I don’t try to ship quickly. I started learning programming 2024, I’d say I’m pretty good with Python, proficient in vanilla web tech, ok with C, and I know basics of React/Fullstack. Starting from nothing I’d say I have progressed very fast, I follow a uni CS course. LLM’s have certainly helped in explaining concepts and to learn, but I don’t use them to code pretty much at all.
I recognised that my weaknesses are more in understanding the mathematical fundamentals of computation, so now I’m mostly studying maths rather than coding, currently linear algebra and propability theory. Coding is the easy part I’d say. Hopefully I get to concentrate on the study of my sworn enemy, algorithms, at some point.
I’d like to be able to do low-code and graphics/sound -programming some day. Or maybe use that knowledge some other cool stuff, if we are all replaced by robots anyway.
This is unbelievably depressing. Why to learn any skills at all, since some model is going to do it pretty soon and companies only need bunch of sales people, your Musk’s and Bezos’, to sell that crap. Rest of us rotten our brains online living on goverment hand-outs and designer drugs.
Why learn to play the drums, when there are drum machines? Or play any music, when there are MP3s? Or cook, when there's microwave dinners?
If you can't answer the above, you might want to have a chat with a psychologist. We can and do create meaning in our own lives.
Programming will change, but I won't miss creating the same boilerplate again and again. I expect to focus more on translating the business & technical requirements to decent quality results. I expect good interfaces and separation of concerns will be even more important, as whole modules might be rewritten from scratch rather than being modified, changing the way we think about maintainable code.
I started hobby-coding, and that can continue if I want to do it. If the point is to get into the mental exercise and craftsmanship of coding.
But for most of the time, the thing I really want is the product, the program, the result. Being able to skip the coding step and go direct to the result by using an LLM is really freeing. I can try different approaches, experiment with different ways of presenting it, iterate on actual product ideas without having to spend months refactoring code. It's great.
As for the commercial stuff - I don't know if you've ever worked as a software dev in a large company. I have a couple of times, and it's a living nightmare of politics and compromise (hence only a couple of times, I prefer working in startups and small businesses). The average software dev spends their days doing pointless JIRA tickets in sprints designed to make their manager look good at their next review. Nothing valuable will be lost by replacing all of this with LLMs.
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
> "The studies show that Meta has obtained extensive evidence, from many different kinds of research, that its products facilitate and enable vast direct harms to young people (e.g., cyberbullying, unwanted sexual contact) and that its products are likely harming users’ mental health, particularly for adolescent girls, particularly via harmful social comparisons, promotion of eating disorders, body-image problems, and increased depression."
I have a previous Master’s degree from art and I am after working years in tech doing a second degree in CS. Neither degree I need in my current job.
Personally I think what you gain from education comes from three things:
i. How much you apply yourself, how much are you willing to self-study, do research, your own projects, ask question.
ii. The structured pathway an educational institution gives you to learn certain skills and gain knowledge. In self-learning the problem comes knowing what to learn and in what order so that you can advance to a more advanced level.
iii. People you meet. Not just networking, but the fact that if you hang out with very clever people all day long, some of that prob sticks to you as well.
Even my art degree was extremely useful, although it provided absolutely no path to employment. I don’t know what the future brings, but I have absolutely loved my current degree so far, although it admittedly very hard at times.
From wikipedia: ” An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί epi "upon or above" and δῆμος demos "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of hosts in a given population within a short period of time.”
As with covid, individual actions are not enough to stop the spread of the epidemic. You need vaccinations, health education, public policy etc. not just individual actions, so ”go dancing” and ”talk to people” doesn’t quite cut it.
Seems strange to me that at this site from the whole internet people don’t seem to see the connection between the raise of new technologies and lonelines (with a host of other mental health/social issues). And therefore this is the one problem the nerds don’t seem to be able to solve…
I cannot either, but I think we need to start looking at technology from a point of view of public health. Some sort of sociology/medical studies on the effects of computing on human body/mind and society.
> Seems strange to me that at this site from the whole internet people don’t seem to see the connection between the raise of new technologies and lonelines (with a host of other mental health/social issues). And therefore this is the one problem the nerds don’t seem to be able to solve…
It doesn't seem that strange that a website with a few thousand geeks isn't able to solve a global phenomenon by commenting on an article.
HN is a place for discussion. It seems unreasonable to expect world changing outcomes.
I suspect the "think global, act local"-motto applies here. You can certainly make a local impact by "going dancing".
You missed my point. You cannot find a solution to a problem if you don’t first correctly analyse the problem. My criticism lies in the fact that most answers (not all however) analye the problem from an individualistic point of view, not from the systemic, ignoring the technological aspect. Which is a bit ironic one must say.
Laws and regulations are also ”advanced behaviour modification”. That is how they work. Tobacco is clear example of this, almost everybody used to smoke back in the 90’s and 00’s (including me) whereas after years of laws regulatios, taxation, public education, and providing healthcare for addiction, we are at the point where smokin makes you a loser rather than some cool Marlboro dude/dudette. There is very little society can do for grandparents addicted to fb, but we can prevent the same happening to the future elderly.
Limiting at which age you can use the product is just one part of the puzzle. You could also hit a big tax on ad revenue gained via social media to veer people off from ruining their brains. There is a host of others tools as well and I think we will see them implemented more and more. The tech billionaires fight back and rather fund a fascist dictator to power than lose a single cent, but there you go. But I think the Musk’s and the like have constantly stepped over boundaries to the extent that the tide has changed.
Yep, this is definitely written by an LLM. I doubt any model is capable of reasoning this bad.
> “harmful compared to what?”
The kids can sniff glue all I care, at least we get some good punk rock out of it. That largely depends on their parents. But children spending time completely unsupervised with bunch of adult men only some of which are pedophiles while shooting into their brains 24/7 the most powerful advertisement ever known to man wrapped into an application that has the same operationational logic as one-armed bandit will not bring anything good to anybody - except loads of money to the tech bro’s. It is basically same as raising your children in a Las Vegas casino.
But you don’t have to take my word. You know you can just ask the kids who have been raised with social media, the first generation of which is adult now? Every single one of the zoomers say it sucks. That should be enpugh.
To be fair, all tech companies do this. Sell first, implement later, hype hype hype. Of course we’d like to think Apple was better, but well.. it isn’t.
Google certainly shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
I recognised that my weaknesses are more in understanding the mathematical fundamentals of computation, so now I’m mostly studying maths rather than coding, currently linear algebra and propability theory. Coding is the easy part I’d say. Hopefully I get to concentrate on the study of my sworn enemy, algorithms, at some point.
I’d like to be able to do low-code and graphics/sound -programming some day. Or maybe use that knowledge some other cool stuff, if we are all replaced by robots anyway.
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