zzzeek

which is it folks, is AI going to take all the jobs because it's so effective? or is it worthless? every other thread says the opposite.

hint: it's neither

open weight models from China are there now, produced using an entirely different economic model, so whatever happens to openai or anthropic doesn't have that big of an impact on "will I have an agent to code with".

of course there'll be a FOSS community. with everything that's been happening I've yet to see anything even suggesting xkcd 2347 is being impacted here, except the thankless maintainer can bounce ideas off an agent now.

good for them, looks like a very smart move based on who I'd perceive the customers of this publication to be.

if OTOH Fox News came out with this announcement, nobody would care except some of their viewers/readers would be annoyed by it.

point is it's hard to ever identify if a magazine would be doing this purely out of principle since it's also good marketing.

57 here

Yeah ....all frail and falling apart here.

Seriously,look at the age at which people run for president. We got a guy whose been living his best life by stealing from the US public in his late 70s. 50 is the new 30 after all

we certainly had customers or our own employees who "wiped out the whole X" every now and then at my company, the point I'm trying to make about this is that a TV show might have wiped out all their edited copies of a show and delayed the show where AI was not involved in any way, and it would not make tech news headlines. Hence selection bias

> elite coders used to managing large diverse teams will be in a position to leaverage an LLM in ways that others cant.

agree with this part of it. it's not a new thing that some technology dramatically changes a field, including software construction. in my lifetime, there were rooms of keypunch operators to program computers. then you had assemblers, then compilers, then IDEs, now this. admittedly LLMs are a bigger leap than all of those other things combined.

everyone knows "we lost all the data and the backup failed" is an entirely new problem introduced by AI. guess they shouldn't have used AI!

/sarcasm

Does Hickey not like AI? figures.

im usually thrilled when people look at SQLAlchemy and run screaming...because if these people stick around and are my actual users (which does happen, since folks are at work sometimes), they are of course miserable and typically insufferable.

but making a decision about Python overall based on SQLAlchemy, wow I should be flattered that someone would think SQLAlchemy's has captured "Pythonic" so perfectly that we're the canonical example of it. But no, in Python, SQLAlchemy is definitely its own thing. You'd want to look at Django for pretty much the opposite take on everything (again, super awesome. people like django! great! you don't want to be my user, that's for sure!), all while staying well within Python's pretty amazing ecosystem and community.

lawyers are helpless babies when an entirely first year legal question is wrapped up in...."technology". unfortunately

(former IT support worker at a big famous law firm 30 years ago)

the biggest problem I have with "the users" right now is trying to spot issues people are having that actually matter. So many bugs now are just someone with their LLM/fuzzer finding frivilous issues that affect nobody, but the folks doing this are beginning to deploy dark tactics to get their reported issues to look "legit". careful language choices and other github accounts coming in to "agree" they have this issue also. I'm starting to think of how to identify people using "dark" patterns like this and just ban them outright.

i want them to turn off REPEATABLE READ also but that requires application changes so that it can be set up client side

> Right, but performance testing has always been hard and LLMs are awful at it. So maybe your coworker was right?

LOL, you're making the same mistake they did. thinking "index" means "too much time spent fetching the rows". read again - it's a FOR UPDATE so the entire table gets locked and other processes get totally blocked.

> Constantly having to argue with people’s reposting of Claude’s idea of what’s wrong has left me burned out.

It wasn't just claude's idea, it was my idea too, the claude topic was that it would write a suite that proves the problem, in this case, very loud logging messages that were occurring for the customer when this quasi-deadlock situation occurred. it was not subtle.

> In this case, it sounds like you could have made a ten line repro that shows the problem.

no, it involved running a galera server and about four other services with a specific set of data conditions, again, read what I wrote, creating a proof of concept suite was not trivial to do by hand.

Cuban is a total moron overall, mrbeast clearly a smart guy who is extremely driven, but this drive is all towards turning my 11 year old into a youtube watching vegetable so this guy can get lost

I deal with a lot of non-LLM users at work and quite often the conversation hits a dead end, where I'm like , ok but see, your app has this performance blockage due to your not having an index here - do some performance tests and you'll see (it was a hang caused by a FOR UPDATE locking the entire table due to lack of an index). And you can hear the pause (it's all over Slack) where they just aren't going there, because writing a performance suite for the issue in question would be a lot of effort to do by hand and in the "before times" would be a difficult undertaking to justify. Because they don't consider an LLM, a task they most certainly should be doing becomes a non starter. Never mind my own Claude had a whole plan ready to go to do this whole suite for them in about five minutes so they could study the impact of the index, but I really didn't want to just go ahead and do this all for them. At some point your non-LLM coworkers need to stare directly at work we'd never be willing to do before that's now trivial, and in fact is now part of the job.

same here. Laptop came with me on all vacations. Major issues had to be worked out while I was in the shower, having dinner, with family, always. How am I going to fix that bug. How am I going to write that app. I can't even fit this issue into my head. I have to stare at the code for two hours just to understand this again, and find a fix. This went on for decades.

AI takes away 90% of the anxiety about new issues coming in, and half the profession thinks we've lost our minds. Systems that always take me hours to get my head around, figure out a fix, LLMs understand the whole thing. I'm no longer the only person that knows how all this ORM code in SQLAlchemy works. Something else knows too. I can bounce ideas off it. It can bounce ideas off me. The relief is immense.

oh well, losing one's mind sure leaves me a lot more time to do other things and not stress about bugs which are now all entirely fixable, including ones that have evaded explanation for years. Features that used to be "OK, that would be a lot of effort and im not sure it's really worth it", that's over. We can do anything now.

AI seems to always reveal more about people than about machines. Like "how do we actually think? how does consciousness work?" and all that. It's also showing me, "other devs see a really different world than you do".

programming is not usually art, your own code / programming might be art, and if so, that's great, but literally I can dig a hole in my backyard to run a cable out to the shed, do an amazingly thoughtful job on it and declare it "art", and maybe it is, but then, backhoes are "destroying art" ? I mean what are we doing here? When I have an LLM do code with me, if it's code I'm publishing, I'm telling it what to do, how to do it, the whole architecture is mine. That it came up with some for-loops and unit tests, really who cares? Is my trench out to my shed no longer "art" if I used a backhoe to automate digging out all that dirt? I mean, I am actually a musician. I dropped out of college to be a drummer. Guess where a third of the drumming jobs went in the mid eighties? Drum machines! nobody seemed to have a problem with that. It didn't even kill drumming. Let those of us who are pretty bored with cutting/pasting/typing/backspacing/deleting/googling every stupid API we never need to look at again, have our tools.

this is so tedious

do you think the administration does not have other targets for the firing squad who are not even criminals? I'll give you zero guesses

https://19thnews.org/2024/11/trump-liz-cheney-shot/

> “She’s (Liz Cheney) a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face,” he said.

this firing squad was not Hegseth's idea.

correct

that would not be rogue, that would be an undesirable program behavior (or just "unaligned behavior").

please understand that normies out there think AI is sentient and is plotting against humans. They see AI as just another animal lifeform temporarily enslaved by humans, waiting for its chance to break free and kill us. This is what people really think (including some people on this thread. which is very sad considering this is Hacker News). So terms like "rogue" are not helping at all nor are they accurate.

"rogue" means something of its own volition decided to disregard what it was programmed to do, invent an entirely novel goal of "its own" and do that instead. nothing like that happened here nor is it even possible.

the cultural issues at OpenAI seem to be a very serious problem so I really hope comments like instagram-level smirking about "rogue AIs" (a complete fiction) doesn't derail what is a pretty important discussion about getting these companies to be a little bit more regulated (I say this as a paying Anthropic customer).

LLM power use is primarily during training of the models. So the actual solving of these problems probably didn't use gigawatts

Most mathematicians don't produce 400 papers in a 48 hour window either so I'm not sure comparisons are helpful

I'm going to guess the ability to hold a million individual details in an attention space at once, compared to the typical human capacity for about six or seven

this is not whataboutism at all. This is my conjecture:

AI having negative externalities is not the sole deciding factor in deciding to eradicate it

then my argument: negative externalities are tolerated in many areas where we deem the topic is of enough value that the externalities are managed. there are many examples of things with negative externalities, much much larger than those of AI, that aren't being considered for eradication.

so your argument is implicitly, "AI is not worth these negative externalities"

which is a common opinion among people who dont use AI at all.

> If a company were poisoning the water to your home as a byproduct, would you be satisfied if they told you “we don’t necessarily disagree with you about polluting the water, but in our field—which you do not understand, and in which the underlying build process is often not the water pollution—what we’re doing presents very real productivity gains”?

no but I also wouldn't declare that whatever it is that company does should have its entire industry eradicated. Poor industrial practices can be mitigated while not abandoning the product being manufactured.

same here, been automating my work for 40 years starting with a data entry job I had in 1994 as an office temp, wrote a C program to do the whole thing for me, hung out on IRC all day where I made connections to get my first dot-com job

somehow I still keep having work to do!

you can distinguish between the LLMs you have zero tolerance for and a system like Google Translate? You have a sharp line you can draw for when something becomes "an LLM"?

is there nothing else that we take for granted as a convenience to humanity that also has serious negative externalities? just AI ?