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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#251

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

0x3f wrote: post #207
anticorporate wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting. My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along. Deciding whether something new is the right p…

> My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The only real exceptions are things that spec…

> That's why the EA guys are off beng quants.

Or in prison for fraud.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#252

Post by irishcoffee »

jghn wrote: post #104
wolframhempel wrote: post #50

There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an Acti…

A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid. I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!

I distinctly remember staring at my check/bank/debit card laying on the desk in front of my keyboard, all the info punched in to buy $500 of bitcoin for something like $0.29 a coin.

Didn't pull the trigger. I just tell myself I'd have sold them when they doubled in price or they'd have been hacked in one of the mt. gox attacks and I'd have lost them anyways.

Today it would be about 120m. Oh well.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#253

Post by StilesCrisis »

Tade0 wrote: post #186

To me the main question is the long term pricing. It is said that major providers more than break even on what they're charging. But at the same time that's not the point of capitalism, is it? The point is to charge close to the value you're providing. My lunch money is approximately $10 and I often blow through as much in Claude tokens generously provided by the company which hired me. But I'm not getting $10 value…

I don't think there's a universe where Google stops competing here, though. The second Anthropic gets greedy, there will be alternatives.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#254

Post by brandonmenc »

stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

This is true in my experience.

I waited until it seemed good enough to use without having to spend most of my time keeping up with the latest magical incantations.

Now I have multiple Claude instances running and producing almost all of my commits at work.

Yes, with a lot of time spent planning and validating.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#255

Post by mh- »

Henchman21 wrote: post #242
mh- wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I've mandated for engineers is that folks give it a try occasionally, as models, best practices, and tooling improves. I'm currently tracking exactly two numeric metrics: total MAUs (to track the aforementioned), and total DAUs (to gauge adoption and rightsize seat-licensed contracts.)

Whats your plan for when someone flatly refuses?

I'll cross that bridge when I get there. No one who works for me has refused to be paid to try out a new technology when I ensure the time is set aside for them to do so.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#256

Post by aleph_minus_one »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #185
pennomi wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you. Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster. Designing a new SLAM algorithm? Probably LLMs will spin around in circles helplessly. That being said, that was my experience several years ago… maybe state of the art has changed in the computer vision space.

Specialized is probably not the word I'd use, because llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics. For example I've never randomly heard people talking about the dicom standard, llms have no trouble with it.

> llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics

A very simple kind of query that in my experiences causes problems to many current LLMs is:

"Write {something obscure} in the Wolfram programming language."

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#257

Post by ianm218 »

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #244
mh- wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I've mandated for engineers is that folks give it a try occasionally, as models, best practices, and tooling improves. I'm currently tracking exactly two numeric metrics: total MAUs (to track the aforementioned), and total DAUs (to gauge adoption and rightsize seat-licensed contracts.)

Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"? If the benefit is there people will use it or get left behind, there's no sense having a mandate that people resentfully try the new tooling. Imagine you had a developer who writes Java using vim. It sounds insane but they are just as productive as everyone else…

> Why do you care so much? If these are really revolutionary tools that vastly optimize work, why bother forcing people to "try new models and best practices"?

If AI makes an employee 10X more productive they get a slight pay raise maybe, but the company makes substantially more money or gets substantially more output. So there is a large difference in incentives.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#258

Post by rob »

wolframhempel wrote: post #50

There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an Acti…

I should've started registering a bunch of two and three character and generic .com domains in the early 90s when registration was free.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#259

Post by neya »

> I'm OK being left behind, thanks!

> It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

> I took part in a vaccine trial

> Getting Jabbed With EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE!

This is such a weird article. The author presents so many contradictory anecdotal experiences against the author's own conclusion.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#260

Post by forgetfulness »

zephen wrote: post #229
augusto-moura wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

I don't doubt you, but I'm out of the loop. Who does this?

My uncle leads IT support teams, the org is measuring AI use in writing reports and tickets. The org has very poorly structured and obsolete processes (he's trying to straighten them up as he goes), AI will probably amplify the lack of structure, by making it easier for the work to _look_ as if someone carefully reviewed the issues and followed procedure.

A friend is a team lead in an org that's mandating vibecoding via "Devin", a lesser known player an "architect" chose after shallow review. The company also has endemic process issues and simply can't do deployments reliably, it's behind the times in methodology in every other respect. Higher ups are placing their trust in a B-list agentic tool instead of fixing the problems.

Anyway, I wouldn't be caught dead working at either of those two shops even before the AI rollout, but this is what's going on in the IT underworld.

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