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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#551

Post by xigoi »

linhns wrote: post #515
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? No, not at all. I may be using it wrong. I put in "write me a library that decodes network packets in " and it had no idea where to start. What part of it is it supposed to do? I don't want to do any more typing than I have to.

Well, if you ask it to write a library at the start, it's likely it will not do that well. Start small, spoon feed some examples.

If you have to put in this much effort, why not just write it yourself?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#552

Post by JumpCrisscross »

furryrain wrote: post #423
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #178

“There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?” This is a great framing.

I'm less convinced. To keep and/or increase my current compensation, I have to be competitive in the software development market. (Whether I need AI to remain competitive is another matter.) The 16,000 new babies will be competing in different markets. Oh, and of those 16,000 babies, many are born in far less fortunate circumstances, they're already far behind their cohort. :/

> keep and/or increase my current compensation, I have to be competitive in the software development market

Author’s point is that competitiveness can come in many forms. Having the same AI proficiency as everyone else isn’t differentiating. (And it isn’t table stakes.)

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#553

Post by stavros »

mekael wrote: post #542
stavros wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think this is it. If you don't learn to use them, you'll be much slower than people who do, but also they're not really that hard to learn, so it's not super urgent.

I'm still confused about the things I'll be slower in though, and I'm being sincere with that confusion. If it's "boilerplate", then I haven't done enough research or pick a library which has little to none of that, or I'm not using the template(s) built into whatever framework I am using. For example, in one of the projects I'm working on, I'm using the VSA pattern. I have the list of 50 to 75 features I need to imp…

I find that can write features 5-10x faster with these tools than by hand, at a comparable level of quality (though it hasn't been long enough for me to judge what'll happen in a year).

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#554

Post by JumpCrisscross »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #352
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you aim for if you want to invest early Sure. I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. Most new early-stage VCs do. > get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little Broadly speaking, when your investment outcomes don’t differentiate between anything and zero, you’re mostly going to get zero.

> I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. This holds if you consider "underperforming" to be a comparison of expected values. On the other hand, if you consider "probability of getting a really huge payoff" to be the measure by which the investments are compared, the index fund is the one that looses in the comparison.

> if you consider "probability of getting a really huge payoff" to be the measure by which the investments are compared

That’s gambling. You’re truncating the curve below the top. It’s a terrific strategy for middlemen. Its expected value is lower than index investing.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#555

Post by 0x3f »

Devasta wrote: post #439
0x3f wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I want to cure lung cancer, therefore as an Effective Altruist™ I maximize my income by selling cigarettes to children outside playgrounds. The money will go towards research in my will, and in the meantime the incidence of lung cancer in teenagers will incentivize the free market to find a cure! People don't become quants because they are EAs, they become EAs to justify to themselves why they became quants.

Being a quant is not that interesting and if you're not redirecting the money you're not really an EA, are you?

Your first paragraph is just a standard response to utilitarianism, although a poor one because it doesn't consider EV.

Nonetheless I'm not quite sure why merely mentioning EA draws out all these irrelevant replies about it. It was incidental, not an endorsement of EA.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#556

Post by 0x3f »

ashwinsundar wrote: post #306
0x3f wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I didn't realize maximizing money is the way to achieve moral excellence. It's interesting how Puritanical the EA folks are

There is no moral excellence but which you invent for yourself. But given the first principle or goal of 'having the most impact', maximizing money is often quite useful.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#557

Post by therealdrag0 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #538
hungryhobbit wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead I truly believe so much of the anti-AI sentiment is the same as the Luddites. They're often used as a meme now, but they were very real people, faced with a real and present risk to their livelihoods. They acted out of fear, but not just irrational fear. AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluati…

The burden of proof lies with he who makes grand claims. My counterargument in the face of your lack of evidence is: “Where are all the improvements to my daily life? Where are the disrupting geniuses who go-to market 100x faster than their Luddite counterparts?” To paraphrase another analogy that I enjoyed, it’s a bit like when 3d printing became a thing and hype con artists claimed that no one would buy anything an…

You don’t need 100x productivity to be disruptive. In business 10% gain can be quite enormous. My senior engineers are estimating 25-50% gains. That is a far cry from your 100,000% gain, but very real and meaningful.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#558

Post by 0x3f »

anticorporate wrote: post #327
0x3f wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I knew this canned rebuttal was coming and almost addressed it in my previous comment. I've not found this to be true at all, for a variety of reasons. One of my moral principles that extreme wealth accumulation by any individual is ultimately harmful to society, even for those who start with altruistic values. Money is power, and power corrupts. Also, the further from my immediate circle I focus my impact on, the le…

But you're not supposed to accumulate the wealth, you're supposed to forward it to your elected causes.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#559

Post by logicchains »

mekael wrote: post #534
logicchains wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand. Then you still need to learn how to use the tools to speed up reviewing the code.

If I don't have experience with the underlying framework/language/thing being modified, it makes it quite difficult to trust the actual review. In this example, I haven't worked heavily with Cloudformation, so I can't call b.s if it leaves a database instance exposed to the wider public internet rather than in my company's private VPC.

You can ask the agent to check that it doesn't leave a database instance exposed to the public, and present you with proof for you to check (references to the code and the relevant Cloudformation documentation). Then repeat this for all the things you'd normally want to check for in a code review.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#560

Post by 0x3f »

danny_codes wrote: post #408
0x3f wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 only real exceptions are things that specifically require you personally, like investing time with your family, or developing yourself in some way. So, the things that matter the most for most people? Studies pretty consistently show that happiness caps off at relatively modest wealth.

That's not their stated goal. Their stated goal is to maximize impact, not their own happiness.
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