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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#721

Post by billy99k »

hobofan wrote: post #471
billy99k wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are unions any better than mega corps? My brother is part of a union and the leaders make millions. He's pigenholed at the same low pay rate and can't ever get a raise, until everyone in the same role also gets a raise (which will never happen). It traps people, because many union jobs can't or won't innovate, and when they look elsewhere, are underskilled (and stuck). You mention 'deepseek'. Are you joking? It's…

The top of megacorps make 4-6 orders of magnitude more than labor union leaders. To claim that there is no difference is mindboggeling.

Having 10 million and 30 million aren't all that different to the minimum wage workers barely making ends meet.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#722

Post by tester756 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #646
tester756 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the job is easy software engineering is easy? you live in bubble, try teaching programming to someone new to it and you'll realize how muuuuch effort it requires

Have you tried any other jobs? Have to ever tried teaching just the basics of plumbing to a 18 year old who can barely hold a screwdriver? If you want a challenge, try almost any other job than development, and you'll realize how easy all this stuff actually is.

I've been helping people with programming, from students struggling with classes, thru people trying to get 1st job, to people working in industry.

They were passing their classes, getting jobs and completing their tasks.

So I've witnessed how maaaany things people need to learn, what things are not easy to them and so on.

I'm not saying other jobs are easy/easier, but none of my friends, who work in "traditional" industries like homebuilding, road maintenance, manufacturing, etc, etc. needed to push THIS MANY hours into it in order to get 1st job, be decent on it, improve, get promoted, etc.

Almost none of them is learning during their free time in order to get better, etc.

>If you want a challenge, try almost any other job than development, and you'll realize how easy all this stuff actually is.

I mean, difficult != hard.

software eng. is difficult cuz requires a lot of time to put into in order to be proficient.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#723

Post by fancyfredbot »

adrr wrote: post #660
fancyfredbot wrote: post #393

I feel like in a sci-fi world with robots, teleportation and holodecks these people would decide to stay at home and hand wash the dishes. If an amazing world changing technology like LLMs shows up on your doorstep and your response is to ignore it and write blog posts about how you don't care about it then you aren't curious and you aren't really a hacker.

Dishwasher use is correlated to allergies in children. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25713281/

Recent research demonstrates that when epidemiologists find an association between cleaning the home and health problems such as allergies, this is often not caused by the removal of organisms, but rather by exposure of the lungs to cleaning products that cause a type of damage that encourages the development of allergic responses.

https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A...

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#724

Post by an0malous »

embedding-shape wrote: post #654
an0malous wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think comments like yours should include what salary range, industry, and company size your job entails. The last few years have been absolutely miserable for me at Series A YC startups

Salary range: 400 > 8000 EUR (monthly) over the years (starting job 10 years ago > last full-time salary) Industry I guess would be "startups" or just "tech", it ranges across holiday related, infrastructure, distributed networks, application development frameworks and some others. Smallest company I worked at was 4 including the CEO, largest been 300 people. Most of them I joined when it was 5-10 people, and left on…

Thanks. So maybe there's a difference between European startups and American ones, or maybe I'm just really unlucky.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#725

Post by tdeck »

embedding-shape wrote: post #614
tdeck wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely irrelevant. The point is that the profession is being devalued, i.e. losing value relative to where it was. If, for example, the US dollar loses value, it's not a "counterargument" to point out that it's still much more valuable than the Zimbabwe dollar.

It isn't though, none of our lives are happening in isolation, even if you don't believe it, there are other humans out there, with real responsibilities outside of computers. Even if the competition is fierce, do you think it isn't for other professions, or what's the point? Of course a job that is well-paid, has few drawbacks and let you sit indoors in front of computer, probably doing something you enjoy in genera…

> even if you don't believe it, there are other humans out there, with real responsibilities outside of computers.

Are those people's lives getting better because the capital class is able to devalue more skilled jobs every year?

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#726

Post by ishouldbework »

IAmBroom wrote: post #150
ishouldbework wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, speaking just for central Europe, it is pretty average. Sure, entry-level positions are different story, but anyone with at least few years for work experience can find reasonably payed job fairly quickly.

Others in Europe in this thread contradict your belief. Actual data is convincing; few are providing it.

Fair. My "information" is based on what I heard in my network. :)

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#727

Post by jlarcombe »

GrantMoyer wrote: post #373
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

I largely agree with this, but at the same time, I empathize with the FA's author. I think it's because LLMs feel categorically different from other technological leaps I've been exited about. The recent results in LLMs and diffusion models are undeniably, incredibly impressive, even if they're not to the point of being universally useful for real work. However they fill me with a feeling of supreme dissapointment, b…

Agree totally. Reminiscent of the Paul Erdös reaction to the proof of the Four Colour Problem.

It's been quite good reading these comments because a lot of them have put into words my own largely negative feelings about the AI ubiquitous hype, which I have found it hard to articulate. Your second paragraph, and someone else's comment about how they are attracted to computer science because they like fiddly detail and so are uninterested in a machine hiding all that, and a third comment about how so-called "busy work" is actually a good way of padding out difficult stuff and so a job of work becomes much less palatable when it is excised entirely.

The other thing I find deeply depressing is the degree to which people are thrilled (genuinely) by dreadful looking AI art and unbearable to read AI prose. Makes me think I've been kidding myself for years that people by and large have a degree of taste. Then again maybe it just means it's not to my taste..

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#728

Post by rkomorn »

grayhatter wrote: post #711
rkomorn wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone who uses vscode will never produce code faster than someone proficient in vim. Is this an actually serious/honest take of yours? I've been using vim for 20 years and, while I've spent almost no time with VS Code, I'd say that a lot of JetBrains' IDEs' built in features have definitely made me faster than I ever was with vim. Oh wait. No true vim user would come to this conclusion, right?

The take was supposed to be read as slightly hyperbolic. Because while the fastest user of an IDE, has never come close to the fastest I've seen in vim, as you pointed out, thats not really a reasonable comparison either. Here I'm intentionally only considering raw text editing speed, jumping across lines, switching files. If you're including IDE features, when you expect someone in vim to leave vim, you're comparing…

> My larger point was it's absurd to say someone who's faster using [interface] is a luddite because they don't use [other interface] with nearly identical features.

Okay. That, I agree with.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#729

Post by Gagarin1917 »

fooqux wrote: post #446
Gagarin1917 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The companies who now have piles of cash because they eliminated a huge chunk of labor will spend far more on new projects, many of which will require tradesmen. Economic waves never hit one sector and stop. The waves continues across the entire economy. You can’t think “companies will get rid of huge amounts of labor” and then stop asking questions. You need to then ask “what will companies do with decreased labor c…

> Economic waves never hit one sector and stop. Unless they do, or are severely weakened. Consider the net worth of the 1% over the last few decades. Even corrected for inflation, its growth is staggering. The wealth gap is widening, and that wealth came from somewhere. So yes, when there is an economic boom, investment happens. However, the growth of that top %1 tells me that they've been taking more and more off th…

That’s a discussion about where wealth gains are going, however my comment was about the concept of excess capital, investment, and jobs.

Yes, the wealth of the 1% has increased over the decades, but so has investment. The economy still dwarfs what it was decades ago. There are more jobs than there were decades ago.

Hopefully you see my point but now. The “waves” of economics effects objectively didn’t stop at the rich.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#730

Post by computerthings »

quantummagic wrote: post #367
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…

> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.

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