I was in Warsaw a few weeks ago and ended up visiting that museum almost on a whim, so I wasn’t prepared for the experience. I don’t think a museum has ever hit me that hard — inspiring, gut-wrenching, and unforgettable.
I used to live nearby and was always weirded out by the statue just being one of the required two-minute stops for all the tourist groups. A short monologue, then move on to the next attraction...
First, there are still people who don't like high level languages and don't use them, because they find assembly better.
Second, I personally work in a field where I need to consult the source of truth, the actual binary, and not the high level source code - precisely because the high level of abstraction is obscuring the real mechanics of software and someone needs to debug and clean up the mess done by "high level thinkers".
High level programming languages are only an illusion (albeit a good one) but good engineers remember that illusion is an illusion.
When people communicate they speak in terms of the overwhelming generality of reality. There's always at least one guy that is an extreme exception.
I can tell you this, the person you're replying to comes from the overwhelming majority/generality. You, on the other hand, are that one guy.
Of course even my comment is a bit general. You're not "one" guy literally. But you are an extreme minority that is small enough such that common English vernacular in software does not refer to you.
Not a compliment. I’m saying you’re speaking from an incredibly obscure perspective because you took what the other person said way to literally and pedantically.
Your intent here is irrelevant. ;) I know why my perspective is the correct one here and the fact that is "incredibly obscure" only supports my findings.
Majority of software sucks and majority of "software engineers" suck too. It's not a herd that one should ever want to be associated with.
I agree that the problem is volume, even more so than correctness.
All that LLMs and other generative models have done is enable an order of magnitude more stuff to be created cheaply. This then puts the onus and cost on the consumer of that output, hence why everyone is exhausted after a day of work that just involves looking over output. This volume of output will cause people to stop looking at all of the output and just trust the randomly generated code, and in time the quality will suffer.
I'm just saying that I already see that people are outsourcing all the thinking to the models - not only code generation and reviews, but even design - the part that "senior engineers" without imagination think only they are capable of doing.
It's worrying how much trust is being put in those systems. And my worry is not about the job anymore, but our future in general.
I think those of us who have years of experience under our belt our safe. If we're older the knowledge is ingrained and atrophy of this knowledge will be limited based on the fact that it's already "imprinted" onto our brains.
Our futures are safe in this sense, in fact it's even beneficial as we may be the last generation to have these skills. Humanities future on the other hand is another open question.
It's a bit of a weird place to be in as a senior engineer who has spent 2 decades perfecting his craft.
So, on one hand, I'm also kinda sad and how quickly we've thrown the guardrails away, but on the other -- it's... Well. It's just work.
Turns out, no one ever really cared how elegant or robust our code was and how clever we were to think up some design or other, or that we had an eye on the future; just that it worked well enough to enable X business process / sale / whatever.
And now we're basically commoditised, even if the quality isn't great, more people can solve these problems. So, being honest, I think a lot of my pushback is just a kinda internal rebellion against admitting that actually, we're not all that special after all.
I'm just glad I got to spend 20 years doing my hobby professionally, got paid really well for it, and often times was forced to solve complicated problems no one else could -- that kept me from boredom.
I think the shift we are seeing now, as 'previously' knowledge workers is that work becomes a lot more like manual labour than what we've really been doing up until now. When there's no 'I don't know' anymore, then you're not really doing knowledge work, right?
I guess I'll just ride the wave, spew out LLM crap at work, and save the craft for some personal projects, I'll certainly have the capacity now work is a no-op.
Yeah, but the thing is, it's not "just work". Software now has really big impact on the world and actual lives.
In a corporate world, we are typically detached from real world consequences and looking at people around me, people really don't think about such things - but I do. And I really care, because "relaxed" standards might result in errors that amount to stuff like identity thefts, or stolen money, shit like this, even on the smallest scale.
Obviously we can't prevent everything, but it seems like we, as industry, decided to collectively YOLO and stop giving shit at all. And personally I don't like that it is me who is losing sleep over this, while people who happily delegate all their thinking over to LLMs sleep better than ever now.
Yeah that's a tough spot to be in; I think though, your responsibility really ends with you at work, unless you're very high up on the management chain.
Keep it simple right; in everything you do, make things a bit better than you found them. It's enough. You're never going to win the fight to get everyone (or maybe even ANYONE depending how messed up your org is) to care; so why lose sleep on things you can't change?
At least, that's what I started doing some years ago by now having lost lots of those fights, and I'm sleeping fine again.
You could say the same thing about compiled code, actually it's worse because anything a compiler spits out is very hard to understand even for those who understand assembly.
You don't need to look at the entire program at the assembly level to figure out parts that you want to optimise or prove for correctness. You do need to look at all the code the LLM generates in order to understand it.
You can learn to understand the patterns that compilers spit out and there are many tools out there to aid in that understanding. You can't learn to understand what an LLM spits out because by design it is non-deterministic and will vary in form and function for each pull of the lever.
You can learn to understand how high level concepts in code map down to assembly language and how compilers transform constructs in one language to another. You can't know that about LLMs because they generate non-deterministic output based on processing of huge low-precision tables.
I dunno, I'd rather proofread (or better yet just test) LLM-generated code than have to reason about assembly. You can't just look at part of the assembly to prove that the rest is right, especially if it's hand-written, or maybe just -O3. But anyway compilers are not what come to mind when someone mentions LLM coding.
This is an illusion: reasoning about typical NPM-based project with hundreds of dependencies that you will NEVER dig into is not at all easier, it's just that most people completely give up on this and base their "reasoning" not on the facts, but on the made-up stories about what do those things supposedly do.
I’m not sure what you mean? I have goals that I want to achieve; lil ai buddy comes along and helps me, over time buddy becomes better able to help me do stuff.
What do you mean role? Person who does stuff I guess, same as it is now.
Because I'm the one employing it? A model which makes a "delete production database" mistake clearly needs to be taught not to do that, and the person whose production database was deleted ought to be able to teach them not to do that. This seems quite reasonable to me.
Sure! Two are gameplay pics. An enemy sprite sheet generation, and the results of the map generators. Of course these are basic placeholders for a few hours of work, but I will definitely go heavy on this route with more layering and details.
Off the cuff I do think it's pretty good advice if someone is unfulfilled or really spending a bunch of time just relaxing. Almost everyone I know with nothing much going on that had kids are happier for it. If you are wasting your life fucking about, kids will force you to do something with your life, and raising kids is an honorable use of time.
If you already have a fulfilling and happy life without children though you are throwing a wrench into a good thing with a dice roll of how it's going to turn out. Turns out, I'm not the kind of person that finds raising children fulfilling. If my life was already unfulfilling, then that wouldn't have made much difference and at least added a distraction.
There's no one to blame but me for that, but I'm here to pass on the experience.
Of course what's interesting is that while you do have the obligation to provide for and take care of your kids, you don't have the obligation to enjoy it or find it fulfilling. But people get offended if you don't, which I've never understood, as there is nothing dishonorable about it.
No sarcasm, your reply is insulting. But stupidity, blindness and greed-driven techno-optimism displayed on this site got to a vomit-inducing level recently.
I'm wondering how on earth are people supposed to provide for a family these days?
the techno optimism has been absolutely insane. celebrating that people won't have jobs anymore, that robots will be doing everything and that how the human species is just a stepping stone or something and if you resist you're a "specist" (famously said by Larry Page)
Don't swing to the extremes, world is a bit bigger than news portals and US ones are beyond toxic regardless of the party favored. Nature is still beautiful, traveling is as enlightening as ever, meeting new cultures, foods, learning real history of the world as you visit places is priceless. Raising kids is hard but extremely rewarding. And so on.
Times are not easy, but they are not doomish. Or, every decade there were doomish periods where you could have the same view. every. single. one. How would you feel in late 30s when big part of the world was visibly inching to global war? This is nothing and nobody knows where this current moment will lead us to.
It's not about news but the reality around me, and I'm not in US but in a country that has an active war on the other side of the eastern border. And it's a war with increasing participation of drones and robots.
And at work? Yeah, the clock is ticking, and in this transitory period people seem to be happily ginving up on thinking and their agency. Execs are getting more and more sociopathic. Young people more and more disenganged. The planet is getting worse and worse.
At this point I really regret that I brought my kids to life, because I'm pretty sure it will be mostly suffering that they will experience.
That is extremely bleak. The story of the human race is a series of good and bad cycles. Right now we are in a bad cycle. It will end. Maybe in 10 years, maybe in 20 years, maybe in 80. But it will. And we need your children & others to carry the torch of our species into the future. Humanity still has many thousands of years of life in us yet.
Rustin Cohle:
Think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of non existence into
this... meat, to force a life into this... thresher. That"s... so my daughter, she
spared me the sin of being a father.
Ask your IT department what they're tracking and they'll tell you. And yet I assume you still continue to go to work or do not actively seek out non-surveiling companies. By "everybody," maybe iI should clarify that it’s "majority" instead.
That's fine but realize you are not representative of the average tech worker or indeed any white collar worker such as those we are talking about in this post.
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