I love how ten years ago it was folks complaining about juniors using Google to code, this articles first suggestion was juniors need to Google more. Twenty years ago it was that Python was not as good as learning C or something. Thirty, it was probably folks lamenting juniors can’t code x86 asm.
Nah, they are still whining here, on Hacker News, about how a 91 KB webpage is too large to be considered disciplined. (Literally saw that comment earlier today.)
I don't think it's quite the same. We live in an inbetween time - AI is not quite there yet.
AI struggles with knowledge from after its training date (so it can't help very well for anything relating to new versions of libraries) and often just generally gets things wrong or comes up with suboptimal answers. It's still only optimized to create answers that look correct, after all.
With these problems, someone on the team still needs to understand or be able to figure out what's going on. And dangit if it isn't getting hard to hire for that.
And the day that AI can actually replace the work of junior devs is just going to cause more complications for the software industry. Who will get the experience to become senior devs? Who will direct them? And even if those people also get replaced eventually, we will still probably have more awkward inbetween times with their own problems.
Can't say it's not convenient, but no use pretending the challenges don't exist.
While a trope, it is also statistically proven that the youth of this generation are doing worse, by almost every metric, than prior generations; including but not limited to achieving adult milestones years later than normal, record high percentages of medication distribution, and (for what it’s worth) a historically low percentage of young people that could even enter the military if they wanted to, at just 1 in 7.
Gen Z also has a lower crime rate, less teen birth rates, and less illegal drugs and alcohol consumption when compared to previous generations at the same age.
Yes; but are we silly enough here to believe that it’s because they have some newfound sense of morality that is guiding their actions?
No.
They are so deep into other things that the old vices have lost their appeal.
I argue that what’s really happening is that this is the most introverted generation (lockdowns playing a part). Home is comfortable, safe, entertaining, free of judgement, and has never been less boring; the basement dweller stereotype has never been more real.
“Better” because they’ve found even worse replacements.
Who needs to get a girl pregnant, when you can jack off twice a day to a unique body every day for the next decade? Heck, why even get married or even get a girlfriend at all, at any point (also a statistical low)?
Who needs alcohol and drugs, when you can drown your sorrows into hundreds of hours of gaming? And you’ve been doing this since you were 10 years old and playing 12 hours straight on weekends? (There is literally a 10 year old relative in my life doing this.)
This generation is better on the statistics - but we have no reason to believe the outcomes are better. We have every reason to believe that they will be worse for it.
Not just that they might - look at the statistics, it’s already happening. Antidepressant rates among teen girls has literally increased 130% in 5 years.
Are you seriously comparing drugs and alcohol with video games and saying video games are worse replacements?
What the hell is wrong with you?
Most people get bored of any particular game given enough time. Any psychological dependency will disappear and fade away.
The reason drugs screw you over is that they enter your brain directly. The brain can't cope with direct chemical alterations through countermeasures on a mental level. For the brain to protect itself from that, it would need to activate the immune system and send out macrophages etc to physically get rid of the chemicals.
> Who needs to get a girl pregnant, when you can jack off twice a day to a unique body every day for the next decade?
Buddy, here's the straight dope. If you're mad that teenage pregnancies are going down on average, you literally lack the basic empathy required to comment on the internet. Log off, you are just too unintelligent to contribute to this discussion.
If you're not trolling then I am seriously worried that you are autistic or mentally disabled and may not know it. This is outrageous behavior and I've seen you repeat this psychopathic bullshit for years now. Do you live in the real world? Do you have healthy relationships with family members or friends that share these ridiculous principles with you? It defies normalcy.
Please don't forget to tell us about them in great detail, Socrates and all that. After all that supposed counter-argument to anything and everything only gets brought up every single time when anyone suggests something got worse.
It's also true that for every thing that turned out to be horrible, there were people saying "this is gonna be great". Do you then also also dismiss all optimism?
Why is this fallacy only employed in one direction? It's not an argument either way, it's just spam, but I wonder why it only ever gets deployed in one direction.
Look, when you get to my age, you've literally seen it happen through multiple generations. As a kid growing up, parents thought we were the lost generation. Then I started growing up and I thought the next generation was the lost one. Then they grew up and they think the next one is doomed. It's so absurd to see it happening over and over. And everybody always thinks they have the unique and correct perspective.
I've seen it happen even as a young person, and still saw the fallacy of this "argument". I've been arguing with people twice my age who used it to silence any criticism of trends.
And it's totally an online thing, too. It's usually used to dismiss a thing without looking at the thing. Because if you could dismiss the thing by looking at it, you wouldn't need that old chestnut.
I don't blame young people for having less to look forward to than previous generations. I don't blame them for being unable to code, and so on. Blaming them for their lot is totally orthogonal to even having a honest look at what that lot is.
I never thought of a new generation failing the one's before it, being "lost" -- rather the other way around. We failed them. And by the same token, I also never dismissed people as being old and knowing nothing even when I was 20. I simply never once rolled that way, and I see nothing interesting, much less truthful, coming from it.
I’ve heard this comparison between C compilers and LLMs and I don’t think it’s similar.
there’s a direct relationship to C code and the resulting assembly.
The C language was specifically designed so that language constructs were converted into the intended assembly anyway.
C didn’t obfuscate the problem of writing code, just allowed us to operate at a higher, but still sound, level.
LLMs are not an abstraction like C. You aren’t going through a sound, tractable process going from natural language to code.
You’re going through a black box.
It’s no longer a new abstraction on top of a fundamental idea.
There is no understanding of anything being developed. Prompts aren’t even deterministic wrt the output of the LLM, so even how to prompt a given model isn’t something that can be understood or totally predicted. It’s just like SEO hacks.
While C compilers are technically not "black boxes", if you looked at lawyerly discussions about UB I don't think you can in full conscience say that `gcc -O2` is much better than a LLM.
I already said they are technically not black boxes. We are not in disagreement here.
The fact that code is all there and deterministic isn't sufficient. People use newer versions of compilers and you can't predict what the people who write compilers will do (people are black boxes). The compilers may do something you don't expect but still conform to the spec.
The point is that there is no one implementation of C. And the same is true for any other language too (to a lesser extent).
Unless you're coding against very specific versions of OS and compiler and runtime environment, you don't have code to inspect. You are not inspecting all the underlying dependencies when you write your code. You just assume they work.
It doesn't matter whether they are black boxes if you don't routinely inspect the boxes. Perhaps you do, but for most people they don't. So it doesn't matter as much.