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This is exactly why I still play Go, practice martial arts, archery and use the command line for my dev workflow. Those are all arguably less efficient and obso

by hosh 2y ago

This is exactly why I still play Go, practice martial arts, archery and use the command line for my dev workflow. Those are all arguably less efficient and obsolete. The AlphaGo series can defeat the strongest human Go players and firearms are more effective than unarmed martial arts and archery. GUI is easier for most people than the command line. Yet, I practice all these to develop my mind and body. I don't have to be a world-class Go player to benefit from learning to play Go. This happens a lot in the natural world in ecosystems. For example, many people plant trees and add a drip system. The trees grow to depend on the drip system, and never stretch and develop their roots -- and the relationship they have with the soil microbiome. They make the trees prone to get knocked down when an unusually strong gust of wind come through.

MrMcCall 2y ago
You might have my favorite profile page here, with the exception of DonHopkins. Just beautiful concepts, inspiring, and well-represented in this comment. Peace be with you, my friend.
BeetleB 2y ago
> This is exactly why I still play Go, practice martial arts, archery and use the command line for my dev workflow. And this is what worries me. Pre-LLM, I'd get all my practice done during work hours. I fear that with LLMs, I'll need to do all this practice on my free time, effectively reducing my truly "free" time.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > Pre-LLM, I'd get all my practice done during work hours. I fear that with LLMs, I'll need to do all this practice on my free time If you can attach a valid business reason/excuse then it's fairly easy to get time dedicated to experimentation and learning. I haven't been a coder for several years now, but I still try to justify a personal lab environment in order to understand the market and customer problems. If you're an Engineer or EM, I think it would be even easier (attach experimentation to some sort of critical engineering initiative). Even with Code Gen Copilots becoming a thing, between the lines most of us in engineering and business leadership recognize it cannot replace architecture or design. If it can, then you've solved the Turing or Chinese Room problem and that's a whole other story. That said, if your day job isn't only "write this terraform/python script" you shouldn't be at risk.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    > If you can attach a valid business reason/excuse then it's fairly easy to get time dedicated to experimentation and learning. This has the same problem as "doing it in free time". I have a finite number of goodie points with management, and I'd be using some when I request this - which means I have fewer things I can request from them in the future. > That said, if your day job isn't only "write this terraform/python script" you shouldn't be at risk. I'm not worried about the present, or even the near future. The reason I have other valuable skills is because of the years I spent on writing code. Eventually, I'll stop growing if I rely too much on LLMs. I may have to rely on them if everyone else is and being more productive.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    The Turing test can be considered well and truly passed at this point, partially because it has always said more about the human taking the test than it did about the machine. As for the Chinese Room, it was never anything but a pointless exercise in question-begging. If anyone ever considered it relevant, the advent of LLMs should have immediately convinced them otherwise. Searle knew nothing about embedding vectors, never mind attention. Great points otherwise, though. A strong focus on identifying, understanding, and solving customer problems is, in modern parlance, all you need.
- hosh 2y ago
  I had someone give me a good use-case for LLMs -- such as, doing the CRUD work that I really don't want to do, if you are short on funding. On the other hand, there is something I learned from permaculture design. You need to allow what you want to grow in the ecosystem if you want them present. If I wanted to develop the next generation of developers, then I'd be giving that CRUD stuff I've done many times to a junior developer instead. It obviously depends on funding, and whether your investors are on board with that. As far as keeping up and remaining competitive ... my suggestion is to learn these things in a way where you can broadly apply the underlying principles in other domains, especially that, as you age, your working memory will shrink. This isn't accumulating more of the same thing, but gaining deeper insights that can only be found when you've developed a sufficient level of skill. There are lots of ways this can be accomplished.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    > You need to allow what you want to grow in the ecosystem if you want them present. If I wanted to develop the next generation of developers, then I'd be giving that CRUD stuff I've done many times to a junior developer instead. Indeed, one of my fears is that people won't develop those skills to begin with. In my team, the few senior people can pretty much be trusted with using LLMs and still producing quality code. But we decided against evangelizing it to the junior folks. They still have access via Copilot, but we won't gently suggest they try it out.

by hosh 2y ago

MrMcCall 2y ago

You might have my favorite profile page here, with the exception of DonHopkins. Just beautiful concepts, inspiring, and well-represented in this comment. Peace be with you, my friend.

BeetleB 2y ago

> This is exactly why I still play Go, practice martial arts, archery and use the command line for my dev workflow. And this is what worries me. Pre-LLM, I'd get all my practice done during work hours. I fear that with LLMs, I'll need to do all this practice on my free time, effectively reducing my truly "free" time.

alephnerd 2y ago
> Pre-LLM, I'd get all my practice done during work hours. I fear that with LLMs, I'll need to do all this practice on my free time If you can attach a valid business reason/excuse then it's fairly easy to get time dedicated to experimentation and learning. I haven't been a coder for several years now, but I still try to justify a personal lab environment in order to understand the market and customer problems. If you're an Engineer or EM, I think it would be even easier (attach experimentation to some sort of critical engineering initiative). Even with Code Gen Copilots becoming a thing, between the lines most of us in engineering and business leadership recognize it cannot replace architecture or design. If it can, then you've solved the Turing or Chinese Room problem and that's a whole other story. That said, if your day job isn't only "write this terraform/python script" you shouldn't be at risk.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > If you can attach a valid business reason/excuse then it's fairly easy to get time dedicated to experimentation and learning. This has the same problem as "doing it in free time". I have a finite number of goodie points with management, and I'd be using some when I request this - which means I have fewer things I can request from them in the future. > That said, if your day job isn't only "write this terraform/python script" you shouldn't be at risk. I'm not worried about the present, or even the near future. The reason I have other valuable skills is because of the years I spent on writing code. Eventually, I'll stop growing if I rely too much on LLMs. I may have to rely on them if everyone else is and being more productive.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  The Turing test can be considered well and truly passed at this point, partially because it has always said more about the human taking the test than it did about the machine. As for the Chinese Room, it was never anything but a pointless exercise in question-begging. If anyone ever considered it relevant, the advent of LLMs should have immediately convinced them otherwise. Searle knew nothing about embedding vectors, never mind attention. Great points otherwise, though. A strong focus on identifying, understanding, and solving customer problems is, in modern parlance, all you need.
hosh 2y ago
I had someone give me a good use-case for LLMs -- such as, doing the CRUD work that I really don't want to do, if you are short on funding. On the other hand, there is something I learned from permaculture design. You need to allow what you want to grow in the ecosystem if you want them present. If I wanted to develop the next generation of developers, then I'd be giving that CRUD stuff I've done many times to a junior developer instead. It obviously depends on funding, and whether your investors are on board with that. As far as keeping up and remaining competitive ... my suggestion is to learn these things in a way where you can broadly apply the underlying principles in other domains, especially that, as you age, your working memory will shrink. This isn't accumulating more of the same thing, but gaining deeper insights that can only be found when you've developed a sufficient level of skill. There are lots of ways this can be accomplished.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > You need to allow what you want to grow in the ecosystem if you want them present. If I wanted to develop the next generation of developers, then I'd be giving that CRUD stuff I've done many times to a junior developer instead. Indeed, one of my fears is that people won't develop those skills to begin with. In my team, the few senior people can pretty much be trusted with using LLMs and still producing quality code. But we decided against evangelizing it to the junior folks. They still have access via Copilot, but we won't gently suggest they try it out.