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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#371

Post by doctorwho42 »

sdevonoes wrote: post #64

Can’t we just sabotage AI? We have the means for sure (speed light communication across the globe). Like, at least for once in the history of software engineering we should get together like other professionals do. Sadly our high salaries and perks won’t make the task easy for many - spend tons of tokens on useless stuff at work (so your boss knows it’s not worth it) - be very picky about AI generated PRs: add tons o…

It really is the albatross around the neck of software and software adjacent professionals... How you don't see the value of collective action is wild to me. Most of you are still working class, you can't survive that many years unemployed...

But the Kool aid has been drunk, and the philosophy of silicon valley cemented in your field. It will take a lot of pain or work to get it to change.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#372

Post by nunez »

bombcar wrote: post #29
jordanb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging. They literally made it a crime to walk down the street.

across the street, no? It's also a crime to jog on the railroad tracks.

Down the street also.

"Fighting Traffic" by Peter D. Norton talks about this at length.

The suburbs didn't exist when automobiles hit the market. Most people lived in cities because that's where the jobs were and transportation (outside of whatever public transportation options the cities provided) was limited. Kids and adults used the streets freely (which were for horses, though they were widened as automobiles started growing in popularity).

This changed as cars killed kids (and adults) who didn't know that cars were much faster than cars and didn't react in time. Traffic deaths were so numerous, cities invested lots of money in "safety parades" that were kind of gruesome, actually (like showing tombstones of the future deceased). [^0] Jaywalking was a crime that was invented to deal with exactly this phenomenon.

People fought HARD to keep the streets free (where else are kids going to play). People lost that battle, as we know.

[^0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-10/how-citie...

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#373

Post by ndriscoll »

rafterydj wrote: post #327
kjksf wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your busine…

Actually I found that if you have a pretty good understanding of the core parts of the C standard (e.g. the idea of the abstract machine, storage durations, unspecified vs undefined behavior, etc.) and working experience with the language, Rust is then quite natural. To first approximation, Rust basically makes lifetime management/ownership semantics that would be "good practice" in C into mandatory parts of the type system.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#374

Post by mchaver »

oompydoompy74 wrote: post #210
mchaver wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that humans should continue to value various forms of literacy even in the face of AIs that can do everything better than us. I too will continue to dig deeper into tech literacy. There was a Terence Tao paper recently that mentioned we are in a shift similar to the end of heliocentrism. It made clear that Earth is not the center of the universe, but Earth is still deeply valuable and important for humans. Mu…

I have some amount of hope that local open models with sufficient quantization are the future as hardware becomes more powerful and models become more optimized. I don’t think we will be living in thin client land forever. Human expertise and intelligence will continue to be important and anyone who says otherwise is being disingenuous.

Agreed. I am crossing my fingers that local open models can catch up in the future. Otherwise the big LLM companies will have everyone by the balls.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#375

Post by bigstrat2003 »

phpnode wrote: post #158
zozbot234 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM's don't really output the same code quality as a human, even on the smallest scale. It's not even close. Maybe you can guide them to refactor their slop up to human-written quality, but then you're still coding. You're just doing it by asking the computer to write something, instead of physically typing the whole thing out with a keyboard.

This just isn’t true at all, with guidance and guard rails they produce much better code than the average developer does. They are only going to get better.

That is completely false in my experience. I have never once seen an LLM produce code that would be acceptable. It certainly is worse than what a human can do.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#376

Post by rafterydj »

SoftTalker wrote: post #364
rafterydj wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your busine…

If all you got out of a Computer Science undergrad program was "learning C" you were severely shortchanged. An 8-week bootcamp could have done that.

Point still stands. You're going to take up the mantle for suggesting a computer science degree from 2000 completely qualifies someone for work in 2026? No further education needed?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#377

Post by ModernMech »

TomasBM wrote: post #367
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

I agree with the sentiment, but I think the problem is much wider. Managers at companies are just doing what they've optimized their careers for: maintaining some edge over some competition, at some cost. What is pure FOMO to you or me, is good strategy to anyone trying to win [1]. In other words, FOMO was always the strategy. This self-reinforcing loop is also not going away. There hasn't been any real evidence that…

The evidence that software development cannot be automated is we already tried to do it in the 90s with OOP, UML, and outsourcing. It didn’t work out for the same reasons vibe coding isn’t working out — because building the system is the same as specifying it, and that is a creative iterative process.

We are at the point where sure ai can write code, but we could always do that; lack of code writing ability was not what killed the OOP automation efforts. There was plenty ability to code back then as well. The distinction of whether it’s an offshore team in India or Claude writing the code doesn’t change things as far as the larger picture of building the software.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#378

Post by bigstrat2003 »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #268
rglover wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major or regional? This is alarming beyond words.

Major, big big major, not just me either. How is it alarming beyond words? If I said "Im an emt and I just ask the AI everything" now that would be alarming beyond words.

It's alarming because AI produces crappy software, and I would rather not lose money because banks are turning out slop with AI.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#379

Post by dgb23 »

WarmWash wrote: post #307
qsera wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>using synthetic training data yea, look up how it is done. It is exactly how a perpetual motion machine scam would project an appearance of working like using a generator to drive a motor, and the motor driving the generator..something that would obscure the fact that there is energy loss happening along the way....

I'm confused with the point you are trying to make, because they are using synthetic data, and the models are getting stronger. There is no "conservation of fallacy" law (bad data must conserve it's level of bad), so I'm struggling to connect the dots on the analogy, unless I ignore the fact that training on synthetic data works, is being used, and the models are getting better.

Better by which metrics?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#380

Post by rafterydj »

ndriscoll wrote: post #373
rafterydj wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your busine…

Actually I found that if you have a pretty good understanding of the core parts of the C standard (e.g. the idea of the abstract machine, storage durations, unspecified vs undefined behavior, etc.) and working experience with the language, Rust is then quite natural. To first approximation, Rust basically makes lifetime management/ownership semantics that would be "good practice" in C into mandatory parts of the type…

I agree - I was mostly trying to think of an example against OP's rather facetious attitude towards the time and effort required to maintain engineering performance.

In my experience, a lot of the Rust fighting with the borrow checker is really just enforcing better quality code I should've been writing anyway.

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