Don’t be naive. Anthropics (et al) mission is to make us unemployable. They need to sell their tools to companies so that they can finally discard 90% of their workforce. It’s a win win for companies and for anthropic (et al). Obviously we are the losers in the middle. And people around here on HN may think they cannot be affected, that they are the elite class of developers… they are gonna get hurt
You won’t be able to enjoy your free time playing with computers if anthropic et al make you jobless.
The “you” doesn’t necessarily refer to you. Im addressing 90% of the developers out there. We love playing around technology… but I doubt we will be thinking the same once we become unemployable. But here we are, having fun with the tools of companies that want to finish us. How ironic
Fiddling while our home burns has been a beloved pasttime for many people, from emperors to passengers on ocean liners to prisoners in camps. What else is there to do anyway? Sometimes history must take its course before humanity as a whole recognizes its folly.
While I work in IT today, that wasn’t always true. I am certain I spent more free time playing with computers when my work did not involve computers at all. While I enjoy working with computers at a variety of different levels, when I do it all day, I don’t typically wanna do it when I get home. If Anthropic means there are no more IT jobs, software jobs, etc. etc. etc. (which I think is highly unlikely) then I guess I will have to do a non-tech job just like 99% of the other human beings. If that comes to pass,I expect in my spare time I will suddenly reacquire a love for tinkering with computers.
Also consider the great fortune of dicking around with computers ever being so lucrative in the first place even if the gravy train eventually stops. We were lucky. Most hobbies aren’t anything like that.
Are you sure you will be able to spend time playing around that kind of stuff when anthropic/openai/google/etc make you jobless? (well, perhaps not YOU precisely, but 90% of devs, so there’s a high chance).
We always think it’s not gonna hit us… we may be wrong
How can you be so blind? This is all a marketing campaign by anthropic. No more no less. The developers doing the rewrite have no voice at all in this game.
The problem with security through obscurity (even if it’s just an “addon”) is that it pollutes your code base, system. It’s just not worth it.
Like moving ssh to a different port. If you are the only one working on it, sure fine, as long as you remember the port. If you re working with others, then everyone needs to know the new port, so it has to be documented somehow. It’s a pita
Agree to some extent. At some point though we jump the thin line between creative expression and… magic?
Like if at some point I can just say “Generate a song similar to Smooth Criminal, different enough to not trigger copyright claims” and it just works, and everyone loves it… well is that creative thinking?
I think you can quantify the amount of creative expression you engage in by looking at all the decision points in the creative process where you are directly involved in making the decision. For an LLM prompt, that is going to be fairly limited by definition. I suppose the quality can be measured then by how novel and effective the output/approach of each decision is then, how much impact is made.
The amount of creative expression does not necessarily correlate with impact. Something can be created with nearly zero creative expression, that ends up making a significant impact. In that case you are more of a director than an artist I suppose, in that you direct the high-level process and only make decisions there. You can call it creative thinking in the same way a good businessman makes smart high-level decisions and then delegates what is downstream to others, with decisions being optimized for impact.
I think you can be creative "within a frame" in that sense, e.g. creative in the way you wield an LLM for instance, which is on a different scale compared to being creative on the piano roll with how you organize and brainstorm your melodies. It's just a different skill set at a different granularity altogether. But the one thing that I think holds, is that higher level methods have less creative expression by definition, because you are delegating more decisions to other faculties; you are seeing less of the "creator" in the work.
I think there is something to it. First, it would still need to be different enough from Smooth Criminal to avoid listeners just going back to the original. Then, if anyone could just type a simple prompt like that and get a hit, wouldn't we be flooded with 'sounds like' singles, which would turn the audience off of those, and now, you're not making hits...
I think there will always be more to it then just a simple prompt, but having the vision to make a song that sounds pleasing, and unique enough is certainly creative to me.
Of course, there's also a huge demand for generic, inoffensive music (think theme/intro songs, waiting room and elevator music). If we could make that more enjoyable to listen to, would anyone care if that's not creative thinking?
You could make (and many do) the same arguments over covers of songs, even when the covers end up eclipsing the original. Where was the creative thinking in that?
Metrics: I increased retention 2x; I reduced latency from X ms to Y ms; increased slo to 99.999… those are all meaningless. It was in fashion to put such numbers in cvs maybe 5-10 years ago. Not anymore
They were always lies because they’re imprecise. “I” didn’t do any of those things, you did other things together with other people leveraging company infrastructure to accomplish those things. Tell me about the SKILLS you excel in tha make those things happen.
Why would you not want to know a general idea of what specific technology someone is familiar with ? Someone could be an "infrastructure engineer" and be more proficient in specific tools vs others - don't you want to match that to the job your hiring for ?
In my case it's not a lie: I reduced the time for a complex import process from 1 hour to 3 minutes, a 20 fold improvement. I included it in my CV, but now I wonder if I should take it out.
Yes, I'm aware with what options I have, they've been detailed quite thoroughly in the many other threads on this topic. The question is about understanding the trend of week long cut-offs.
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