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#228Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#229I'm just retired and more than happy to be left behind. I'll carry on writing software the way I love until I die
Re: "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
#230Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and re…
It's a bit arrogant and borderline Luddite to suggest that 'your era was legitimate' and that somehow these new things which you don't understand are somehow 'lesser' or illegitimate. In the long arc of history, I'm doubtful we'll see 'the last 50 years' as 'the Golden Age' - that's just a personal, contemporary romanticization. More than likely, the advent of computers -> web -> AI etc. will be one block of the 'inf…
There is no doubt that AI is world changing technology. I'm not sure I want to go back to the world before LLMs. However, he's right to lament the impending demise of personal computing. Our computing freedom is being attacked on all fronts by governments and trillion dollar corporations alike, and things are not looking good for us. Our machines are increasingly locked down by rent-seeking corporations. Software is increasingly in the cloud. Thanks to remote attestation, we get ostracized from digital society if we take ownership of our machines. It's starting to look like the "you'll own nothing" future is actually coming.
I do hope the open weight models keep distilling the frontier models, and that powerful and unlocked computer hardware remains accessible to us mere mortals so that we may run them with no limitations in our own homes. That's optimistic though.