Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 713 posts

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#351

Post by 7speter »

danjac wrote: post #218
nomilk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is exactly the type of conversation we need to have as a society. Jobs have been disappearing at a high rate for at least a couple of generations now, and have steadily been replaced with new ones, often high paying ones. We can't control which jobs are in high, low, and no demand, so we're best off swimming with the current, whichever way it flows. 1. Accept that professions come and go. 2. Expect jobs to dis…

3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete. You do realize that "awesome new job" will require years of training and experience? Enjoy working at the Amazon Fulfilment Center in the meantime (until of course that's automated too).

Don’t forget all the people who laugh in your face and tell you you don’t actually know your newly learned skills, and reduces you to a bartender fraudulently entering their field.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#352

Post by throwawaylinux »

tlocke wrote: post #278
throwawaylinux wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees. Actually before that too. "Society" came about because we invented tools and techniques to make our jobs easier so people could spend more time on different things. "AI" is some more steps down that same path. > In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI. Not in th…

I agree with a lot of what you write, but in my experience in the UK there can be instances where money from the the wealthy has been used for the common good. For example, until 1945 only the rich could afford to educate their children, but the government decided to use taxpayers' money to provide free education for every child up to the age of 16. It was a utopian idea, and when it was first suggested most people s…

> I agree with a lot of what you write, but in my experience in the UK there can be instances where money from the the wealthy has been used for the common good. For example, until 1945 only the rich could afford to educate their children, but the government decided to use taxpayers' money to provide free education for every child up to the age of 16. It was a utopian idea, and when it was first suggested most people said, 'yeah right, nice idea but of course it'll never happen'.

And yet you ask people today and they'll moan about never having had it worse, boomers this and billionaires that (or tories I guess, I don't know what the equivalent go-to brainless insult is over there).

Not that there aren't valid reasons for complaint, but as I said envy (and greed) is a fundamental part of the human condition. I don't know why people think some utopia is just around the corner -- we've had thousand-fold multipliers in production. Fossil fuels, internal combustion, farming and construction machinery, factories, chemicals, computers, industrial robots, electricity. From pre-historic farmers and hunter gatherers to now production has increased unimaginably. The utopia never comes because that was never what was preventing it.

People who want there to be a utopia where nobody works and everybody is happy sharing everything fundamentally want to extinguish humanity. Because that's not what humanity is.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#353

Post by danjac »

mkmk3 wrote: post #344
anonyfox wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the total opposite most people around me (many immigrants from the US!) experience for the like last 2 decades actually, where have you been to that draws such a funny picture? Europe has more % Entrepreneurs/Self-employed people than the US, lots of great companies even though not leading in the richest top5-ranking, and the work ethic is focussed during working hours instead of chitchatting/looking busy 12h+…

Could also be the advantage of a unified market helps US startups scale faster, maybe someone else can speak to that better. Its been influential where Ive worked, at least. I also think at least US tech has significantly larger firms, but I dont think thats directly in line with societal good. Seems pretty fucking cancerous to me. Cant speak to industries outside of software though.

Europe (mostly, at least) does have a unified market on paper, but not culturally, which makes marketing, localization etc. harder - a commercial that sells well to Germans might go down like a lead balloon in Spain.

The biggest advantage I've seen in the US has been the VC ecosystem. For all we deride VCs - and sometimes (particularly given events over the past few weeks) with very good reason, the money spigot is just much more generous in the US. Of course that will change in the new low interest rate economy, but that to me seems more the deciding factor than silly claims that Americans are somehow more innately "innovative" than Europeans.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#354

Post by jeppester »

This very well sums up the anxiety I have about how this is going to affect programming.

That any creativity and understanding will be sucked out and replaced with prompt engineering.

I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really understands, but that it won't matter much.

All of this is powered by work done by real programmers who are not getting a dime for their effort. That just seems completely unfair to me, and even more so when already insanely rich corporations like MS only stand to gain from it.

I'm not sure I want to be part of it to be honest. It feels dirty and wrong as it works now. Laws might be able to change that, but with a whole industry of giant corporations ready to fight any such laws, I'm not optimistic.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#355

Post by walthamstow »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #262
anonyfox wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about striding for one of the core societal values that make many advanced democraties (including the European nordics) so much better/happier than the US? It’s called Equality. Insert strong progressive taxes, especially on wealth, and use it to fund a strong public sector, so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… . I think you vastly underestimate how m…

[flagged]

London Oyster card introduced June 2003

NYC Omny card introduced October 2021

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#356

Post by figassis »

have_faith wrote: post #348
pdc56 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious - on a scale out of 10, how much of that was written by ChatGPT? No offense intended - if the answer is zero, my apologies

I’ve noticed a large amount of responses from chatgpt start the second/third paragraph with “however, “ or a similar adverb. It will always strive to provide a “balanced” view, even on heavily one sided subjects.

I use however a lot

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#357

Post by muyuu »

xdennis wrote: post #264
muyuu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, whatever output people can do, generative AI can do to the point you wouldn't be able to tell it apart.

Except for the hands. If you're familiar with the Rick and Morty "what is my purpose" meme ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa9MpLXuLs0 ), it will essentially be the same for humanity in the future. Humanity: "What is my purpose?" Robot: "You draw the hands." Humanity, with existential dread: "Oh my god..."

that is technical minutia that will improve before artists relying on that hurdle saving their job have time to sign up for the dole

don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for everybody who for whatever reason sees their livelihood endangered overnight through no fault of their own and with little time to adapt

but I perceive a lot of denial:

- denial that "it could not/would not happen to me"

- denial that this rate of change is not rather unprecedented, "it was always thus" kind of denial

- denial that just because a certain niche won't be quickly automated, it follows that this job is safe or that a general reshaping of that general industry won't happen, changing the incentive structure massively

- denial that a second order effects may get you; so you can now automate some expensive part of your process? that also means the barrier of entry for the competition is lower and whatever competitive advantage you had in that process is now gone. Sure, embrace the efficiency but keep adapting because the only thing sure after those changes is that your industry will experience some "creative destruction"

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#358

Post by mattlondon »

jeppester wrote: post #354

This very well sums up the anxiety I have about how this is going to affect programming. That any creativity and understanding will be sucked out and replaced with prompt engineering. I still think you will have to be a good developer to understand if the solution you get is good, but is that even going to matter when you can just ask again and try again? I think there will be lots of code bases that no-one really un…

It will probably end up being more "test driven development"-like.

Write your tests/expectations and the tooling automatically prompts/writes the code to meet the tests.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#359

Post by Mistletoe »

savef wrote: post #349
pdc56 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious - on a scale out of 10, how much of that was written by ChatGPT? No offense intended - if the answer is zero, my apologies

https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/ Using this tool on the comment yields a 77.6% fake score. To give (pretty limited) contrast, a response from ChatGPT gives 99.9% fake, and another comment from this thread gives 0.1% fake. I assume that means the comment text was GPT-assisted, with some moderate editing from a human.

This is fascinating. I can’t imagine why someone would go to the trouble to do all that for a comment.

Re: I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

#360

Post by mattlondon »

I feel like we are at a bit of an industrial revolution type stage here - lots of old jobs that were previously done by hand (spinning yarn, weaving, making bricks etc) are about to be industrialised and automated. I don't think it will happen overnight, but perhaps a decade or two and a lot of jobs/industries will be irrevocably changed.

I am surprisingly sanguine about it. I think there will always be a need to understand what needs to be built, even if it is the AI that is actually coding it up. SWEs will probably end up in more of a supervisory role, responsible for ensuring that the requirements are suitable for automated code generation. Think TDD, but with AI writing the non-code bits.

Interesting times.

Post reply on HN