Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 800 posts

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#71

Post by cryptonym »

butILoveLife wrote: post #4

This would hit harder if Bitcoin didn't win and AI coding didn't completely change our jobs. Why not simply evaluate things instead of ignoring them until its too late? Sure, we don't have infinity time, but the fact that OP mentions these two things, means the pattern showed up enough.

Crypto didn't "win", the technology is there but people are mostly gambling, or doing shady stuff. Shall I mention NFTs? It didn't change the life of the average joe, nor business. It's a niche.

Many people are still coding without AI and doing perfectly fine. When you design serious things, coding is not where most time is spent anyway. Maybe it'll become unavoidable at some point, by that time the experience will be refined and it'll be easier to learn.

Point is, it's never too late. If you don't need to be cutting edge on a new tech, it may not make sense to put the extra effort of early birds. If you put that effort, you better not do it for free.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#72

Post by aduwah »

A_Duck wrote: post #22

Crypto isn't bad because it failed to make early adopters rich — it did make them rich. It's bad because it has horrible externalities in scams, war crimes / sanctions evasion, organised crime — which most of those early adopters were well aware of.

Not to defend crypto, but this all applies to fiat too

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#73

Post by kxrm »

As someone further down the road in my career, I would argue that waiting is your prerogative but you do so at your own peril.

I made these kind of mistakes early in my career, stuck it out with PHP for far too long ignoring all the changes with frontend design trends, react, etc. I was using jQuery far too late in my career and it really hurt me during interviews. What I was doing was seen as dated and it made ageism far worse for me.

Showing a portfolio website that was using tables instead of divs.

I had to rapidly skill up and it takes longer than you think when you stick too long with what works for you.

If AI truly is a nothing-burger than guess what? Nothing lost and perhaps you learned some adjacent tech that will help you later. My advice is to NEVER stop learning in this field.

Learning is your true superpower. Without that skill, you are a cog that will be easily replaced. AI has revealed to me who among my colleagues is curious, and a continuous learner. Those virtues have proven over the course of my 25+ year career in technology to be what keeps you relevant and marketable.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#74

Post by emoII »

A_Duck wrote: post #22

Crypto isn't bad because it failed to make early adopters rich — it did make them rich. It's bad because it has horrible externalities in scams, war crimes / sanctions evasion, organised crime — which most of those early adopters were well aware of.

I think you can actually replace crypto with LLMs/Diffusion models in this sentence and it will still hold true

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#75

Post by yunwal »

bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

> A flat tire is a flat tire, no matter whether a recession is going on or whether LLMs are causing chaos in white collar work.

There’s really not much stopping changing tires from being automated away. Further standardization of tires or wage increases would probably do the trick.

There’s still plenty of software to be created. You’ll probably have to learn some ML tricks or whatever, but there’s nothing going away, just changing as software has always done.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#76

Post by surgical_fire »

Okay, this text was pretty good. Refreshing to read something that doesn't seem written by AI too (would be ironic given the contents).

The only scenario where I think it pays off to be on top of the hype is of you are chasing money sloshing around the latest hype. You know, the hustle culture thing. If that's not your thing, waiting until things are established (if they ever get there) is harmless.

And yeah, AI as it is now is at best moderately useful. I use it on a daily basis, but could do without it with little harm.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#77

Post by colejohnson66 »

lapcat wrote: post #55
heytakeiteasy wrote: post #14

Feels like a false equivalency. It's just my experience, but I've completely ignored crypto and the metaverse, and I don't get the sense I'm missing out on much. In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose…

> Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose That's the point of the blog post. If you can't even say right now whether it's for the better, then there's no reason to rush in.

I read OP as saying it is transformative, at least for them. Whether it's transformative for society is left to be decided.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#78

Post by RustyBucket »

adriancooney wrote: post #12

There are real productivity gains by using these tools right now. Instead of doing 1x your normal work, you can do 5x while still maintaining quality. This is like an accountant sticking to pen and paper because calculators are big and clunky.

To be honest, I would rather spend 5x effort while doing my normal work, because salary won't grow.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#79

Post by [deleted] »

wolframhempel wrote: post #50

There's value in being early - in the right thing. - If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush Of course, you could just as well have - become an Acti…

[deleted]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#80

Post by Xenoamorphous »

bluGill wrote: post #21
marnett wrote: post #2

> I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. What jobs aren’t requiring usage of these tools by now?

You should be able to pick up tools and learn on need. There are better version control systems than git - always have been, but git won despite being worse. (Git was massively better than what was popular before it won) if you can't learn git quick then you shouldn't program at all - there are much harder tools you will need to know and many are company or project specific

Mercurial?
Post reply on HN