511–520 of 896 posts
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It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading (even tens of thousands of pages of) documentation, that is the crust of it.
crust (edge/border) -> crux (heart/essence)
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> R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them. Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit fo…
Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student. Products like jet engines, though, ar…
A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction.
Aircraft engines are subjected to both.
The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…
I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is,…
It's affecting their ability to collaborate. They retain the confidence of years of experience, but their brain isn't going through the appropriate process anymore to check their assumptions.
I've seen a similar thing happen to engineers who move into management, but this is now happening at such a large scale.
- Knowledge of how to make Fogbank etc. was lost when the people retired and or died. AI will make things worse, especially for code.
In reality if they'd used AI the knowledge in it would still be there as it doesn't retire or die or need paying a salary. I guess you have to keep a copy of the model file.
The article seems AI written with punch sentances and mixed up logic.
- Knowledge of how to make Fogbank etc. was lost when the people retired and or died. AI will make things worse, especially for code.
In reality if they'd used AI, the knowledge in it would still be there as it doesn't retire or die or need paying a salary. I guess you have to keep a copy of the model file.
The article seems AI written with punchy sentences and mixed up logic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am really amazed at how we are really okay with LLMs writing code end to end (without human in the loop) / dark factory concept but when it comes articles, HN is suddenly against LLMs writing words. I do not see the difference between writing code and writing prose. Both have keywords, grammars, syntax, meaningful combinations (function or chaining in code / collocations in words). If we think that AI-generated wor…
That's because the purpose of code is to be used, not to be read. The only purpose of the written word is to be read.
I disagree with the premise that "we" are all OK with AI slop computer code however. Even if it's just for consumption by machines, for at least some developers it is a creative outlet.
"institutional knowledge that exists nowhere in the codebase. Those engineers don’t exist yet because we’re not creating them. The juniors who should be learning right now are either not being hired or developing " This article passes blame to AI for developers not learning because they are not being actively hired. You do not need to be hired to learn something. You need to learn something in order to be hired.
I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What…
Outside of a sufficiently large organization „seniority“ of a developer doesn‘t make any practical sense. So, technically you can assign yourself any label, but that would be weird thing to do.
A freelancer is measured by portfolio, a computer scientist in academia by publications, an OSS contributor by the volume and impact of contributions. In either case, it‘s proportional to the effort spent on learning and building.
Anyway, regardless of employment status the measure of your professionalism is not defined by only something you can learn from the books. Experience matters a lot: it‘s nearly impossible to succeed in stakeholder management or presentation of your solutions by reading anything. You need practice and feedback. Senior engineers aren‘t those who excel in writing code: fresh CS graduates are supposed to know algorithms better. Senior engineers can contribute at full scale of SDLC themselves and support others. That is much easier to achieve in a professional environment rather than working on amateur projects.
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> In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is,…
We see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions. Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and thei…
The AI companies have taken all the wrong lessons from social media and learned how to make their products addictive and sticky.
I’m a certified hater, but even I’ve fallen into the exact trap you’re describing. Late last year I was in the process of buying a house that had a few known issues with a 30 day close. I had a couple sleepless nights because I had asked ChatGPT or Claude about some peculiar situation and the bots would tell me that I was completely screwed and give me advice to get out of the contract or draft a letter to the seller begging for some concession or more time. Then the next day I’d get a call from the mortgage guy or the attorney or the insurance broker and turns out, the people who actually knew what they were doing fixed my problem in 5 minutes.