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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

aphyr.com

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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#51

Post by the_af »

abstracthinking wrote: post #49

Humans will be held accountable, not machines, whatever is the technology used. The jobs you suggest are based on the state of LLM right now, this could change rapidly, considering the state of progress. These are just activities that are already done by people that work with these instruments, because they want to optimize and obtain the best/safest output from these machines.

> Humans will be held accountable, not machines, whatever is the technology used

Isn't this addressed explicitly in TFA, in section "meat shields"?

As for the rest, if you predict even the jobs described in TFA will be obsoleted by future LLMs+tools, then the future is even more dire than predicted by Aphyr, right? Fewer jobs for humans to do.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#52

Post by the_af »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #29
Aperocky wrote: post #26

As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests. Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have…

I mostly agree with you. Though something I half-miss is using my own software as I build it to get a visceral feel for the abstractions so far. I've found that testability is a good enough proxy for "nice to use" since I think "nice to use" tends to mean that a subsystem is decoupled enough to cover unexpected usage patterns, and that's an incidental side-effect of testability. One concern I have is that it's gettin…

> But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems.

Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of the usual "it's not X, it's Y", full of AI-slop. Most of the text is filler, with a few tidbits of real content here and there.

I don't know before, but now blog posts have become more noise than signal.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#53

Post by pixl97 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #34
netcan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense, technology is "not normal" regardless. If we think of the digitization tech revolution... the changes it made to the economy are hard to describe well, even now. In the early days, it was going to turn banks from billion dollar businesses to million dollar ones. Universities would be able to eliminate most of their admin. Accounting and finances would be trivialized. Etc. Earlier tech revolution s were…

Accountability is really a way to address liability. So long as people can sue and companies can pay out, or individuals can go to jail, there is always going to be a question of liability; and historically the courts have not looked kindly at those who throw their hands up in the air and say “I was just following orders from a human/entity”

>nd historically the courts have not looked

This is dependent on having a court system uncaptured by corruption. We're already seeing that large corporations in the "too big to fail" categories fall outside of government control. And in countries with bribing/lobbying legalized or ignored they have the funds to capture the courts.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#54

Post by the_af »

Aperocky wrote: post #26

As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests. Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have…

> As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job.

How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited?

Everyone thinks it won't be them, it will be others that will be impacted. We all think what we do is somehow unique and cannot be automated away by AI, and that our jobs are safe for the time being.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#55

Post by gordonhart »

gessha wrote: post #44
gordonhart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why post an archive link for a static site with no ads or subscriptionware?

Can people make a soft assumption that if somebody went through the trouble of digging up an archive link, then access to the article is limited in some way?

Sure, but I would likewise appreciate if you made the assumption that my question wasn't snark and that I actually wanted to learn the answer.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#56

Post by buildbot »

simonw wrote: post #43

Loved that section about "meat shields". LLMs cannot be held accountable. Someone needs to be involved in decision making, with real stakes if those decisions are bad.

It just makes logical sense really; the human using the tool is in the end responsible.

Whether the tool is too powerful or ethical to use is an orthogonal discussion, in my opinion. Taken to the extreme, nuclear weapons still need someone fire or drop them. (We should still have discussions on safety and ethics always!)

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#57

Post by pixl97 »

nonameiguess wrote: post #18

This is part 9 of a 10-part series. The author has posted every chapter to Hacker News every day for the past 9 days. Every time four of the first five or so comments are: Someone noting it is unavailable in the UK. Someone posting an archive.is link. Someone asking why the above posted an archive link to a static site. An answer that it is because the content is otherwise unavailable in the UK. Do we really need to…

>Can we get a new rule that an author posting their own content, knowing it is unavailable in the UK, has to post their own archive link and explain why they're doing so as part of the submission?

[Author blocks link to avoid being potentially in violation of the law]

You ask author to willingly provide link to again potentially be in violation of the law

You do not see the irony in your question

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#58

Post by cucumber3732842 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #34
netcan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense, technology is "not normal" regardless. If we think of the digitization tech revolution... the changes it made to the economy are hard to describe well, even now. In the early days, it was going to turn banks from billion dollar businesses to million dollar ones. Universities would be able to eliminate most of their admin. Accounting and finances would be trivialized. Etc. Earlier tech revolution s were…

Accountability is really a way to address liability. So long as people can sue and companies can pay out, or individuals can go to jail, there is always going to be a question of liability; and historically the courts have not looked kindly at those who throw their hands up in the air and say “I was just following orders from a human/entity”

A huge component of compulsory (either by statute or de-facto as a result of adjacent statute, like mandatory insurance + requirements thereof) professional licensure is that if you follow the rules set by (some entity deputized by) government the government will in return never leave you holding the bag. The government gains partial control and the people under it's control get partial protection.

"oh I'm sorry your hospital burned down mr plantiff but the electrician was following his professional rules so his liability is capped at you'll just have to eat this one"

I would wager that a solid half if not more of the economy exists under some sort of arrangement like that.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#59

Post by thrance »

ai_critic wrote: post #19

I think that this is an interesting attempt at taxonomy, but it's a bit on the magical thinking end (and I say this as somebody that does a good amount of what's described as the incanter role). It's a combination of the author's previous witchy aesthetic (see his excellent " ing the technical interview" series) and progressive labor politics (which are asymptotically doomed in the current automation push). The bigge…

> and progressive labor politics (which are asymptotically doomed in the current automation push).

What do you mean exactly by this?

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#60

Post by treyd »

kaashif wrote: post #41
hombre_fatal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you. Though something I half-miss is using my own software as I build it to get a visceral feel for the abstractions so far. I've found that testability is a good enough proxy for "nice to use" since I think "nice to use" tends to mean that a subsystem is decoupled enough to cover unexpected usage patterns, and that's an incidental side-effect of testability. One concern I have is that it's gettin…

Those things are all still signals. If taken from a snapshot of the Internet pre-AI.

People were still gaming GitHub profiles before AI, sometimes even just reuploading existing repos as their own.
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