Yes, I use AI quite a lot, and I worry a lot about the effect that technology is having on me. Luckily, I have the advantage of using a tool called Solve It from the company I helped found called Answer.ai with Jeremy Howard that is explicitly designed for human-in-the-loop creation of artifacts and the development of human skills even while you use AI. Otherwise, it's likely that LLMs will cause your own skills to atrophy. You can learn more at solve.it.com
Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility.
Even better if you get some management consultant to suggest the idea and/or do the subcontracting.
Definitely buys you a few quarters of bonus and some time to land your next gig.
yep, even people I thought educated voted for this fool. seriously, they have college degrees, but apparently get their news from random social media accounts
We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.
And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.
> The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
The most powerful force in the universe is not gravity, or the strong nuclear force - it's the prisoner's dilemma.
Don't fool yourself into thinking you could have avoided this. If you didn't, any one of the other ten million people would. You didn't choose for it to happen, you chose to be the one who got the money from it happening.
They're also the ones that won't let their kids anywhere near the things.
That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.
I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?
Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.
But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.
As far as I see the "problem" with mastodon is the lack of addiction mechanics. The first time someone has an negative mastodon interaction, the close the app and because it isn't that addictive, they don't come back.
Meanwhile on Facebook people get angry every day on something they see on the feed yet come back in hour "just in case the are is something interesting this time"
> We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
Far too much money in tech traces its roots to ad tech.
You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.
There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.
Don’t listen to the defeatists. This is like post-modernism. Post-modernism as a phenonemena is a very real thing, studied and documented extensively, critiqued extensively. And when you read about it it seems hopeless. Like everything is destined to be a pastiche. But once you stop reading about it you realize that there is no Matrix that you’re trapped in. The biggest Matrix is your own mind. People had problems disciplining their minds a millenium ago. They do today as well. It’s marginally more difficult today, yes. But smart phones are just addictive like bad food. Not like a ahrd drug.
We also, thankfully, don’t need a clique of very smart people to save us. We’re all in this together. (Except the psychopaths wanting to enslave us.)
I use claude code on a daily basis, but honestly it becomes more annoying the more I use it. Why? I think because I ask it to do something and unless I'm extremely specific, either the code is verbose or the feature I'm designing is done in a poor way. For me, the productivity gains aren't that great and I'm even considering whether to go back to doing things by hand to save myself the frustration. Sure, if you don't care about code quality or scalability, it's a great thing to generate code. And yes, there are times when I don't, but for real projects, I actually do because I know as an engineer those things do matter in the long run. So, to be honest, I still haven't had that moment.
From a technology perspective LLMs are absolutely bonkers, blows my mind it works as well as it does.
From a programmer perspective, I'm starting to like it less and less. It's useful for sure, but doesn't really live up to the hype. In many ways it's the opposite, my bet is still that programmers will be in high demand in the not so distant future after all of this settles.
It has seemed to me that with each step from Opus 4.6, to 4.7 to 4.8 Claude has gotten worse at building good solutions. Like perhaps it is more "capable" in the small scale than 4.5 was but it's much worse at knowing what to do.
Yeah I'm the same way. They seem great when you ask it to build something unspecified, like "build me a todo app" or something. It's like magic. But when you know what the code needs to look like and can't accept anything else they just become so frustrating to use, and I doubt there is a productivity improvement there.
I think we will find ways to make them useful though. I imagine eventually it'll just be built into our editors and we don't even be thinking about AI or "agents" or "prompting", our tools will just be more capable.
I disagree. There's cases where girls do better and cases where boys do better. This blanket statement is just as bad as saying that all men/boys are smarter than girls.
Exactly, girls and women can do astonishing work in fields that favour more or less their mutual traits and vice versa, no need for "hehe we are better because GPA said so".
Bugs did exist, but bugs that come from AI generated code can be easily avoided if a good enough engineer designed it. Also, the rate at which AI generates code means that there's A LOT more bugs now than there used to be.
I'm sure the engineering teams of every company in the world is just "good enough engineers" and not, you know, regular devs who ship bugs at the same rate that has been now. And I'm sure your personal anecdote of "I saw a bug" shows that there's more bugs being shipped now.
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