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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#781

Post by richard_todd »

adamredwoods wrote: post #708
richard_todd wrote: post #704

The craft is still there just like painting is still an alternative to a photograph. It's just not going to be valued by society anymore, and far fewer will learn how to do it. Natural language is the new programming language. For now, understanding the craft is still an edge in making better prompts, but already I can see that telling Antigravity "now look for ways to make this more efficient" works almost as well a…

Natural language is not a programming language. Programming is precision. Natural language is fuzzy. >> spend my retirement having fun in it. People who have reaped the rewards of their careers tend not to be the ones concerned about their futures. Apathy.

Even if I were retired and financially set now, that would mean nothing in 10 years if an unemployed society collapses around me. Apathy is not on the menu today.

Re: We mourn our craft

#782

Post by margalabargala »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #764
margalabargala wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you weren't actually using the thesaurus as a reverse dictionary here. The thesaurus contains definitions, and the reverse dictionary was the search tool built into their website. It would work just as well against a dictionary as a thesaurus. Importantly to the point being discussed, what you did does not work at all against an actual physical thesaurus book.

If the thesaurus had an entry for "very useful" (as WordHippo does), then yes, it would work against an actual physical thesaurus book. This whole cluster of words is coded into Wiktionary incorrectly – for example, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/utility#Synonyms is a subsection of "Adjective" despite listing synonyms for a sense of the noun: > (state of being useful): usefulness, value, advantages, benefit, return,…

Paper thesauruses (thesaurai?) won't have prefixes like "very" in their pages.

Furthermore, even if we allow "very useful", that's a far cry from "admitting a large number of uses". The latter requires a search engine to properly map.

Which they've been good at for a while. You could have googled "word meaning admitting a large number of uses" back in 2018 and gotten good answers.

My point is, the tools you've linked to are useful/versatile, but it's not the thesaurus that makes them so useful, it's the digital query engine built on top of the thesaurus.

Re: We mourn our craft

#783

Post by gordonhart »

leptons wrote: post #753
gordonhart wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a scale that would make big tobacco blush.

Big Oil too

Personally I’m less bullish on oil as the metaphor given how much of the modern world is underpinned by cheap and ubiquitous oil. If oil disappeared tomorrow, society would collapse — if tobacco disappeared tomorrow, it would make some subset of the population very unhappy for a few weeks.

Software engineering AI API dependence seems to have already screamed past the tobacco mark but we’re still a long ways away from oil. Though I would bet that we hit it sometime in the next few decades once the bulk of the industry has never written code in any serious capacity.

Re: We mourn our craft

#784

Post by weavie »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #407
hnlmorg wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified. Instead what we have is: - AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason. - perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”.…

Have you tried using GenAI to write documentation? You can literally point it to a folder and say, analyze everything in this folder and write a document about it. And it will do it. It's more thorough than anything a human could do, especially in the time frame we're talking about. If GenAI could only write documentation it would still be a game changer.

Have you tried reading the documentation it generates?

Re: We mourn our craft

#785

Post by seanmcdirmid »

davidw wrote: post #741
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3000 is not that much for hardware (like a refurbished MBP Max with decent amount of RAM), and you'd be surprised how much more useful a thing that is slightly worse than the expensive thing is when you don't have anxiety about token usage.

$3000 might not be much to a wealthy software engineer in the US, but to, say, a college student in Portugal, it's a big expense. Open source software democratized software in a huge way.

Ok, from that perspective we are still a few years from when a college student in Portugal can run local OSS models on their own hardware...but we aren't a few decades away from that, at least.

Re: We mourn our craft

#786

Post by _zagj »

chasd00 wrote: post #505
_zagj wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationship…

even in the 90s there was the phrase "the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents". It was always the case you never really knew who/what you were dealing with on the Internet.

Are you trying to argue that the probability of interacting with a bot or reading/seeing something algorithmically generated hasn't gone up astronomically since the 90s?

Re: We mourn our craft

#787

Post by wasmainiac »

alephnerd wrote: post #775
wasmainiac wrote: post #757

> If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. I’m not against AI in itself, but the current implementation (read market) can eat my shiny metal … I got kids to feed and bills to pay. Yes AI was all about post scarcity. Hiring in our industry is already feeling the brunt of AI, where is the UBI? Where is our soft landing? I’m too old to learn XYZ skill if I get laid off, it will be life changing, and…

> Hiring in our industry is already feeling the brunt of AI AI isn't what is driving us to slow hiring down in the US. There are other reasons I have brought up multiple times on HN. > I’m too old to learn XYZ skill if I get laid off Sadly, you will have to. My dad is in his 60s and has been programming and soldering since ZX Spectrums and apple ][s roamed the earth, yet he still keeps abreast on the latest CNCF proj…

The name of the game for me is building “sh#t that works well” and I like it, and that means constant learning no doubt. I’ve done crazy sh!t like implementing Webservers with bash, accessed accessed by tunneling over uart, to configure laser driven HUD on a pair of glasses. All this was new to me but I did it and it works well within the constraints we were given.

Now AI is making us more efficient (with questionable quality) that means we need less people to get a job done, less people hired per project. I have personally experienced this, to a degree. Now if I get layedoff and I don’t meet the cut because there is more competition someone better or more desperate that me, I’m out of luck.

I can restart my career as an electrician, I studied a lot of electronics both professionally and personally, but I will be starting as an apprentice, that’s not putting food on my table.

> We are paying you $200k-300k base salaries

That’s nice, I earn far less than half that as a web dev in Norway.

Re: We mourn our craft

#788

Post by wizzwizz4 »

margalabargala wrote: post #782
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the thesaurus had an entry for "very useful" (as WordHippo does), then yes, it would work against an actual physical thesaurus book. This whole cluster of words is coded into Wiktionary incorrectly – for example, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/utility#Synonyms is a subsection of "Adjective" despite listing synonyms for a sense of the noun: > (state of being useful): usefulness, value, advantages, benefit, return,…

Paper thesauruses (thesaurai?) won't have prefixes like "very" in their pages. Furthermore, even if we allow "very useful", that's a far cry from "admitting a large number of uses". The latter requires a search engine to properly map. Which they've been good at for a while. You could have googled "word meaning admitting a large number of uses" back in 2018 and gotten good answers. My point is, the tools you've linked…

Even if I don't know the word "versatile", I can go from the phrase "admitting a large number of uses" to the phrase "very useful". The original point I made (before I discovered OneLook Thesaurus) described the effectiveness of a procedure that was just manually looking things up in databases, as one might do in a paper thesaurus. (I could print out Wiktionary and WordHippo in alphabetical order, buy a Cambridge Thesaurus and some bookshelves, and perform the procedure entirely offline, with only a constant factor slowdown.)

Re: We mourn our craft

#789

Post by alephnerd »

wasmainiac wrote: post #787
alephnerd wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hiring in our industry is already feeling the brunt of AI AI isn't what is driving us to slow hiring down in the US. There are other reasons I have brought up multiple times on HN. > I’m too old to learn XYZ skill if I get laid off Sadly, you will have to. My dad is in his 60s and has been programming and soldering since ZX Spectrums and apple ][s roamed the earth, yet he still keeps abreast on the latest CNCF proj…

The name of the game for me is building “sh#t that works well” and I like it, and that means constant learning no doubt. I’ve done crazy sh!t like implementing Webservers with bash, accessed accessed by tunneling over uart, to configure laser driven HUD on a pair of glasses. All this was new to me but I did it and it works well within the constraints we were given. Now AI is making us more efficient (with questionabl…

> That’s nice, I earn less than half that as a web dev in Norway

Well, that's a different conversation then, and you raise a fair point.

I think it is fair for most Europeans to complain because your business community does not respect software and other engineering and IP driven disciplines.

The fact that Bangalore [0] tech salaries have caught up to Italian [1] tech salaries highlights that fact. But then again, you are competing against Czech [2], Polish [3], and Romanian [4] developers who are also members of the EFTA and whose governments provide massive subsidizes for tech companies to operate there.

On the other hand, if I see American SWEs complain I will get livid.

> I’ve done crazy sh!t like implementing Webservers with bash, accessed accessed by tunneling over uart, to configure laser driven HUD on a pair of glasses. All this was new to me but I did it and it works well within the constraints we were given.

That is great stuff from a technical perspective, but what I mean is making sure any development work you do is aligned with your employer, or shifting employers to one who is better aligned with SWEs and Engineering, such as my buddies from college who specialized in HPC and ended up doing simulation work in Equinor style ONG majors.

Alternatively, you may have no choice but to immigrate to Stockholm or London because there is some amount of network effect for software in both metros.

> Now if I get layedoff and I don’t meet the cut because there is more competition someone better or more desperate that me, I’m out of luck

Assuming you live in a city (an actual city) like Oslo and keep up-to-date technically you should be fine.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/czech-r...

[3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/poland

[4] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania

Re: We mourn our craft

#790

Post by AndrewKemendo »

hnlmorg wrote: post #778
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what to tell you other than to say that the concept of determinism in engineering is extremely new Everything you said right now holds equally true for chemical engineering and biomedical engineering so like you need get some experience

That’s some epic goal post shifting going on there!! We’re talking about software algorithms. Chemical and biomedical engineering are entirely different fields. As are psychology, gardening, and morris dancing

I said all technologies
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