[jerhewet]

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months.

I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it.

IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and rent-seeking, to my own bought-and-paid-for computer sitting on my desk that did exactly what I told it to do using software that never changed unless I wanted it to change, and now we're back to dumb terminals (browsers) that talk to mainframes (the cloud) that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software and have gone back to renting me the software and pushing changes that I never asked for and never wanted in the first place.

I will never use spicy autocomplete for anything, and I find it depressing that people are being forced to use it in order to keep their job. I see a very dark future for computing if real skills are all replaced with garbage being vomited out by rules engines that harvested their "guess the next word" results from today's internet.

[btschaegg]

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

[croon]

It's not so much the technologies that are good/bad, but IMHO that the pipeline between invention of and abuse of technology is increasingly short.

[soloto]

There are just too many examples by now that immoral and even illegal behavior will not be prosecuted or otherwise punished, especially if you make money with it. No wonder the pipeline is getting shorter.

[benterix]

It's funny because I was watching a lot of amazing new tech appear after I was 35 and most of it was exciting. Learning these things was fun and rewarding. You could say it made me happier.

Not sure why LLMs feel the opposite. Maybe it's because of the terrible marketing and pushing it down everyone's throats. Maybe it's because of the personality of people like sama, or how it's being used to produce the so-called AI slop globally. Maybe something completely different. But there's something bleak and off-putting in it.

[archagon]

Kinda funny that you're quoting a real author who would never in a million years have resorted to using slop generators.

"I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." -Hayao Miyazaki

[raddan]

I’m not so sure. Douglas Adams was an avid technologist who worked on two interactive fiction games: the famously-cruel Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide and Starship Titanic. I don’t remember whether there was anything free-form about the dialogue in the HHGG game, but Starship Titanic had many bots you could talk to. It was immensely fun, and I suspect he would have loved the ability to spin out dialogue a little more naturally.

On the other hand, the HHGG universe is just packed to the brim with deranged robots. Everybody loves Marvin, of course, but my favorites were the sycophantic ones like the elevators that sigh with pleasure upon delivering you to your destination. Adams always seemed to do perfectly anticipate the insanity of marketeers, and I expect that we’ll actually get some of this someday…

[intended]

I WANT to be excited by LLMs.

But it has been so frustrating to listen to the hype and then contend with the actual results.

How bizarre is this tool, that I have been forced to conduct interviews across all domains, to see where people are having actual productivity gains?

I never had to do this with the iPhone, or with word, excel or any number of cool technological inventions.

The early internet empowered people, and we created some of our most amazing collaborative intellectual achievements like wikipedia.

Today, aside from being built by harvesting the IP of people, LLMs are shuttering our entire information economy. Sites I go to for info are either going behind paywalls or shutting down because they are being rapaciously harvested by bots.

Yes, history rhymes and repeats; however there are other tunes that have been played that sound similar but end differently.

[JKCalhoun]

I have been treating LLMs as a research assistant (and sometimes tutor) as I have explored analog computing for a hobbyist project that I have been working on for 6 months now.

To my mind, saying the AI will cause me to forget how to learn is equivalent to suggesting that going to school for instruction will cause me to forget how to learn.

[sph]

> equivalent to suggesting that going to school for instruction will cause me to forget how to learn

I see plenty of “classically trained” people (as opposed to self-taught) that have no idea how to learn things on their own and at their pace.

I mean, in the era of youtube and the internet, any subreddit is filled with posts like ‘where do I start with X?’ or a endless rehashing of the same beginner questions from people that are not even able to use Google.

I am biased as a self-taught person that dropped out of high school, and it is baffling to see people have forgot how to learn things by themselves past 10 years old. There wouldn’t be so many people with student debts if that were the case.

[happytoexplain]

True. Even Adams himself would have been sickened by GenAI.

[RajT88]

Happy Service!

[rurp]

A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me. I would say empowering, if that weren't such a cheesy overused term. If you were any good at it, you could get a great job at an interesting company.

Now like you said we're entering a world where anyone with a computer can pay a giant tech company thousands of dollars a year to spin up some agents for them. That's much less exciting to me, and I'm certain I would not enter the field if I were just starting out right now (assuming there even was a junior job available).

We've seen how big tech monopolies treat domains they control like search and social media. They try to extract all of the value, leaving nothing for the individual or common good, and they're quite effective at it. I'm not looking forward to them gatekeeping the field of software development as a whole.

[znpy]

> A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me.

but you can still do that, AI is not preventing you from doing any of that in any way.

[benterix]

True, but this is like saying 10 years ago: you don't need to learn React, you can continue coding in Angular.

People do want to learn and use new tech but instead what is promoted is an access to a proprietary and (increasingly more) expensive API.

[raxxorraxor]

React is really a bad example because you really don't need it. I am no web dev, but I think React is an abomination. The reason I can confidently say it without knowing every detail there is to it is simply that there aren't impressive websites that show it. There should be some that by now. The number of reused components is probably quite analogous to reused classes in OO. It can make sense, but sometimes it also sometimes doesn't.

Some suggested it could become web standard and I just hope it doesn't. React is beyond opinionated. It certainly has a raison d'être for some applications, but the problem is simply that it didn't put our less buggy or generally better sites.

[nurettin]

Internally I oppose react as much as possible. The reason beginners use it is because of job security. The reason experts start projects with it is because it enforces encapsulation, inversion of control and declarative code. Can you do all those yourself in freeform js? yes, of course. It is their way of imposing these traits.

[benterix]

Fortunately, we do have more or less open models, and they get better and better each year.

Unfortunately, sama & co hunger for global domination makes them more and more expensive to run.

[sph]

Good to see another Luddite (as they’d call us) on here! I am quitting tech in a month. I chose to go through 6 month of identity crisis, depression and reinventing my life after 20 years in software than having those bullshit generators imposed upon me to compete with those for whom thinking is démodé.

Meanwhile the front page is people complaining that using a particular word causes their evil genie to go haywire. You guys still call this stuff engineering? Writing requirements in prose, because programming languages are too hard? Fuck that, I’m out.

[hmokiguess]

Going full circle is what we do, it's everywhere throughout human history. Actually, one could argue it's how life works. Nature has seasons to help life grow and be balanced. We're only starting to understand how this affects us in a larger scheme of things. Who knows, maybe we will wipe ourselves to dust and be discovered by the next iteration until we reach v1.0.0

[znpy]

> that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software

yeah i'm gonna call BS on that. what you describe was happening well before modern-day AI (LLM, agentic stuff etc) became mainstream: think of google accounts binding your identity to your searches, gmail, google adsense, facebook, instagram and twitter (and others).

And the products and services that do what you describe can do that just as well without ai.

So yeah the problem is absolutely real but AI is not the culprit here.

[dsiegel2275]

Take me with you, please.

[raffael_de]

Where he goes, he has to go alone.

[classified]

That sounds like it could be a quote from a book or a movie. Any hints?

[raffael_de]

Basically a generic movie trope.

[fragmede]

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

[buffalobuffalo]

I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been.

The fact of the matter is, a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person. It makes research faster. It makes experimentation faster. It makes output cleaner. And this is true across many disciplines, not just tech.

Also, it is a skill. Yes, anyone can chat with an LLM. But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult. Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined.

If i had to guess, I'd say we'll probably see major breakthroughs across multiple disciplines within the next decade, largely because researchers and engineers can cover much more ground individually now, freed from the slow moving coordination mechanisms that team dynamics require. Pretty good for "spicy autocomplete" as you put it.

[LaGrange]

> I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been.

There are jobs outside of IT. They are harder, they have less benefits, they pay less. It's a whole project to switch your lifestyle so you can even afford them.

I know nobody who regrets making the jump. I hope to make it within this year. I'll be poor, but at least I won't work in IT.

> But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult.

No it's not, you can learn it in less than a day. I've done it a few times while evaluating how much the agents have progressed (despite what people keep saying, not much).

> Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined.

Some of us learned technical writing to communicate with _humans_ before, and we're sitting here alternating crying and laughing as y'all scramble to figure it out just to put all that into a hallucination machine.

[eleventen]

> I hope to make it within this year.

What's your plan?

[LaGrange]

Changing flats so it's cheaper (it's hard but still possible here), then go for an entry-level "barista" job.

It's gonna be very broke, but I'm not the first one in my friends circle to make the jump, so I have some support.

Edit: I probably will keep coding. Just... nobody else is ever going to see or use my code again.

[sph]

Respect. I moved countries for lower cost of living, and I’m gonna become a starving artist, so to speak, trying to use my software skills to make myself useful and earn enough to buy food, in a field where human ingenuity still reign supreme.

And if I ever find money under the mattress, I’ll make a solar farm. Something useful for the world, for once.

Better content and poor than living in golden handcuffs.

[raddan]

Why jump now?

If your worry is that you won’t be able to “keep up” and you’ll be laid off, or fired, just wait for that to happen. Keep making a paycheck until then. Then you can start your barista job.

If the problem is that you hate the work, then fine. But why barista? Fine, if that’s what makes you happy. But there are a million jobs out there _if you are willing to relocate_.

[LaGrange]

Bluntly? Because working with y'all is becoming insufferable. Because I don't want to work in IT. Note this isn't "I don't want to program" or whatever. That's cool and fun. But the people in here? Oh gods.

Also I'm sick and tired of working on projects where the best social benefit from my work would be if I stopped. And IT has this talent of doing this to even most superficially useful projects. I worked on solar panel software that got turned into a scam by marketing. That takes a talent, of sort.

The best time to jump out of IT was to never get into it. The second best time is now.

As for why barista? People need food and drink and coffee is great.

[joe_mamba]

Probably goose farmer https://www.linkedin.com/in/dryuan/

[LaGrange]

That sounds quite expensive to start, to be honest. But if you can? Sounds fun.

[cmiles74]

Are they? I remember when heavyweight IDEs where all the rage, there was a similar sentiment that if you weren't using one of them then you would eventually be so much slower that you'd be out of a job. It only took maybe five years until people started asking themselves if the dependency on a big IDE (and cost) was worth it. I don't think anyone would look at someone who prefers a stripped down text editor today and think they are backward or doing it wrong.

We have yet to see hard numbers on time saved by those who use LLM tooling extensively. It could be it doesn't turn out as compelling as we might expect.

Just sayin', I never forced software developers to use NetBeans or Intellij IDEA. I'm certainly not changing my tune and forcing them to use LLM tooling either.

[classified]

Maybe it depends. If what you want to build is one-shot crap anyway, then micromanaging LLMs to make them vomit what you need for that is "productive". I wouldn't know, because I prefer real work over the make-believe and leave the AI coding acolytes to be left behind and die when their ingenious plans explode in their faces.

[znpy]

Keep in mind, we don't do a lot of things that big IDES used to do.

Dumb example: graphical user interfaces. Heavyweight IDEs used to have a GUI designer (Netbeans had a very nice one).

GUI development is niche nowadays.

Also we have much better cross-editor tooling, just think of language servers (https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/) and build servers (https://build-server-protocol.github.io/). Back in the day each IDE had their own.

Vim and Emacs can do a lot of what IDEs used to offer thanks to language servers and build servers. Before those (lang/build servers) they were largely useless for large scale development (believe me, i tried).

[raxxorraxor]

It can put out code much faster than any software dev. And if you are careful with your prompts and demands, it is good quality code as well.

Especially for visualising data, to just get a quick look at, it can now be done in lightning speed and I am quite familiar with "manual data processing" in a few languages.

AI use me decently outcompetes manual me. Sometimes there are also stupid tasks. Data must be serialised in a certain way for some stupid reason. You prepare the info to be digested and the busywork can be done by agents with little oversight, which otherwise would have taken you a few hours. There simply is a limit in how fast you can read, look up field names, etc... If you outsource these critical paths to AI, you can gain productivity.

I also start way more side projects now and I like manual coding a lot.

[xigoi]

> It can put out code much faster than any software dev.

Judging a programmer by how much code they write is like judging an airplane engineer by how heavy their planes are.

[raxxorraxor]

Of course, it isn't the quantity. It is more about the features you wouldn't implement because manual dev takes a long time and why not let the AI spin up a non-critical site for administration or testing just for you. The cost/benefit calculation shifts a bit.

That said, if you get something quite heavy to lift off, it probably is a decent engineering feet. Not saying it would be the best plane :)

[bergie]

> a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person

[citation needed]

I try LLMs for something every couple of months, and I have yet to see them produce anything actually correct. Calling non-existing library methods, confabulations, etc.

But sure, they produce a lot of stuff in a short while. The utility of any of that another question.

[jjav]

> I try LLMs for something every couple of months, and I have yet to see them produce anything actually correct. Calling non-existing library methods, confabulations, etc.

That's too pessimistic, the productivity gains are real and substantial.

OTOH, the hype train is out of control. It is nowhere near perfect and requires a lot of handholding and guardrails to avoid going sideways.

You need to adopt it to stay relevant, but don't fall for the excessive hype. At the end of the day the limitations are significant.

[intended]

> That's too pessimistic, the productivity gains are real and substantial.

Source, please.

Even if its self reported, its useful to know.

[jjav]

I ask in honesty, have you used LLMs? Seems to me the productivity gains are obvious.

As for my source, it is my experience at work for both myself, and my direct reports, and my peer teams.

Tiny example: a certain recurring task we need to do to help other teams which requires somewhat tedious analysis but rarely a lot of high level thinking, plus a bit of decision making. A year ago I'd do maybe 2-3 per day because each one took about 30 minutes so I had to find slices of uninterrupted time between other work to complete them.

Just tonight as I was wrapping up the day I did 19 of these in an hour while also catching up on email. I let the bots do all the research in parallel, as each one completed the research I'd either tell it "ok, do it", or if it was asking me for a decision I'd decide and tell it how to proceed.

I count myself as an AI skeptic, in the sense that the hype is way above reality. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of real gains.

[bluegatty]

It's a bit arrogant and borderline Luddite to suggest that 'your era was legitimate' and that somehow these new things which you don't understand are somehow 'lesser' or illegitimate.

In the long arc of history, I'm doubtful we'll see 'the last 50 years' as 'the Golden Age' - that's just a personal, contemporary romanticization. More than likely, the advent of computers -> web -> AI etc. will be one block of the 'informational industrial revolution'.

The people who made the ostensible 'Golden Era' were pioneers, just as those breaking new ground are pioneers today, it's honestly 'depressing' that people who consider themselves 'Engineers' wouldn't see that as clear as day, an be hopeful for the future on some level.

AI is very real phenom, obviously vastly over-hyped in many ways, and it doesn't feel nice to have to get caught up in a tectonic shift against one's will, but it is bringing about legitimate progress in every sense that the Engineers and Creators before us did.

In the exact same spirit as DaVinci or Babbage.

If one wants to keep a horse in the stable, or a typewriter around for posterity or any other reason that's fine, but not under the notion that somehow they are better or more useful.

[happytoexplain]

The Luddites were rational. It's immature to use that word as an insult.

Nothing the parent said was arrogant.

[bluegatty]

That the Luddites were acting on principle doesn't mean wouldn't use the term.

Also, if you want to 'go there' you could find a much better word than 'immature' to say what you're trying to say.

The OPs posture is not tonally arrogant, but it's it's definitely intellectually arrogate.

The OP claiming heritage of the 'Golden Era' which is a dramatic, egoic romanticization.

To place one's 'own story at primacy' above all others, insinuating that 'his skills' are those which are 'true and relevant' and that those using new tools are 'lesser' or 'not substantial' , and also grossly myopic to the truly great Engineering that's going on ... is arrogant and insulting frankly.

We can empathize with having to yield to a changing world, or being too out of scope to even fathom the 'new tech', but that's very different with saying that 'Frank Sinatra was the Only Great Singer, those that came after him had not talent'.

If it were the case, then fine, but it's obviously not. AI is a legitimate advancement that narrow minded people are struggling to fathom, and it's coming out in some ugly ways.

A true creator would probably take magnanimous position that after having made their contribution, they are sad to not be able to participate in what is maybe an even more substantial era of progress, and all of the wonders that will come of it.

Good gripes - we're all about to have robots in our homes (!) probably within 5-15, we're witnesses Sci Fi unfold in front of us ...

[matheusmoreira]

There is no doubt that AI is world changing technology. I'm not sure I want to go back to the world before LLMs. However, he's right to lament the impending demise of personal computing. Our computing freedom is being attacked on all fronts by governments and trillion dollar corporations alike, and things are not looking good for us. Our machines are increasingly locked down by rent-seeking corporations. Software is increasingly in the cloud. Thanks to remote attestation, we get ostracized from digital society if we take ownership of our machines. It's starting to look like the "you'll own nothing" future is actually coming.

I do hope the open weight models keep distilling the frontier models, and that powerful and unlocked computer hardware remains accessible to us mere mortals so that we may run them with no limitations in our own homes. That's optimistic though.

[bluegatty]

Those are all fine points, but 'lack of open compute' isn't quite an AI issue.

Thanks to Chinese vendors, there's a ton of near Tier1 AI that we can all access.

Unlike Android where it's not feasible to use though it may be Open on some level.

[matheusmoreira]

Not quite an AI issue, but they do intersect. They want us to pay them for "intelligence" on a metered basis, just like we pay for energy and water. They absolutely are an enemy of local computing freedom. The future they are designing is one where they hold all the computing power while we are literally priced out.

[bluegatty]

I think your concerns are valid - but the decisive claims are not.

They're capitalist entities trying to capture value and control of a new thing they are introducing - yes - but that's a pretty normal thing, we get over that with competition, regulation etc.

This will happen over time - all device manufacturers, cloud providers are 'on our side!'

AWS and Apple want to commoditize the AI as much as you do.

So do the Chinese manufacturers, and really Nvidia and ASML as well.

So we, the proletariat can 'pit them against each other' in value chain competition!

[matheusmoreira]

I hope you're right. I truly do.