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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#341

Post by justonceokay »

simianwords wrote: post #300

This person gives me the vibe that they are so attached to their craft that they can't seem to do anything about LLM's ubiquity rising but scold and vaguely sloganeer. Was this how other professionals dealt with their grief? Like a translator in the advent of ML based translations? Like a lift man?

I’m reminded of the Douglas Adams quote

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

A lot of the dissonance on this forum is probably age based.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#342

Post by coldtea »

colechristensen wrote: post #301
coldtea wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself Is the world any better for them existing? The decline of coding and sw engineering skills in humans from outsourcing the practice of it to AI is it worth it and sustainable long term?

>Is the world any better for them existing? The decline of coding and sw engineering skills in humans from outsourcing the practice of it to AI is it worth it and sustainable long term? The world is going to be no worse than it was when humans transitioned from writing assembly to writing compilers for high level languages. Assembly is still necessary, but not that often. In the same way writing code is going to beco…

>The world is going to be no worse than it was when humans transitioned from writing assembly to writing compilers for high level languages

When I open some Electron apps I wish we stopped right about there.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#343

Post by agentultra »

nicksergeant wrote: post #266
agentultra wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone not learning things via LLM coding right now either doesn't care at all about the underlying code/systems How many bytes is a pointer in C? How many bytes is a shared pointer in C++? What does sysctl do? What about fsync? What is a mutex lock? How is it different from a spin lock? You want to find the n nearest points to a given point on a 2-D Cartesian plane. Could you write the code to solve that on your o…

Agree with pretty much everything you wrote here, I guess with the addendum that LLMs can be a part of the learning experience you're describing. It's as easy as telling the LLM "don't write a single line of code nor command, I want to do everything, your goal is to help me understand what we're doing here." There are always going to be people who just want the end result. The only difference now is that LLM tools al…

Best of luck in your journey!

To those reading this thread though, be wary of the answers LLMs generate: they're plausible sounding and the LLM's are designed to be sycophants. Be wary, double check their answers to your queries against credible sources.

And read the source!

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#344

Post by tpdly »

colechristensen wrote: post #295
tpdly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fooling yourself. People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.

I also did a native implementation of git so I could use an S3 compatible data store, your rails guru can't do that. Objectively, my GitHub clone is still shitty, BUT it got several ways github is shitty out of my way and allowed me to add several features I wanted, no small one of which was GitHub not owning my data. I don't know the shit out of Rails and I don't want to, I know the shit out of other things and I wa…

Hey I understand you've gotten something out of it. You hired a robot to 3d-print a mug that fits your hand. There's a place for that. You understand that it might poison you a little bit? You understand that this doesn't make ceramics irrelevant?

Hobby-project vibe coding is pretty cool (if I'm being honest, its fucking miraculous; this tech is wild) but isn't it clear that there's a problem with the linkedincels, the investors, the management that are all convinced this will remove say 50% of programming jobs? I understand these things have legitimate uses, but I'm at my wits end hearing about how deep understanding, craftsmanship, patience and hard work aren't "results oriented".

There's definitely zealotry developing against AI, but I suspect it is a proportional (if unhelpful) response to the hype machine. Is it really zealotry to insist on the value of your mind and your competence? These people saying you should never "hand write" your code-- how the fuck did the discourse move so much that this isn't a laughably stupid thing to say? "I'm a CEO, and if you aren't using consultants to make your decisions you've already lost"

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#345

Post by ArnoVW »

falkensmaize wrote: post #276
dspillett wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? If it does go as far that way as many seem to expect (or, indeed, want), then most people will be able to do it, there will be a dearth of jobs and many people wanting them so it'll be a race to the bottom for all but the lucky few: development will become a mi…

What the people excited about the race to the bottom scenario don’t seem to understand is that it doesn’t mean low skill people will suddenly be more employable, it means fewer high skill people will be employable. No one will be eager to employ “ai-natives” who don’t understand what the llm is pumping out, they’ll just keep the seasoned engineers who can manage and tame the output properly. Similarly, no one is goin…

And those that do have not yet understood what will happen when those seasoned workers retire, and there are no juniors or mid that can grow because they have been replaced by AI

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#346

Post by coldpie »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #249
niek_pas wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it. I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

Dog in the Manger. I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share". There's hardly any other…

> I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person

Rather, I don't like that the terms I released my work under aren't being respected. I believe LLMs are derivative works of the pieces they are trained on. I spent more than ten years working on open source code, and now the models that were trained on my GPL'd code are being used to make proprietary code against the terms of the license. I find this reprehensible.

While it wasn't an explicit term of release, generally I did not expect anyone to get any kind of financial value from the blog posts I wrote. I just wrote them for fun & maybe others would find them interesting. Now, LLMs have been trained on my blog posts and are generating financial value for some of the worst human beings on the planet who are using their money to murder, demean, and maim other humans.

I now know that blog posts I wrote for fun are putting money in some sociopath's bank account, and the GPL'd code I wrote is being used to create software to exploit me & other users. If I continue to create things publicly, it will be used against me and other people, and there's nothing I can do to stop it except to stop creating things. It's all very disrespectful & demoralizing.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#347

Post by dgb23 »

poody wrote: post #304
bonoboTP wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also remember a similar wave around 10-15 years ago regarding ML tooling and libraries becoming more accessible, more open source releases etc. People whose value add was knowing MATLAB toolboxes and keeping their code private got very afraid when Python numpy, scikit learn and Theano etc came to the forefront. And people started releasing the code with research papers on github. Anyone could just get that working…

This is so true... I am having issues with the change right now.. being older and trying to incorporate agentic workflow into MY workflow is difficult as I have trust issues with the new codebase.. I do have good people skills with my clients, but my secret sauce was my coding skilz.. and I built my identity around that..

The cure for me has been to write an agent myself from first principles.

Tailored to my workflow, style, goals, projects and as close as possible to what I think is how an agent should work. I’m deliberately only using an existing agent as a rubber duck.

It’s a very empowering learning experience.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#348

Post by cynicalpeace »

People don't care what bots have to say

Therefore, things like writing, film, sales, etc are less productively scalable by bots

And things like code, where people don't care how the sausage is made as long as it "works" are more productively scalable by bots

And even in the situation of code, the job description leans more on defining what "works" which requires the human touch

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#349

Post by mixmastamyk »

kjksf wrote: post #297
ojbyrne wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the lack of investment in their skills was the cause for the commenter’s job hopping, not the effect.

It's all so vague. "lack of investment in their skill". You just spent $250k and 5 years in college learning stuff. You get hired to do a job for money. What "investment" do you expect company to do? Give me number of weeks and amount of dollars per year and tell me how it stacks against $250k and 5 years that you just spent? If you want to learn on the job, shouldn't YOU be paying the company for teaching you, like…

Continuing education is recognized and required in many fields.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#350

Post by pc86 »

chromacity wrote: post #263
TeMPOraL wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dog in the Manger. I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share". There's hardly any other…

Conversely, some people feel entitled to 100% of the value created by others. Oh, you wrote a book? Too bad, it's a part of my training data set now. Downloading public stuff off the internet with no regard for the creator's wishes or license is bad enough, but we have many people here who defended AI companies seeding models with pirated content. The internet is a social contract. AI is not the first thing to try an…

Putting a book into a training data set does not take 100% of the value created by the author. You could make a convincing argument that since the LLM was never going to purchase the book, and the number of people who would have purchased the book but now won't because it's included in the training data is effectively zero, that no value was lost at all.

Licenses are legal documents and are usually treated as such, but "the creator's wishes" are irrelevant without case law, legislation, or licensing to back it up. And jurisdiction - show me a license that doesn't stand up in court in my home jurisdiction and I'll show you a license I won't care if I break or not.

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