I think we're entering a world where programmers as such won't really exist (except perhaps in certain niches). Being able to program (and read code, in particular) will probably remain useful, though diminished in value. What will matter more is your ability to actually create things, using whatever tools are necessary and available, and have them actually be useful. Which, in a way, is the same as it ever was. There's just less indirection involved now.
We've been living in that world since the invention of the compiler ("automatic programming"). Few people write machine code any more. If you think of LLMs as a new variety of compiler, a lot of their shortcomings are easier to describe.
You can run an LLM locally (and distributed compile systems, where the compiler runs in the cloud, are a thing, too) so that doesn't really produce a distinction between the two.
Likewise, many optimization techniques involve some randomness, whether it's approximating an NP-thorny subproblem, or using PGO guided by statistical sampling. People might disable those in pursuit of reproducible builds, but no one would claim that enabling those features makes GCC or LLVM no longer a compiler. So nondeterminism isn't really the distinguishing factor either.
If you think of the training data, e.g. SO, github etc, then you have a human asking or describing a problem, then the code as the solution. So I suspect current-gen LLMs are still following this model, which means for the forseeable future a human like language prompt will still be the best.
Until such time, of course, when LLMs are eating their own dogfood, in which case they - as has already happened - create their own language, evolve dramatically, and cue skynet.
More indirection in the sense that there's a layer between you and the code, sure. Less in that the code doesn't really matter as such and you're not having to think hard about the minutiae of programming in order to make something you want. It's very possible that "AI-oriented" programming languages will become the standard eventually (at least for new projects).
One benefit of conventional code is that it expresses logic in an unambiguous way. Much of "the minutiae" is deciding what happens in edge cases. It's even harder to express that in a human language than in computer languages. For some domains it probably doesn't matter.
Cheaper than hiring another developer, probably. My experience: for a few dollars I was able to extensively refactor a Python codebase in half a day. This otherwise would have taken multiple days of very tedious work.
And that's what the C-suite wants to know. Prepare yourself to be replaced in the not so distant future. Hope you have a good "nest" to support yourself when you're inevitably fired.
> Prepare yourself to be replaced in the not so distant future.
Ignoring that this same developer, now has access to a tool, that makes himself a team.
Going independent was always a issue because being a full stack dev, is hard. With LLMs, you have a entire team behind you for making graphics, code, documents, etc... YOU becomes the manager.
We will see probably a lot more smaller teams/single devs making bigger projects, until they grow.
The companies that think they can fire devs, are the same companies that are going to go too far, and burn bridges. Do not forget that a lot of companies are founded on devs leaving a company, and starting out on their own, taking clients with them!
I did that years ago, and it worked for a while but eventually the math does not work out because one guy can only do so much. And when you start hiring, your costs balloon. But with LLMs ... Now your a one man team, ... hiring a second person is not hiring a person to make some graphics or doing more coding. Your hiring another team.
This is what people do not realize... they look too much upon this as the established order, ignoring what those fired devs now can do!
This sounds nice, except for the fact that almost everyone else can do this, too. Or at least try to, resulting in a fast race to the bottom.
Do you really want to be a middle manager to a bunch of text boxes, churning out slop, while they drive up our power bills and slowly terraform the planet?
The same way that having motorized farming equipment was a race to the bottom for farmers? Perhaps. Turned out to be a good outcome for most involved.
Just like farmers who couldn't cope with the additional leverage their equipment provided them, devs who can't leverage this technology will have to "go to the cities".
Please do read up on how farmers are doing with this race to the bottom (it hasn't been pretty). Mega farms are a thing because small farms simply can't compete. Small farmers have gone broke. The parent comment is trying to highlight this.
If LLM's turn out the way C-Suite hopes. Let me tell you, you will be in a world of pain. Most of you won't be using LLM's to create your own businesses.
But modern tillage/petrol based farming is an unsustainable aberration. Maybe a good example for this discussion, but in the opposite direction if it is.
> except for the fact that almost everyone else can do this, too. Or at least try to, resulting in a fast race to the bottom.
Ironically, that race to the bottom is no different then we already have. Have you already worked for a company before? A lot of software is developed, BADLY. I dare to say that a lot of software that Opus 4.5 generates, is often a higher quality then what i have seen in my 25 year carrier.
The amount of companies that cheapen out, hiring juniors fresh from school, to work as coding monkies is insane. Then projects have bugs / security issues, with tons of copy/pasted code, or people not knowing a darn thing.
Is that any different then your feared future? I dare to say, that LLms like Opus are frankly better then most juniors. As a junior to do a code review for security issues. Opus literally creates extensive tests, points out issues that you expect from a mid or higher level dev. Of course, you need to know to ask! You are the manager.
> Do you really want to be a middle manager to a bunch of text boxes, churning out slop, while they drive up our power bills and slowly terraform the planet?
Frankly, yes ... If you are a real developer, do you still think development is fun after 10 years, 20 years? Doing the exact same boring work. Reimplementing the 1001 login page, the 101 contact form ... A ton of our work is in reality repeating the same crap over and over again. And if we try to bypass it, we end up tied to tied to those systems / frameworks that often become a block around our necks.
Our industry has a lot of burnout because most tasks may start small but then grow beyond our scope. Todays its ruby on rails programming, then its angular, no wait, react, no wait, Vue, no wait, the new hotness is whatever again.
> slowly terraform the planet?
Well, i am actually making something.
Can you say the same for all the power / gpu draw with bitcoin, Ethereum whatever crap mining. One is productive, a tool with insane potential and usage, the other is a virtual currency where only one is ever popular with limited usage. Yet, it burns just as much for a way more limited return of usability.
Those LLMs that you are so against, make me a ton more productive. You wan to to try out something, but never really wanted to get committed because it was weeks of programming. Well, now you as manager, can get projects done fast. Learn from them way faster then your little fingers ever did.
You say this like it's some kind of ominous revelation, but that's just how capitalism works? Yeah, prepare for the future. All things are impermanent.
I suppose as long as either humans are always able to use new tools to create new jobs, or the wealth gets shared in a fully automated society, it won't be ominous. There are other scenarios.
I think we might make new jobs, but maybe not enough. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we get good at sharing wealth over the next few years. Maybe something like UBI will become so obviously necessary that it becomes politically feasible, I don't know. I suspect we'll probably limp along for awhile in mediocrity. Then we'll die. Same as it ever was. The important thing is to have fun with it.
Well excuse the shit out of my goddamn French, but being comfy for years and suddenly facing literal doom of my profession in a year wasn't on my bingo card.
And what do you even mean by "prepare"? Shit out a couple of mil out of my ass and invest asap?
Not the person you're responding to but... if you think it's a horse -> car change (and, to stretch the metaphor, if you think you're in the business of building stables) then preparation means train in another profession.
If you think it's a hand tools -> power tools change, learn how to use the new tools so you don't get left behind.
My opinion is it's a hand -> power tools change, and that LLMs give me the power to solve more problems for clients, and do it faster and more predictably than a client trying to achieve the same with an LLM. I hope I'm right :-)
Why do you suppose that these tools will conveniently stop improving at some point that increases your productivity but are still too much for your clients to use for themselves?
And so the AI will develop the skills to interview the client and determine what they really need. There are textbooks written on how to do this, it's not going to be hard to incorporate into the training.
Well probably OP won't be affected because management is very pleased with him and his output, why would they fire him? Hire someone who can probably have better output than him for 10% more money or someone who might have the same output for 25% less pay?
You think any manager in their right mind would take risks like that?
I think the real consequences are that they probably are so pleased with how productive the team is becoming that they will not hire new people or fire the ones who aren't keeping up with the times.
It's like saying "wow, our factory just produced 50% more cars this year, time to shut down half the factory to reduce costs!"
> You think any manager in their right mind would take risks like that?
You really underestimate stupidity of your average manager. Two of our top performers left because they were underpaid and the manager (in charge of the comp) never even tried to retain them.
I bet they weren't as valuable as you think. This is a common issue with certain high performing line delivery employees (particularly those with technical skills, programmers, lawyers, accountants, etc), they always think they are carrying the whole team/company on their shoulders. It almost never turns out to be the case. The machine will keep grinding.
So, if we were to implement what this author is proposing, governments would be allowed to jail people indefinitely simply because they used effectively unbreakable encryption- regardless of whether what they encrypted was illegal (or evidence of a crime)? Because if so, that is absolutely unacceptable in any society that would call itself free.
I don't know what country you think that is true in, but citation needed.
In the US at least, criminal convictions must be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt", they can't just say that they think there's information there, it must be proven that they already know it's there.
The hypothetical country the article writer wants to live in. The one where if you can't decrypt purported evidence of a crime you get the maximum sentence by default.
No, the downvotes are because rationalism isn't a cult and people take offense to being blatantly insulted. This article is about cults that are rationalism-adjacent, it's not claiming that rationalism is itself a cult.
To be clear, this article isn't calling rationalism a cult, it's about cults that have some sort of association with rationalism (social connection and/or ideology derived from rationalist concepts), e.g. the Zizians.
This article attempts to establish disjoint categories "good rationalist" and "cultist." Its authorship, and its appearance in the cope publication of the "please take us seriously" rationalist faction, speak volumes of how well it is likely to succeed in that project.
Not sure why you got down voted for this. The opening paragraph of the article reads as suspicious to the observant outsider:
>The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.
Anyone who had just read a lot about Scientology would read that and have alarm bells ringing.
Asterisk magazine is basically the unofficial magazine for the rationalist community and the author, Ozy Brennan, is a prominent rationalist blogger. Of course the piece is pro-rationalism. It's investigating why rationalism seems to spawn these small cultish offshoots, not trying to criticize rationalism.
"Unofficial?" Was that a recent change? But my point is that because the author neither can nor will criticize the fundamental axioms or desiderata of the movement, their analysis of how or why it spins off cults is necessarily footless. In practice the result amounts to a collection of excuses mostly from anonymees, whom we are assured have sufficient authority to reassure us this smoke arises from no fire. But of course it's only when Kirstie Alley does something like this we're meant to look askance.
Out of curiosity, why would the bells be ringing in this case? Is it just the fact that a single person is exerting influence over their followers by way of essays?
Even a marginal familiarity with the history of Scientology is an excellent curative for the idea that you can think yourself into superpowers, or that you should ever trust anyone who promises to teach you how.
The consequences of ignorance on this score are all drearily predictable to anyone with a modicum of both good sense and world knowledge, which is why they've come as such a surprise to Yudkowsky.
You can say all of this of drug-oriented seekers of superpowers, too. Trust the SSRI cult much?
It just seems to be a human condition that whenever anyone tries to find a way to improve themselves and others, there will always be other human beings who attempt to prevent that from occurring.
I don't think this is a cult thing - I think its a culture thing.
Humans have an innate desire to oppress others in their environment who might be making themselves more capable, abilities-wise - this isn't necessarily the exclusive domain of cults and religions, maybe just more evident in their activities since there's not much else going on, usually.
We see this in technology-dependent industries too, in far greater magnitudes of scale.
The irony is this: aren't you actually manifesting the very device that cults use to control others, as when you tell others what "specific others" should be avoided, lest one become infected with their dogma?
The roots of all authoritarianism seem to grow deep in the fertile soil of the desire to be 'free of the filth of others'.
It's been 17 years since the series was written and rationalists haven't become a cult with Yudkowsky as leaders, so it's safe to say those were false alarms
That we know about, I suppose. We didn't know at one point there were any outright rationalist cults, after all, whether involved in sex, murder, both, or otherwise. That is, we didn't know there were subsets of self-identifying "rationalists" so erroneous in their axioms and tendentious in their analysis as to succeed in putting off others.
But a movement, that demonstrates so remarkably elevated rate of generating harmful beliefs in action as this, warrants exactly the sort of increased scrutiny this article vainly strives to deflect. That effort is in itself interesting, as such efforts always are.
I mean, as a rationalist, I can assure you it's not nearly as sinister a group as you seem to make it out to be, believe it or not. Besides, the explanation is simpler than this article makes it out to be- most rationalists are from California, California is the origin of lots of cults.
> Besides, the explanation is simpler than this article makes it out to be- most rationalists are from California, California is the origin of lots of cults
This isn't the defense of rationalism you seem to imagine it to be.
I don't think the modal rationalist is sinister. I think he's ignorant, misguided, nearly wholly lacking in experience, deeply insecure about it, and overall just excessively resistant to the idea that it is really possible, on any matter of serious import, for his perspective radically to lack merit. Unfortunately, this latter condition proves very reliably also the mode.
None in particular, as of course you realize, being a fluent reader of this language. It was just a longwinded way of saying rationalists suck at noticing when they're wrong about something because they rarely really know much of anything in the first place. That's why you had to take that scrap of a phrase so entirely out of context, when you went looking for something to try to embarrass me with.
Why? Which perspective of yours has you so twitchingly desperate to defend it?
Funny how the comment making a factual correction gets downvoted.
For me, that is the crucial information in the article: Yes, multiple people have succeeded to create a cult within the rationality community, but it always involved isolating their victims from the rest of the rationality community. (Now that we see the pattern, could it possibly help us defend against this?)
If it took you this long to see a pattern that anyone with any experience at all can trivially recognize, why should anyone trust you to defend against anything? You are plainly incompetent.
I can't even tell what you mean to try to criticize here. Are you saying that because one may tell what the article tried to do and failed, it didn't fail? I can try to answer your point here, but you need to put in the effort of making it make sense, first.
> Because these dodecahedrons have been found in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland — but not in Italy — Guggenberger views them as "Gallo-Roman products" with a possible origin in the Celtic tribes of the Roman Empire.
> Guggenberger views them as "Gallo-Roman products
Oh my, I’m getting flashbacks to this absurd Meeple copyright (edit: trademark) case for some reason due to the arguments that were used. It’s a really weird case if you’re into copyright (edit: trademark) law, which if you’re here on HN to read this, I’ll take the odds that you might be. Something about discussing stuff that may or may not be dice made me primed for that perhaps?
> Over 40 games with the word meeple in the title had been published as of 2024. Several games published by large game companies, like AEG and Asmodee, have even published games with the term in the titles, as well as adopting the token design commonly associated with the term, including such games as Mutant Meeples (2012), Terror in Meeple City (2013), the Meeple Circus series (2017-2021), and Meeples and Monsters (2022). This continued until 2019, when "MEEPLE" was registered as an EU trademark owned by Hans im Glück. The 2019 trademarking was objected to by, among others, gaming company CMON. The critics argued that the term has been used in common parlance, and the very shape of the meeple became commonplace in the industry. This resulted in the EU trademark exempting the category "toys and games"; however, Hans im Glück has since registered the term as a trademark in Germany for usage which does include toys and games, and the company also acquired the EU trademark for the shape of the ‘original’ meeple figure as used in Carcassonne. In 2024, the company Cogito Ergo Meeple received a cease and desist for unsanctioned use of the trademark, and decided to change the name of their upcoming game from Meeple Inc to Tabletop Inc, and the name of the company itself to Cotswold Games.
It goes on. I would try to shorten this but it’s just so silly that for it to make as little sense as it’s supposed to, I had to quote that much to be fair to the issue and how silly it is.
The most annoying thing for me is that Hans im Gluck didn't even create the term "meeple," that was coined by a writer with no affiliation to HiG, and adopted by the community.
How can you trademark something public that long after the fact, when it is clearly in common use to boot? Patents only give you a leeway of 1 year or less depending on the jurisdiction.
Do you know if this sort of nonsense is commonplace or is this a weird edge case?
Thinking Machines was chosen over the Cray because they had more visual appeal. Sheryl Handler the CEO had (has) a real flair for and it showed; they were neat looking machines
The Cray machines looked more like an airport seating area. Or with later models, obstacles in a laser tag arena. While the Thinking Machines with the moving LEDs looked alive, almost like it was designed to be a character in a movie, which they became.
Very unfortunate situation, but I'm doubtful that it's the bacteria causing it. As far as I can tell, it just doesn't produce enough formate. The body is pretty good at metabolizing formate, so it really only causes blindness from large, acute exposures, not smaller chronic exposure, AFAIK. Combine that with no other reports of blindness from other users of the Lumina probiotic, nor any similar issues appearing in rodent studies, and the bar for evidence is pretty high.
> nor any similar issues appearing in rodent studies
That's addressed in the OP:
> And in case you were wondering, this wouldn’t have shown up in the original BCS3-L1 rodent toxicity studies either as most non-primate animals metabolize formate much more efficiently, including rats. This has led to difficulties creating a rodent model of methanol toxicity, in fact.
I'm not certain they're correct there, as various studies seem to quote different numbers. Either way, I'm not sure rats are so much more efficient that it would matter: e.g. if the half-life in rats was a few tens of minutes vs the hour or so half-life in humans, would that make the difference between no toxicity and toxicity? Still, I haven't seen other people report vision loss, so maybe the point is moot anyway.
Although, it doesn't preclude some kind of uncommon impairment to formate metabolism, which would explain why it doesn't happen to other people.
Robusta is great if you don't go with the low quality stuff. Good quality Vietnamese Robusta is very enjoyable (and much higher in caffeine than Arabica, which I think is a nice bonus).
There's also the possibility of hybridizing Robusta and Arabica to get the best traits of both. A few hybrid varieties, such as Catimor, have existed on the market for a while. AFAIK Catimor has some of the hardiness of its parent Robusta.
As always, you'll have the best experience if you buy whole beans and grind them yourself (or at least find a supermarket that lets you grind beans fresh). No instant coffee that currently exists will be able to compete with that.
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