Whenever I hear "It's never too late to do X", I can't help but think "Well in this case, there is no harm in waiting a bit longer, is there?".
I'm OK being left behind, thanks
351–360 of 800 posts
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Index funds give you something like the expected value over a huge class of possible investments. What you aim for if you want to invest early is rather a probability distribution of - get rich with a small (but nevertheless realistic) probability p - get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little bit with probability 1-p This is a very different offering than the profit probability distribution that ind…
> What you aim for if you want to invest early Sure. I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. Most new early-stage VCs do. > get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little Broadly speaking, when your investment outcomes don’t differentiate between anything and zero, you’re mostly going to get zero.
> I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index.
This holds if you consider "underperforming" to be a comparison of expected values.
On the other hand, if you consider "probability of getting a really huge payoff" to be the measure by which the investments are compared, the index fund is the one that looses in the comparison.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, which is why I think it's a straw man. How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?
I had an heavy ai user on my team say that “those who learn how ti use the tools wont get fired, those who dont are gone”. I used it to generate a bunch of cfn and it worked fine from an example and a couple line prompt, doesnt seem that hard to learn to me. Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand.
Yeah, I think this is it. If you don't learn to use them, you'll be much slower than people who do, but also they're not really that hard to learn, so it's not super urgent.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
You would probably have sold early for a relatively small amount too. I bought 10ish BTC at some point for almost nothing, sold them for a low 4-digit amount thinking they were stupid anyway. I still think they were stupid but it turns out they could have paid off my house easily. Oh well.
Question is whether you sold all or just a segment. If you bought 100 btc early on, sold 99 of them, you'd still have something worth a deposit for a house or a car now, which is still life-changing.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot but agree. It's a massive skill leveling where software development is transforming from high skilled coding to low skilled prompting. For an old dog like myself it feels an unjust rug pull.
Why unjust? Who promised you that the way software is made will stay static? Our software industry has specialized, for decades, in "rug pulling" / changing / "disrupting" other industries on a massive scale. I find it pretty ironic when engineers make these statements in that context.
Whether you like it or not but the society is built on certain social constructs and agreements.
Do you think it's fair that when the society moves underneath, the capitalistic system moves its tectonic plates it's the individual who has to bear the cost of that?
Abd let's be clear only software devs are just sucking it up. You think lawyers and doctors would allow themselves to be laid off en masse and be replaced with trainees who just prompt the computer?
Also what will happen when high wage earners start loosing their discretionary income. The whole service sector for starters will be shaken.
Just imagine some big tech company laying off 10k engineers. Making 0.3m per year. That's 3b dollars that disappear from the incomes and thus from the economy and just stays in the pockets of the capital holders.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#356Earlier 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'm just using Copilot CLI for mindless stuff and set it to the premium models to meet the quota, as long as they can't see the prompts I think I should be fine
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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#357I prefer to move slower. I've accepted that I'm not going to create some unicorn startup (that was never an aspiration). As an employee at a company, my goal is to focus my time learning the things that are relevant to my job and that will be useful for 10 years, not 10 weeks.
Chasing every new tech will lead to burnout and disillusionment at some point.
AI probably isn't going away in the same way NFTs largely did, and I use it to some degree. However, I don't see a lot of value of being on the bleeding edge of AI, as the shape it takes for those skills that will be used for the next 10 years are still forming. Trying to keep up now means constantly adapting how I work, where more time is spent keeping up on the changes in AI than actually doing something useful with it.
After the bubble pops, I think we'll start to see a much more clear picture of what the landscape of AI will look like long-term. Who are the winners, who are the losers, and what tools rise to the top after the hype is gone. I'll go deeper at that time.
Right now, the only thing I'm allowed to use at work is Copilot, so I just use that and don't bother messing around with much more in my free time.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#358> 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…
Counter point. It’s always advantageous to learn and grow as things evolve. This way you have an active role and maybe a say in how it will evolve. And maybe you could contribute towards that evolution (despite poor execution openclaw showed what LLMs could be doing) > There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Not long ago we were ridiculing genZ for not knowi…
I agree with this point. There is absolutely a 'left behind' gap that is under-explored.
My last job was a cable technician - making house calls to fix wifi, satellite tv, phone issues. Mostly elderly residents. The majority of them all were computer and phone illiterate. They were slow adopters to the fast-moving technology and many of them did not know how to operate their devices after we (UI/UX/hardware/software engineer 'we') removed them.
I wonder if this also has contributed to the elderly lonliness problem - sure its probably mostly related to physical companionship, acceptance of aging, etc, but the world that they knew (in general and the technological world they grew up in) is no longer recognizable.
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#359sure you can pick up any tool whenever you want, but from your employer's perspective AI is the best force multiplier since slavery, everything between it still required humans with leverage, the question is if your boss will need you at all by then
Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
They complained about the skill leveling where now lower skilled people can also do what needed higher skill before. You toiled to learn the craft, now there is a fast track to those results. That's what the rug pull is. Yes, producing software was value. (It of course still is as of today, we are talking about what may be coming). My plead is to continue searching for ways to contribute value. Don't resign to a feel…
The problem is that we don't live in a society where the benefits of new technology benefit all. We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy. You might feel great about when things become cheaper but remember that when things are cheap it's only because costs are low and when costs are low the revenues are low and when revenues are…
> We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy.
It will put and end to the middle class entirely, but that’s the intent.
The reality is a lot of people who were formerly middle or upper middle class, and even some lower class populations will face steep, irreversible “status adjustment”.
I’m not talking about “we used to be able to take vacations and now we can’t”. I’m talking about “we used to be highly paid professionals now we’re viciously competing for low paid day labor (gig work) to hopefully be able to afford the cheap cuts this week”.