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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

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471–480 of 668 posts

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#471

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #344
NiloCK wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. Socrates said the same thing about the written word. The determining factor is always "did I come up with this tool". Somehow, subsequent generations always manage to find their own competencies (which, to be fair, may be different). This isn't guaranteed to play out, but it should be the default expectation until we actually see g…

> People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. As it happens, we generally don't let people use calculators while learning arithmetic. We make children spend years using pencil and paper to do what a calculator could in seconds.

Unfortunately there are many posters here who believe we should, in fact, let children use calculators and not bother with learning arithmetic. It's foolishness, but that argument does get made. So I wouldn't be surprised if people also think we should let students use LLMs.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#472

Post by shimman »

throwanem wrote: post #77
sd9 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, it’s only since about December that I felt things really start to shift, and February when my job started to become very different. Personally I’m looking at more physical domains, but it’s early days in my exploration. I think if I wanted to stick to remote work (which I have enjoyed since 2020), then the AI story would just keep playing out. I’m also totally open to taking a big pay cut to do somethin…

So recent? I've been on sabbatical (the real kind, self-funded) for eighteen months, and while my sense has been things have not stopped heading downhill since I stepped off the ride back in 2024, to hear of such a sudden step change is somewhat novel. "Very different" just how, if you don't mind my asking? (I'm also looking for local, personally satisfying work, in exchange for a pay cut. Early days, and I am findin…

Be weary of false prophets in these comments, none of these tools are anywhere close to production quality and now that major companies are suffering enough outages to negatively impact them (Amazon, MSFT, Cloudflare).

Much better take is to start establishing yourself as a slop wrangler. Lot of stupid money to be made from fools wanting to purify their slop.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#473

Post by bigstrat2003 »

cfloyd wrote: post #194
djaro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve. To me, it seems a bit like the difference between learning how to cook versus buying microwave dinners. Sure, a good microwave dinner can taste really good, and it will be a lot better than what a beginning cook will make. But imagine aspiring cooks just buying premade…

I held this point of view for a while but I came to the (possibly naive) conclusion that it was just forced self-assurance. Truth is, the issues with sub-par output are just a prompting and supervision deficiency. An agent team can produce better end product if supervised and promoted correctly. The issue is most don’t take the time to do that. I’m not saying I like that this is true, quite the opposite. It is the re…

> Truth is, the issues with sub-par output are just a prompting and supervision deficiency. An agent team can produce better end product if supervised and promoted correctly.

Which is more work, and less fun, than doing it myself. No thanks.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#474

Post by cweld510 »

iterateoften wrote: post #359
wongarsu wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duh, the only way to get startup experience is indeed to get startup experience. My point is that getting into the weeds of writing CRUD software is not the only way to gain the ability to write complex algorithms, or to debug complex issues, or do performance optimization. It's only common because the stuff you make on the journey used to be economically valuable

> write complex algorithms, or to debug complex issues, or do performance optimization That’s the stuff that ai is eating. The stuff I’m talking about (scaling orgs, maintaining a project long term, deciding what features to build or not build etc) is stuff very hard for ai

AI is only eating some of that though. For instance, everyone who does performance work knows that perhaps the most important part of optimization is constructing the right benchmark. This is already the thing that makes intractable problems tractable. That effect is now exacerbated — AI can optimize anything given a benchmark —- but AI isn’t making great progress at constructing the benchmark itself.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#475

Post by throwanem »

nidnogg wrote: post #441
throwanem wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So recent? I've been on sabbatical (the real kind, self-funded) for eighteen months, and while my sense has been things have not stopped heading downhill since I stepped off the ride back in 2024, to hear of such a sudden step change is somewhat novel. "Very different" just how, if you don't mind my asking? (I'm also looking for local, personally satisfying work, in exchange for a pay cut. Early days, and I am findin…

Don't you feel that sabbaticals kinda get you off the new tech wave anyway? I usually check in on news much more often when bored at slow work days. On the side, this might not have to do at all with your case, but the reason I personally keep putting off sabbaticals is that I feel it can severely compound my routine wrecking habits and I don't think I'd be too strong-willed to give it meaningful purpose. Not to ment…

Well, sure. It isn't for everyone, and this isn't my first time. Lots of folks struggle without exogenously imposed routine and structure, and wouldn't it be a dull old world if we were all alike? My diary is nine years old and, as of today, thirty-one hundred and one pages long. But for what it's worth, I neither desire nor intend ever to return to "tech" as you construct it in your comment here, and as HN the appendage of YC (1) also does. I learned how to work for a living well before any of that stuff really came along, and I confide I will still know how once it's gone. (Also, reading the news versus distracting oneself with it is a distinction worth considering for the difference it describes. Can be hard to be very proactive or muster much motivation when all one's energy goes to either earning a livelihood or to recovering from same, eh?)

(1) Peace, Dan! I imply no substantial or material connection, only nascence within the same culture and enshrinement of the same desiderata, as you well know - and well know can't be gainsaid, or not in factual terms at least.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#476

Post by iwontberude »

vinceguidry wrote: post #444
adriand wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a deliberate process powered by rightwing and capitalist interests designed to create a dumber, less educated and more distracted population. A war as stupid as the one with Iran would not have been possible three decades ago. As ill-advised as the Iraq war was, Bush at least spent months explaining the rationale and building support for it, successfully. Now that’s not needed. I saw interviews with young Americ…

I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track. Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or foole…

Where exactly because in the Midwest we were very vocal about it. We have tons of military families out there and we were poor enough to feel almost like military service was inevitable if we didn’t get scholarships for school. You know the band NOFX had an album, the War on Errorism that was quite successful based on the fuckery of the bush administration. Punk rock and protest music was huge then.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#477

Post by throwanem »

shimman wrote: post #472
throwanem wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So recent? I've been on sabbatical (the real kind, self-funded) for eighteen months, and while my sense has been things have not stopped heading downhill since I stepped off the ride back in 2024, to hear of such a sudden step change is somewhat novel. "Very different" just how, if you don't mind my asking? (I'm also looking for local, personally satisfying work, in exchange for a pay cut. Early days, and I am findin…

Be weary of false prophets in these comments, none of these tools are anywhere close to production quality and now that major companies are suffering enough outages to negatively impact them (Amazon, MSFT, Cloudflare). Much better take is to start establishing yourself as a slop wrangler. Lot of stupid money to be made from fools wanting to purify their slop.

If you don't consider it "production quality" and I don't consider it "production quality" and the paying client does consider it "production quality," which two of these people are wrong?

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#478

Post by aworks »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #284
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things I’ve been reminded lately of a conversation I had with a guy at hacker space cafe around ten years ago in Berlin. He had been working as a programmer for a significantly longer time than me. Long enough that for many years of his career, he had been programming in assembly. He was lamenting that these days, software was written in higher level languages, and that m…

The difference is that you don’t need to review the machine code produced by a compiler. The same is not true for LLM output. I can’t tell my manager I don’t know how to fix something in production the agent wrote. The equivalent analogy would be if we had to know both the high-level language _and_ assembly.

I was an engineering manager for a commercial C/C++ toolchain used in embedded systems development. We, and our customers, examined the generated code continously. In our case, to figure out better optimizations (and fix bugs). For some of our customers, because their device had severe memory constraints or trying to do difficult performance optimizations.

Moving up to an MMU and running Linux was a different (more abstract) world. Although since it was embedded, low-level functions might still be in both assembly and C if not the apps on top.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#479

Post by beedeebeedee »

I don’t have kids, but suggested something years ago to my siblings when they started confronting similar issues: we should do a version of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” for personal computers.

Kids should start off with Commodore 64s, then get late 80’s or early 90’s Mac’s, then Windows 95, Debian and internet access (but only html). Finally, when they’re 18, be allowed an iPhone, Android and modern computing.

Parenting can’t prevent the use of LLMs in grad school, but a similar approach could be taken by grad departments: don’t allow LLMs for the first few years, and require pen and paper exams, as well as oral examinations for all research papers.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#480

Post by shmeeed »

duskdozer wrote: post #134
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just like modern vehicles rob the user of autonomy, so too for coding agents. Modern tech moves further and further away from empowering normal people and increasingly serves to grow the influence of corporations and governments over our day to day lives. It's not inherent, but it is reality unless folks stop giving up agency for convenience. I'm not holding my breath.

Soon enough we'll have ads playing in our cars at stoplights.

https://www.carscoops.com/2025/02/jeep-owners-complain-about...
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