Crypto isn't bad because it failed to make early adopters rich — it did make them rich. It's bad because it has horrible externalities in scams, war crimes / sanctions evasion, organised crime — which most of those early adopters were well aware of.
And thus it is reasonable to not use LLMs. And it's not only the training process that's problematic. There are so many individual LLM users who waste electricity on tasks that they would have solved by thinking for themselves just a few years ago.
For whatever reason the folks on here refuse to understand that for a big chunk of this planet people get paid in inflationary currencies that they used to have to immediately convert to dollars and then stuff under a mattress because the local banking system is corrupt. In that environment cryptocurrency is a god send.
I'm upvoting because it's useful to see and debate this viewpoint — shared by many engineers I know
I do think it's a bad take though. Not all new trends are the same: the metaverse was an obvious flop and crypto hasn't found practical applications. AI isn't like those because it's already practically changed the way I get my job done.
It takes time to learn skills, and getting started earlier will means more time to use them in your working life.
The way I see it is - AI still makes mistakes, and I have to know how things work at some point anyway. So I'd rather spend my time actually understanding fundamentals (in my case, CSS at the moment), than trying to keep up with the frequently changing AI tools and models.
Once the tools and models stabilize more (as well as the pricing model), there's less risk in me learning something that is no longer relevant.
Except when I choose to wait on learning how to use AI tools effectively, I get told I am going to be "left behind".
What a lovely article. There's a strong correlation between the energy you put out into the world and what you get back.
I often think that as I end up confirming a grumpy/aggressive person's expectation I'll be a bad customer, or confirming a kind/present persons's expectation I'll be a good one
I pedicabbed for five years, and the job is very much what you put into it.
You can be passive and low-effort, or you can be active and hustle rides by chatting up strangers. My roommate could squeeze blood from a stone when it came to persuading strangers to hop in her cab. She had a real talent for connecting with people and stretching out the ride in a way that was mutually beneficial for her (well paying) and the passengers (fulfilling concierge experience). In some ways she was like an escort you'd hire for good conversation at the bar. Minus the sexual expectations.
We all experienced bad actors (malevolent, drunk, immature, entitled) while working, but you can defuse the situation with finesse and charm, or you can bluntly and persistently deny them until they get worn down and steam off down the street to be someone else's problem.
I began as a largely introverted person and came to love the 5-15 minute window that I would have to get to know my clients while we traveled. It's a real captive audience and most people are down for the conversation and the connection. You learn how to listen and you learn to draw people out of their shells and be their best selves.
Some people were so great that on a few occasions I parked up my cab at our destination and spent the rest of the evening hanging out with them.
The job really rewards open-mindedness and a "yes, and" approach to dealing with people. Certain interactions with clients had a way of becoming very fun and adventurous if you kept an open mind and went along with your fares.
Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News
Perhaps one of the secondary effects of AI replacing developers will be mobilising a group of smart, motivated people to the left
(It's always interesting to think of the secondary effects which kick in past a certain point of growth. High-multiple stock valuations often fail to take these into account. For the East India Company, for example — your company can keep growing until it's the size of a country. But suddenly other countries treat you as a foreign power rather than a pet.)
> Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News
I am on this site because it is one of the less shitty places on the Internet (in terms of usability, privacy etc.) to have some form of discussion, but I never identified as a "hacker", "techie", "entrepreneur" or "temporarily embarrassed billionaire". AI didn't change my view on anything, except it has shown me how blind and naive people can be.
Of course I tend to focus on aspects that are being discussed here (context of software engineering).
I've always thought of myself as more "centrist" (feel free to make fun of me), but seeing so many tech CEOs cheer for layoffs and destruction of the job market has been a bit of a wake up call. Also just being confronted with the sheer idiocy of these people. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but they barely understand the tech they are cheering for. They act as though being broadly "bullish on AI" and being overly enthusiastic about its short-term potential was some kind of visionary stance, when in fact they are just repeating the same ideas as every other idiot in the silicon valley VC bubble.
My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an advantage by having more developers than the competition. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your organization.
In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop online along with more and more job loss. There are probably going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom, eat processed food and stay online all day.
Is this correct — HGVs can go faster on dual carriageways than motorways?
"UK speed limits for heavy vehicles are also more complex than most car drivers realise. Articulated trucks over 7.5 tonnes: 60 mph on dual carriageways, 50 mph on single carriageways, 56 mph (limiter) on motorways"
Sorry, got mixed up there, will amend, the 60 is for +3.5t!
Edit: Nope, despite the vehicles only being able to propel themselves to 90kmph, the speed limit is indeed 60mph (in England and Wales, Scotland is a more sensible 56mph)
Big tech recommendation algorithms optimize for time spent on platform, and the easiest and safest way to do that is to show you content very similar to (or literally the same) as what you've clicked before.
I don't see why you can't have an algorithm that's aware of your interests and attempts to show you novel things tangentially related to them.
You can just explain why a recommendation engine is unable to help you discover new things you didn’t know you wanted to know and try to help me understand better.
I think unstructured chat with colleagues is undervalued, though I also respect people who want no part of it.
At one place where we were remote, we had a morning daily (I don't care to argue the usefulness of dailies, though).
When I joined as an IC, I added an emphatically-optional 15 minute "coffee chat" meeting preceding it on the same video chat link. Most people pretty consistently joined at some point before the start of the daily. Sometimes chat was about work, most often, it was just social.
IMO, it was worth it. It was low friction because it was next to a scheduled meeting at a time where a morning beverage was reasonable, and people felt no pressure to join.
Congratulations on building a nice-looking app that addresses a legitimate need.
I'd like to see some proof that this is able to accurately measure noise level across a range of devices. The CDC have a sound meter app [1] which has been tested to 2db accuracy, and they only make that available on specific Apple devices because calculating noise level depends on the hardware.
I'm sorry to ask, but I'm seeing many cases of AI apps making accuracy claims based on the author’s ‘reasonableness spot checks’ but with no statistical testing that the outputs are accurate.
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