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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#781

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #502
thedanbob wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I'm pretty sure this already happens and the results are exactly what you'd expect. Some of the "alternate routes" Google Maps has suggested for me in the past are almost certainly due to other people making unscheduled detours for gas or whatever, and the algorithm thinks "oh this random loop on a side street is popular, let's suggest it". And then anyone silly enough to follow the suggestion just adds more…

Long before any use of LLMs, OsmAnd would direct you, if you were driving past Palo Alto, to take a congested offramp to the onramp that faced it across the street. There is no earthly reason to do that; just staying on the freeway is faster and safer. So it's not obvious to me that patently crazy directions must come from watching people's behavior. Something else is going on.

I've seen this type of thing with OsmAnd too. My hypothesis is that someone messed up when drawing the map, and made the offramp an extension of the highway. But I haven't actually verified this.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#782

Post by juped »

falcor84 wrote: post #196
icepat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg, as always, is well known for making excellent business decisions that lead to greater sector buy in. The Metaverse is going great.

Really, that's what you're going with, arguing against the business acumen of the world's second richest person, and the only one at that scale with individual majority control over their company? As for the Metaverse, it was always intended as a very long-term play which is very early to be judged, but as an owner of a Quest headset, it's already going great for me.

I'm sorry for your sunk cost. I bought an early-ish Oculus Rift myself.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#783

Post by twelve40 »

randmeerkat wrote: post #244
dev1ycan wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he's not, just another delusional venture capitalist that hasn't bothered to look up the counter arguments to his point of view, done by mathematicians

> he's not, just another delusional venture capitalist that hasn't bothered to look up the counter arguments to his point of view, done by mathematicians Don’t hate on it, just spin up some startup with “ai” and LLM hype. Juice that lemon.

Raising on hype != success, most of these lemons will rot before they can even do a small secondary for themselves. Plenty of startups died when the last hype wave ended (which was easy zirp money, before ai). I don't trust anything without a growing revenue anymore, and even then...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#784

Post by ropable »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way. But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time. My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It wa…

I very much relate to the sentiment of starting out with simple tools and then backfilling knowledge gaps as I went. For me it was Excel -> Access shared DB forms -> Django web application framework -> etc. From spreadsheets, to database design, to web application development, to scaling HTTP services, and on and on it goes.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#785

Post by dyauspitr »

groos wrote: post #684

A good analogy from not-so-distant past is the outsourcing wave that swept the tech industry. Shareholders everywhere were salivating at the money they would make by hiring programmers in India at 1/10 the cost while keeping their profits. Those of us who have been in the industry a while all saw how that went. I think this new wave wave will go roughly similarly. Eventually, companies will realize that to keep their…

What do you mean by see how that went? The corps are at the point now where they stopped using consultancies and instead have their own company divisions in India where they still pay them 1/10th. If anything it’s a more dire situation.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#786

Post by dyauspitr »

iainctduncan wrote: post #343

I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question (at risk of deals failing through and being sued to obvilion). Which means we get the hear the real effects of tech debt all time. I call it the silent killer. Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. I'm constantly go…

I see there being no tech debt with sufficiently advanced AI. If humans are sufficiently out of the picture the AIs can just revert to highly performant binary output.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#787

Post by aussieguy1234 »

csmpltn wrote: post #214
dham wrote: post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

I'm aware of a designer, no coding skills, who is going to turn his startup idea into an MVP using LLMs. If that ever got serious, they would need an actual engineer to maintain and improve things.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#788

Post by aussieguy1234 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #411
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

We've been in this world for decades. Most developers couldn't write an operating system to save their life. Most could not write more than a simple SQL query. They sling code in some opinionated dev stack that abstracts the database and don't think too hard about the low-level details.

They'll probably go a step further and use an ORM instead of writing queries.

Since ORMs generally write crap unoptimized sql for all but the simplest of queries, this will lead to performance issues once things scale up.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#789

Post by gantrol »

When a company announces layoffs: people suspect there's something wrong with their growth, cash flow, etc.

When a company announces layoffs because AI is making things more efficient: people start arguing about whether AI can really replace humans.

If you were in company management and had to do layoffs, which would you choose?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#790

Post by geraneum »

batuhandumani wrote: post #76
geraneum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Can you elaborate?

What I mean by Zeitgeist is this: once an event begins, it becomes unstoppable. The most classic and cliché examples include Galileo’s heliocentric theory and the Inquisition, or Martin Luther initiating the Protestant movement. Some ideas, once they start being built upon by certain individuals or institutions of that era, continue to develop in that direction if they achieve success. That’s why I say, "Zeitgeist pr…

I didn’t get what you mean earlier but this is a good explanation. Thanks.
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