321–330 of 375 posts
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I'm always amazed that people feel anything when chatting with an AI bot. Don't people realize it's a machine "pretending" to be human?
Usually the feel part is the subconscius one that isn't swayed by knowing Like a phobia, its whole thing is being irrational, knowing it doesn't make sense doesn't diminish the feeling
When you watch a video ad do you feel an irrational need to buy a product?
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If it's not overconfident, it's the opposite - they're too much of a "Yes man", which at the slightest whim will change their mind to fit your opinion, if they even detect you might have a different one. Then they'll change their mind to their original answer when you tell them "I wasn't disagreeing with you". Honestly, it's amusing, but draining at the same time.
I've had a couple of times where Gemini straight up tells me "Absolutely not, ..." and the explains how my assumptions are wrong and eventually leads me to find the right answer. It's surprisingly good at reading my entire code, reading my assumptions of the code, and explaining what I'm getting wrong and how to fix it.
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I would add one thing though. The pie definitely gets bigger - but i feel there is a period of "downsizing" that happens. I think this is becuase of lack of ideas. When you have tool that (say) 10xes your productivity, its not that bosses will have ideas to build 10x the number of things - they will just look to cut costs first (hello lack of imagination and high interest rates).
We’ve had many improvements that increased productivity at least as much as current LLMs, and I don’t think any of them ever temporarily caused downsizing in the total number of programmers.
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It affects even the competent photographer. How many times do you see that photographer with all the gear sit in front of a literal statue and fire off a 30 shot burst in 2 seconds? I don’t envy these pro photo editors either today in sports. I wonder how many shots they have to go through per touchdown from all the photographers at the end zone firing a burst until everyone stands up and throws the ball back at the…
The AI is already picking out the best photo in those 400-shot bursts. And sometimes it is even combining elements from different photos: Alice had her eyes closed in this otherwise great shot, but in this other shot her eyes were open. A little touch-up and we've got the perfect photo.
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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 an army too, but it's a lot less effective. There is strength in numbers. Corporations know this and they leverage that strength against their employees. You all alone vs. them is exactly how they like it.
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'real' engineers can use SQL just fine. This is a strange position to take.
No true Scotsman would struggle with sql
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…unless the value created via prompt engineering is high enough to cause companies to rationally demand even more prompt engineers. The size of the pie is nowhere near fixed, IMO. There are many things which would be valuable to program/automate, but are simply unaffordable to address with traditional software engineering at the current cost per unit of functionality. If AI can create a significant increase in produc…
Again it's not about value, but solely supply vs demand. If there was somehow only one person who could do janitorial work in a city, that'd be one rich janitor. For a more realistic example - the software side at many companies essentially is the company. They bring products all the way from inception to launch. Yet they tend to get paid less, often much less, than the legal side. The reason is simply that the labor…
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why do you need a union? everyone should just set their personal standards for what they accept/demand, and then let the market sort it out? someone wants to work for $20/hour programming, in a fashion that can satisfy some demand? great, then I will simply NOT be doing that job. Everyone wins even though I do not get that particular job. Someone is willing to work 7 days a week as they prefer to grind to earn more m…
> Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this We tried that in the past. The work still got done, and workers just died more often. If you want to live in that reality move to a developing country with poor labor protections.