Live data from Hacker News

I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

721–730 of 800 posts

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#721
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

The assumption that those managers have is that it’s easy to replace tech guys because AI is advancing, and a crap like that nonsense.

Funny enough, I got laid off last month, yes I’m a tech guy, now they apparently regret it because they are now scrambling to find a replacement to do the tech tasks!

TBH, I’m happy I got laid off because I’m finally building something I wanted to use.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are doing toy projects and praising them, while some are testing them in real world situations and not findings them that useful. But the former is labelling the latter as luddites and telling them they will be left behind.

As someone on the intersection of both (I've built a lot of vibe coded toy projects and lead a vibe coding initiative at work), they're both right and both wrong. For a single dev team, vibe coding is great. Write specs, write plans, write code. I know what the project wants and needs because I'm the target market. At work, I haven't written more than a few lines of code since December. But I work with other people v…

> Sure, we built something in 2 mos that would have otherwise taken us 6 mos, but now I'm fixing the mess that we caused.

You didn't actually build it in 2 months.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#723
post #45
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.

You can make pretty much the same arguments for LLMs. Pollution, corruption, and war are all things I'm keen to avoid.

And thus it is reasonable to not use LLMs. And it's not only the training process that's problematic. There are so many individual LLM users who waste electricity on tasks that they would have solved by thinking for themselves just a few years ago.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#724
post #7

I agree with the conclusion but not with the premise. The conclusion is, "I don't have to be an early adopter," but the premise seems to be "there is zero utility in getting in on anything early."

That's not quite what they write:

> Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#725
Not only is he not being left behind, he might even have the liberty to abandon ship.

So many humans are uploading their code into Github for the AIs to train on, and thus digging their own graves whereby they'll eventually be outsmarted by AI.

On the other side of the coin, don't the AIs have to be weary about training on prior output in order to maintain the purity of their sources? The dogfooding for them will end up becoming overwhelming.

Perhaps innovation should stay private or used to extract micropayments.

Managing themselves well, hardware tinkerers have a solid future, because robots aren't as effective yet in the real-world. I think that is the next golden age, actually.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#726

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.

What is too late? If you want to use cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange, go ahead, it’s right there! There’s this irony to the FOMO in crypto, which is people argue the “sensible” thing (it’s the future of money) to create FOMO for the insensible thing (it’s a lottery ticket). You’re right it’s too late to buy a lottery ticket, but the vision wasn’t a lottery, it was a medium of exchange! AI assisted coding is th…

> Wouldn’t it be ironic if all the early adopters were the losers because they liked the hacky nature of it? This happened to a lot of early computer adopters, low level programmers, etc.

Relevant XKCD: 598

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time. It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems…

> It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. I don't think that's it. SO was the go-to page for troubleshooting, whose traffic was not exactly originating from web search. Also, the LLM-correlated drop in traffic is also reported by search engines. Stack Overf…

I mean the first decline happened well before ChatGPT so it can't just be that.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#728

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.

You're right, you are using it wrong. An LLM can read code faster than you can, write code faster than you can, and knows more things than you do. By "you" I mean you, me, and anyone with a biological brain. Where LLMs are behind humans is depth of insight. Doing anything non-trivial requires insight. The key to effectively using LLMs is to provide the insight yourself, then let the LLM do the grunt work. Kind of lik…

> An LLM can read code faster than you can, write code faster than you can, and knows more things than you do.

I don't agree. It can't write code at all, it can only copy things it's already seen. But, if that is true, why can't it solve my problem?

> The key to effectively using LLMs is to provide the insight yourself, then let the LLM do the grunt work

Okay, so how do I do that? Remember, I want to do ZERO TYPING. I do not want to type a single character that is not code. I already know what I want the code to do, I just want it typed in.

I just don't think AI can ever solve a problem I have.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone on the intersection of both (I've built a lot of vibe coded toy projects and lead a vibe coding initiative at work), they're both right and both wrong. For a single dev team, vibe coding is great. Write specs, write plans, write code. I know what the project wants and needs because I'm the target market. At work, I haven't written more than a few lines of code since December. But I work with other people v…

> Sure, we built something in 2 mos that would have otherwise taken us 6 mos, but now I'm fixing the mess that we caused. You didn't actually build it in 2 months.

Even if it takes me a month to get us to fix (likely a week tbh), then it took us 3 months to build.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your point. You said it would be nice to live..... what does that have to do with bitcoin? What's your point? Make a point.

My point is your opinion is sheltered and lacks life experience.

I understand your point. And I agree on people without life changing fluctuations in currency will hardly understand that side of bitcoin value.
Post reply on HN