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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#281

Post by mh- »

ianm218 wrote: post #257
jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true, though I believe savvy employees have leverage to ensure they participate in a larger share of that upside. As you can see from other comments, lots of people will just drag their heels and not give it a good-faith attempt, so it'll often average out in the way you predict.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#282

Post by LeonidasXIV »

keiferski wrote: post #56

I actually think the opposite approach might be the most optimal one, at least from a monetary perspective. That is, be on the cutting-edge of something, but be willing to bail out at the moment its future starts seeming questionable. Or even more specifically, maximize your foothold in it while minimizing your downside. Bitcoin is a good example: if you bought it 15 years ago and held it, you're probably quite wealt…

If you bought into NFTs when they were hot you would have lost money. Not every new tech is worth investing immediately.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#283

Post by jmye »

0xblinq wrote: post #67

Comparing these tools to the crypto or NFTs hype is so out of touch with reality. This is more on the scale of the invention of the press, the telegraph, or the internet itself. "I'm ok being left behind, I will join this Internet thing when it really becomes useful"... Ok... you do you. Hope you don't get there too late.

> Hope you don't get there too late.

Too late for what? Could no one start a viable internet business in 2005, or were they all taken in 1998? Is it impossible to learn machine learning today, if you weren't jumping into Tensorflow in 2015? Do you think it's impossible to learn OpenClaw today, if you weren't playing with it six months ago, and do you think there might not be a successor that "wins" and is easier to learn and use six months from now, or will I have "gotten there too late" to possibly leverage or learn agents?

I just don't understand what it is you think anyone will be too late for, unless this is just self-justification and snide ego-boosting.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#284

Post by sd9 »

randusername wrote: post #232
sd9 wrote: post #112

> 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. In contrast to the current top comment [1], I don't think this is a wise assessment. I'm already seeing companies in my network stall hiring, and in fact start firing. I think if you're not trying to take advantage of this technology today then there may not be a place for you tomor…

> I find it hard to empathise with people who can't get value out of AI > But that extra value doesn't accrue to individuals, it accrues to business owners. What is value? Is a 2X faster lumberjack 2X as valuable? Sure Is a 2X faster programmer 2X as valuable? At what, fixing bugs? Adding features? That's not how the "ownership class" would define value. Productivity is a measure of efficiency, not growth. Slashing l…

> Slashing labor costs while maintaining the status quo is still a big productivity gain.

Maybe I didn't express myself properly, but I think we agree, at least on this point?

Besides this effect, of enabling smaller teams to produce the same results, I think there is a larger effect coming where fundamentally different structures produce the same or better results as last year. I just don't think we've completely figured out what that looks like yet.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#285

Post by jatora »

heytakeiteasy wrote: post #222
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.

> The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you. I've been impressed by how this isn't quite true. A lot of my coding life is spent in the popular languages, which the LLMs obviously excel at. But a random dates-to-the-80s robotics language (Karel)? I unfortunately have to use it sometimes, and Claude ingested a 100s of pages long PDF manual for the language and now it's better at i…

Agreed. This sentiment you are replying to is a common one and is just people self-aggrandizing. No, almost nobody is working on code novel enough to be difficult for an LLM. All code projects build on things LLM's understand very well.

Even if your architectural idea is completely unique... a never before seen magnum opus, the building blocks are still legos.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#286

Post by topaz0 »

II2II wrote: post #192
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…

I almost entirely agree with the author's assessment of new technology. Yet that statement rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes it is better to get into things early because it will grow more complex as time goes on, so it will be easier to pick up early in its development. Consider the Web. In the early days, it was just HTML. That was easy to learn. From there on, it was simply a matter of picking up new skills as th…

And yet, at some point most web developers will have picked it up after the "raw html" era -- that point has probably come, even.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#287

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #188
heytakeiteasy wrote: post #14

Feels like a false equivalency. It's just my experience, but I've completely ignored crypto and the metaverse, and I don't get the sense I'm missing out on much. In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose…

> Feels like a false equivalency. It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias. In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history. It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to estab…

In the 90s was also the dotcom boom, and the vast majority of those who placed an all-in bet on it being everything lost it all in the dotcom bust and also "ended up being forgotten by history". Some of those bets were prescient but too early but many of those bets never made any sense. The dotcom bust was worse than the software industry crash we're experiencing now.

"It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history" perhaps but it's not at all obvious how it's going to shake out or which bets are sensible.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#288

Post by aleph_minus_one »

another-dave wrote: post #110

On the otherhand, when Cloud Computing started to come in, I knew a bunch of sysadmins. Some were in the "it'll never take off" camp and no doubt they know it now, kicking and screaming. But the curious early adopters were the ones best positioned to be leading the charge on "cloud migration" when the business finally pulled the trigger. Similarly with mobile dev. As a Java dev at the time that Android came along, I…

> On the other[ ]hand, when Cloud Computing started to come in, I knew a bunch of sysadmins. Some were in the "it'll never take off" camp and no doubt they know it now, kicking and screaming.

> But the curious early adopters were the ones best positioned to be leading the charge on "cloud migration" when the business finally pulled the trigger.

From a technological perspective, these sysadmins were right: in nearly all cases (exception: you have a low average load, but it is essential that the servers can handle huge spikes in the load), buying cloud services is much more expensive overall than using your own servers.

The reason cloud computing took of is that many managers believed much more in the marketing claims of the cloud providers than in the technological expertise of their sysadmins.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#290

Post by komali2 »

afpx wrote: post #270
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…

It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

> Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year

I bet we could replace nearly all the CEOs in the country with chatgpt controlling a ceo@thatcompany.com email and nobody would notice.

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