371–380 of 800 posts
That's does not obviously follow, I do worry about the ever increasing proportion of humanity who are no longer 'economically viable' and this includes people who are not yet born.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Specialized is probably not the word I'd use, because llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics. For example I've never randomly heard people talking about the dicom standard, llms have no trouble with it.
I was looking at trying to remember/figure out some obscure hardware communication protocol to figure out enumeration of a hardware bus on some servers. Feeding codex a few RFC URLs and other such information, plus telling it to search the internet resulted in extremely rapid progress vs. having to wade through 500 pages of technical jargon and specification documents.
I'm sure if I was extending the spec to a 3.0 version in hardware or something it would not be useful, but for someone who just needs to understand the basics to get some quick tooling stood up it was close to magic.
> 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…
Ok, here is the risk of being left behind - if we have moderately fast take-off, the 1-2 years required to upskill in AI might mean you find yourself unemployable when your role gets axed. I don’t think folks are taking seriously the possible worlds at the P(0.25) tail of likelihood. You do not get to pick up this stuff “on a timescale of my choosing”, in the worlds where the capability exponential keeps going for an…
We have no reason to believe that they won't keep an eye on this.
Little to nothing about AI tools so far suggests that that one can't just as easily pick the skills later. Tools that will get "exponentially better" will almost certainly be unrecognizable to someone desperately engaging with them now, for not other reason the sake of "having 1-2 years of experience"
Someone might reasonably choose to to bet on the upside. That doesn't imply that everyone else ought to fearfully hedge.
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…
> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. It has often been the case for technologies though, like “now we’re doing everything in $language and $technology”. If you see LLM coding as a technology in that vein, it’s not a completely new phenomenon, although it does affect developers differently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting. My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along. Deciding whether something new is the right p…
> My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants. The only real exceptions are things that spec…
The EA guys aren't the final word on ethics or a fulfilling life.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that one might, rather than seeking to always better one's life, instead seek to share the burden others are holding.
Making a bunch of money to turn around and spend on mosquito nets might seem to be making the world better, but on the other hand it also normalizes and enshrines the systems of oppression and injustice that created a world where someone can make 300,000$ a year typing "that didn't work, try again" into claude while someone else watches another family member die of malaria because they couldn't afford meds.
Earlier 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing I've mandated for engineers is that folks give it a try occasionally, as models, best practices, and tooling improves. I'm currently tracking exactly two numeric metrics: total MAUs (to track the aforementioned), and total DAUs (to gauge adoption and rightsize seat-licensed contracts.)
Making the tools available is one thing, but saying you're mandating their use at any level sounds like micro management to me. How would you feel if one of your subordinates started telling you how to do your job? I'm sure you would be mightily pissed off about it.
Re: some of them being upset about it- probably. Some people are also upset about being required to use Jira. I personally dislike using Okta.
> 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…
If you started early webdev, you learned lots of tricks, that dont benefit a modern webdev. E.g soap, long polling, the JsonP workaround... and so on
Many of the Llm frameworks will be seen simular. Mcp is already kinda heading in the obsolete direction imo, as skills took over