> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.
I feel like I've been hearing this exact sentence for 2 years now...
We mourn our craft
851–860 of 918 posts
Re: We mourn our craft
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can’t reason about inference (or training) of LLMs on the semantic level. You can’t predict the output of an LLM for a specific input other than by running it. If you want the output to be different in a specific way, you can’t reason with precision that a particular modification of the input, or of the weights, will achieve the desired change (and only that change) in the output. Instead, it’s like a slot machin…
That’s like saying that the human brain is based on simple physical field equations, and therefore its behavior is easy to understand. Right, which is the point: LLMs are much more like human coworkers than compilers in terms of how you interact with them. Nobody would say that there's no point to working with other people because you can't predict their behavior exactly.
> LLMs are much more like human coworkers
Specifically they are like Julius, the colleague managers like but is a drag on everyone else.
Re: We mourn our craft
#853> 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…
> where is the UBI?
I have a bridge to sell¹ to everyone who ever believed Sam Altman was serious about and ever cared about UBI. All his “career” was about himself, he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone else. Only way he’d care about UBI is if that somehow would benefit him even more than the alternatives.
¹ Not really. Unlike Sam, I’d feel bad about scamming anyone.
Re: We mourn our craft
#854Earlier 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…
Yea most people earn far less than that in the US too, that’s just hacker news being out of touch
Re: We mourn our craft
#855Think there is some reversion to wider mean at play here too. The majority of jobs out there are not about whether the employee feels fulfilled. And commoditisations of code is likely to trigger same here.
Re: We mourn our craft
#856I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable buggy bloatware actually dies. Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching
Just wait out until you find out how vulnerable the average house is to robbers. The only difference with software is that we have somehow discarded deterrence and law enforcement as reasonable parts of a security strategy and keep insisting that technological defenses need to be 100% tight no matter the cost.
Re: We mourn our craft
#857Like other tech disrupted crafts before this, think furniture making or farming, that's how it goes. From hand-made craft, to mass production factories (last couple of decades) to fully automated production. The craft was dying long before LLMs. Started in dotcom, ZIRP added some beatings, then LLMs are finishing the job. This is fine, because like in furniture making, the true craftsmen will be even more valuable (o…
Where do people find this optimism? I reckon when the software jobs fall everything else will follow shortly too. That's just the first target because it's what we know and the manual stuff is a little harder for now. The "good news" is everyone might be in the same boat so the system will have to adapt,
There is however no reason to believe that the system will adapt in ways that are beneficial to you. Those in power don't tend to like giving it up and now they don't even need other humans to help them oppress those that would stand up to them.
Re: We mourn our craft
#858Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're saying might be true, but it's also a choice to delegate responsibility to someone other than yourself. I'm not saying that the adversarial state of computing is ok, just that most people don't care, or don't like the alternatives. Even as someone concerned with the issues you mention, the shift happening now feels pretty magical to me. I can only imagine how non-technical people must feel.
People definitely care about things that a more open platform brings you, but today's open platforms have really bad downsides. The thing is, those downsides are artificial. They were manufactured by the corporations that prefer to be in control of our devices. It's not the natural state of things. I often get asked by friends and family "can I get rid of annoyance X" or "can I have feature Y" on their Android phones…
> They prefer working to non-working.
This sums up many things perfectly. I'll be stealing this.
Re: We mourn our craft
#859Made it to the 5th stage of grief
Re: We mourn our craft
#860Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me its the money. Software paid and does pay well when I got in. I have actually been trying to get the eff out as fast as I can and move to management/research (I work in ML). I have avoided web dev shit like the plague since it is indeed very low value added work. The fact that LLMs can finish all this crappy work for 20bucks a month where I dont have to do it by hand is a welcome step. Otoh, I dont think point…
Coding is a tool to solve a problem, but, to many it is also a culture. It has a history, it has connections, it has lore, it had some loosely commonly held values, and yes it absolutely was a craft. It’s okay for people to mourn that. It’s not the same as someone who may have taken it up for money. That itself, is seeing coding as a tool for income—which is valid. Calling it pathetic I think lacks empathy and perhap…
Thats actually right. Tbh, I loved learning languages and read books like Programming Perl just because somebody recommended it in an online forum (back in the day). So I get the appeal. But in the end, coding by hand is on its way out and its better to move on rather than romanticize.