7 ms·

There is a lot of talk about how LLMs will disrupt software development and office work and whatnot, but there is one thing that they are massively disrupting r

• goatlover 2y ago
  Computers were supposed to be bicycles for the mind, but increasingly we want them to think for us.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    They were, but that vision was killed as soon as the phrase you quote was spoken. LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Anyone can just go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai to access a tool that will understand their problem, no matter how clumsily formulated, and solve it, or teach them how to solve it, or otherwise address it in a useful fashion. That's pure and quite general force multiplier. But don't you worry, plenty of corporations and countless startups are hard at work to, like with all computing before, strip down the bicycle and offer you Uber and theme park rides for your mind.
    • mvdtnz 2y ago
      > LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Oh BULLSHIT. Computer users have been empowered since the very first programming languages were invented. They simply chose not to engage with them.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        Programming used to be hard, and not everybody is as smart as you are. Things change when difficult things become easy. Engaging with an LLM to have it generate code for you is so far removed from taking a physical book, looking in its index, then hoping it talks about your particular problem, that it's not bullshit.
        • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
          > Programming used to be hard, and not everybody is as smart as you are. But some people are willing to learn brutally hard.
          • TeMPOraL 2y ago
            Context here is "bicycles for the mind", a metaphor that was talking about people in general - it's not "bicycles for the minds of 0.001% of the population dedicated enough and lucky enough to be able to invest large amount of time to master the arcane arts of writing code, in an antagonistic environment, as software vendors try to prevent them from doing it".
            • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
              Learning to ride a bicycle is also hard work. :-)
              • TeMPOraL 2y ago
                Fair enough :). (As a father facing the challenge now, I wonder if it's harder for the kid or for the parent...)
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Who says anything about programming languages? Unless all the bicycle is to you is servicing it? Even if, the last time what you said was true was somewhere in the 80s, maybe early 90s. Afterwards, "programming" was solidly a domain of professionals, not regular users. I don't know about MacOS, but Windows didn't even ship with anything resembling a programming environment until 2010s. Also, time and again with technology, the users didn't chose shit. Technology is thrust at them, it's first and foremost a supplier-driven phenomenon. It's the vendors that chose to gradually remove any ability of customization and end-user automation from software and devices. Initially it was under guise of UI/UX - simplify everything, avoid confusion (and making users engage with their brains). Nowadays, the software is as basic, dumb and functionality-free as it can possibly be, so the excuse shifted to security - everything an end-user can do an attacker can do, so let's take away every possible use that isn't authorized by application and OS vendors. What makes LLMs refreshing is that, for now, they're fully general. The main chat apps don't limit what you can talk about (beyond the usual ass-covering corporate prudishness) - hell, you can use them to work around bullshit limitations regular software has to stop you from harming vendors' profits. But again, only a matter of time - users will get disenfranchised again as near-raw access to LLMs gets replaced by "AI apps". And what do I mean limitations? Think of Copilot in Microsoft Office. If you used it in the past year, you definitely know its limitations. A monkey could hook up GPT-4 to VBA and get more functional Copilot than what Microsoft gave us. But it's not because they can't make powerful assistant - that's the easy part. The challenge they took is making as weak assistant as possible that does anything useful at all. That's the prevailing attitude in software industry, and it has been for good two decades now.
  • dullcrisp 2y ago
    Full self driving Teslas for the mind
    • dgoldstein0 2y ago
      Lol I like the implication that they might drive you into the median or the side of a semi truck. Very apt analogy - we built it because we could, without asking whether we should
      • HPsquared 2y ago
        And just like the Tesla thing, accidents are mostly from people relying too heavily on the raw output, not checking or supervising enough, overestimating the system's reliability/consistency.
  • kazinator 2y ago
    Unfortunately, they got batteries for greater mobility and are now more like e-bikes for the mind.
    • ido 2y ago
      E-bikes are actually better for you than not cycling at all (you still need to push the pedals with a pedelec, and altho that's less strenuous than a non-electric bike it's more than most other forms of transit people otherwise use): https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/the-health-benefits-of-electric-bikes https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/the-health-benefits-of-e...
      • kazinator 2y ago
        Electronic devices are also better for you than no mental stimulation at all.
        • deleted 2y ago
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  • FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    We have robots do physical chores for us: washing machine, robo-vac etc, so why can't we have robots that do mental chores for us? For most of us, our jobs aren't a pleasure, but a chore necessary to earn money to pay rent. How many factory workers do you think enjoy bolting the same car parts to a car over and over again till retirement? So if I can outsource the mundane, annoying and repetitive parts of SW development (like typing the coding) to a machine, so that I can focus on the parts I enjoy (debugging, requirements gathering, customer interaction, architecture etc), what's wrong with that? If the end product is good and fulfills the customers needs who cares if a large part of it was written by a machine and not by a human? I also wish we can go back to the days we were coding in assembly in stead of say JavaScript, but that's not gonna happen professionally for 99% of jobs, you either use JS to ship quickly or get run over by the companies who use JS while you write assembly. ML assisted coding will be the next step.
    • mppm 2y ago
      > So if I can outsource the mundane, annoying and repetitive parts of SW development (like coding) to a machine, so that I can focus on the parts I enjoy (debugging, requirements gathering, customer interaction, etc), what's wrong with that? That's ok when you already understand programming and can guide the codegen and step in to correct when it generates bullshit. But you don't get to that level without learning programming yourself. Education is built from the ground up towards higher and higher levels of abstraction. You don't get to skip learning arithmetic on your way to learning quantum physics, just because numpy will do all your arithmetic once you get there. In other words, it's ok for people who don't like cooking to order takeout, but you don't become a professional cook this way.
      • FirmwareBurner 2y ago
        >Education is built from the ground up towards higher and higher levels of abstraction. How many people who write SW professionally worldwide, know everything about the OS underneath, the sys-calls, disassembly, memory allocation, CPU architecture, network layers, internet routing, cloud and virtualization, etc? Most SW jobs are just routine plumbing, connecting one FOSS pipe to another in whatever way works for you, till you get the desired result which often is unoptimized slop but if it serves the business use case and makes money nobody but the cool-aid drinking stickler developers care that it's slop. It's not rocket science that requires you to know assembly or CPU architectures or linear algebra and optimize ever single bit to perfection, but low cost and time to market is more important. You can try to educate people about everything but not all jobs are gonna require you to know everything. In fact, jobs are being more and more specialized where you'll have one HW expert, one networking expert, one compiler expert, one typescript expert, one GoLang expert etc.
  • weatherlite 2y ago
    > but increasingly we want them to think for us Which is understandable. All societies are constrained by lack of experts / intelligence. Think about how relatively inaccessible healthcare is, even in rich countries.
  • lynx97 2y ago
    Well, I see an e-bike analogy around the corner. People dont want to invest the energy anmore, now that they can buy expensive batteries to help with the pedaling. That is pretty much the human nature.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• aprilthird2021 2y ago
  A diploma from the type of school the author describes is already pretty worthless, imo. I don't get why schools can't just get strict in response to these issues. No electronics in class, period. Accessibility problems can be fixed by having each impaired student get a volunteer scribe for the class. You're in school to learn, and electronics hinder in-person education more than they help, especially as ChatGPT style AI is available on them.
  • cornholio 2y ago
    The "no devices in school" rule has been tried, scientifically tested, and it doesn't really improve outcomes: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(25)00003-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7... The real damage is in the brains and attention spans, traditional school just can't compete with the massive dopamine overstimulus of System A thinking students get every day for an average of 6-8h outside school, by simply requiring focused System B reasoning on tiresome and (comparatively) dull tasks while enforcing dopamine withdrawal.
    • DoingIsLearning 2y ago
      Your appealing to authority with a lancet article but the article just concludes that kids don't spend less time on their phones because of the school bans. Irrespective of brain feedback mechanisms after school it is still a better teaching/learning environment for students to have a device ban during school time. What kids or parents enable after school is beyond school policies. Nevertheless teachers should be minimally protected in their ability to teach and kids in their ability to learn.
      • cornholio 2y ago
        Somewhat ironically given the topic, you are misreading the scientific article: > No significant differences in pupil outcomes were observed between permissive and restrictive schools for all other behavioural outcomes (Fig. 2, Table 3) or for attainment in English (adjusted odds ratio 1.45, 95% CI 0.85–2.47, p = 0.18, reference = permissive) and Maths (adjusted odds ratio 1.01, 95% CI 0.45–2.27, p = 0.98, reference = permissive). Nothing I've said could be interpreted to support the exposure of kids to addictive devices, simply that the quick fix proposed does not seem to have any effect.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  > There is a generation of completely unemployable "graduates" in the pipeline. I feel like that was always the case, at least since like 10 years ago and by my definition.
  • hereonout2 2y ago
    I wasn't unemployable as a graduate, I found a job after all. But I was near enough useless and started from the ground up. I've always felt my real education in software engineering started at work. 20 odd years later I lead a large engineering team and see the same with a lot of graduates we hire. There's a few exceptions but most are as clueless as I was at that age.
    • InsideOutSanta 2y ago
      Yeah, I graduated around 2000 and had to learn how to work on a professional software engineering team. That doesn't mean my education was worthless—quite the opposite. It's just that what you learn in a software engineering degree isn't "how to write code and do software development in a professional team in their specific programming language and libraries and frameworks and using their specific tooling and their office politics."
      • lerp-io 2y ago
        Even professional software development as you know it may not stick around for very long. I believe knowledge and experience gained along the way can translate across different context and you can use that to pivot and adapt to the environment.
        • __loam 2y ago
          The knowledge I got in school is definitely a lot more durable than the experience. Basic knowledge is still what everything is built on.
    • rcxdude 2y ago
      That matches up with my general expectations of graduates. They should be smart, but are not expected to really know much.
• Loeffelmann 2y ago
  I am currently a CS student in germany and our python lecturer told us at the first lesson that "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways and we will not be writing any code after we graduate. He then encouraged us to use AI on all assignments he gives us. He even allows us to cheat at the final exam by using LLMs. I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause. I asked around with my fellow students what they thought about them and not one minded that they were essentially enrolled in a "how to proompt" class. When I asked one student that it was all nice and well that you pass the module but isn't the ideal outcome that you actually know the language by the end? He laughed and said "Yeah sure, do you think the same about maths"?
  • InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    You're being cheated out of an education by your feckless lecturer.
  • darkstar_16 2y ago
    Well, he has a point about Maths :) But, the difference is that basic Maths skills are enough to live a decent life for someone who doesn't do Maths for a career. Basic programming usually isn't enough to pass job interviews and one needs to know the language for a career, atleast for now. I'm actually learning a lot of basic Maths concepts now that I have a kid I need to teach sometimes and have some money I need to invest and understand about rate of return, compounding etc.
    • deleted 2y ago
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    • bramhaag 2y ago
      This is simply wrong. If you think about math as only solving differential equations and inverting matrices by hand, then maybe. This might be how maths are taught in secondary school, but is not at all representative of university-level maths. I use many fields of math on a daily basis at my job and for my personal projects, all of which I've taken courses on: * Formal logic: boolean algebra, set theory. These are the core of any algorithm. * Graph theory: working with parse trees, ASTs, and other problems involving relationships. * Linear algebra: any problem that requires working with vectors or matrices, e.g graphics, many areas of machine learning, ... * Category theory: type systems, algebraic data types, many other functional programming abstractions. I'm sure there are many more that I've taken for granted.
• vendiddy 2y ago
  I think AI will have a dual effect. It will make some folks smarter and others dumber. For example, you could have ChatGPT write your code for you, then explain it to you step by step. It can be an interactive conversation. Or you could copy/paste it. In one case it acts as a tutor. In another case it just does your work for you.
  • intelVISA 2y ago
    It's just Google (web search) v2, if you are able to input the right terms and interpret the results critically you'll be accelerated. If not, you're just another mark.
    • __loam 2y ago
      Also there's no context or docs to dig into, it just spits something out that looks right but might be relying on deprecated code or completely wrong. Ask it to explain something? At least it's confident I guess.
  • itsgrimetime 2y ago
    I agree - the truly curious will be rewarded while those who couldn’t care less will mindlessly copy and paste. Maybe that will give the rest of us job security?
  • tosmatos 2y ago
    I agree with this. I've used AI as a crutch for a time, and felt my skills get worse. Now I've set it up to never have it give me entire solutions, just examples and tips on how to get it done. I've struggled with Shader Programming for a while, tried to learn it from different sources and failed a lot. It felt like something unreachable for me, I don't really know why really. But with the help of an AI that's fine-tuned for mentoring, I really understood some of the concepts. It outlined what I should do and asked socratic questions that made me think. I've gotten way better at it and actually have a pretty solid understanding of the concepts now (well, I think). But sometimes at work I do give in and get it to write an entire script for me, out of laziness and maybe boredom. Their significant advances as of late with "extended thinking" and the likes made them much more likely to one-shot the writing of a slightly complex script... Which in turn made it harder to not just say "hey, that sounds like boring work, let's have the AI do the biggest part of it and I'll patch up the rest".
• petesergeant 2y ago
  > There is a generation of completely unemployable "graduates" in the pipeline. A friend who's a high-school teacher says all the students want to be software engineers, so there's also a glut of them coming...
  • generic92034 2y ago
    Did anyone tell them about the current market for SW developers? :o
• tdeck 2y ago
  I have seen folks who are relatively new to programming work like this. Rather than simple laziness, it was often because they felt intimidated by their lack of knowledge and wanted to be more productive. However, the result of a ChatGPT based workflow is that reasoning often is the very last resort. Ask the LLM for a solution, paste it in, get an error, paste that in, get a new solution, get another error, ask for a fix again, etc. etc. Before someone chimes in to say this is like Stack Overflow: no it isn't. Real people expect you to put some work and effort into first describing your problem, then solving it. You would rarely find someone willing to go through such an exercise with you, and they probably wouldn't hallucinate broken code to you while doing it. 15 minutes of this and it turns out to be something silly that ChatGPT would never catch - e.g. you have installed a very old version of the Python module for some internal company reason. But because the reasoning muscle isn't being built up, and the context isn't being built up, they can't figure it out. They didn't see the bit on the docs page that says "this function was added in version 1.5" because they didn't write the function call, and didn't open the documentation, and perhaps wouldn't even consider opening the documentation because that's what ChatGPT is for. In fact, they might not have even consciously chosen that library because again.. that's what ChatGPT is for.
  • nosianu 2y ago
    Just a funny, or depressing, aside - and then a point about LLMs. Real coding can, unfortunately, be as bad as that or worse. Here is one very famous HN comment from 2018, and I know what he is talking about because participating in this madness was my first job after university, dispelling a lot of my illusions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 I went into that job (of porting Oracle to another Unix platform for an Oracle platform partner) full of enthusiasm and gave up finding any meaning or enjoyment after the first few weeks, or trying to understand or improve anything. If AI could do at least some of that job it would actually a big plus. (it's the working-on-Oracle-code comment if you didn't already guess it) I think there's a good chance code becomes more like biology. You can understand the details, but there are sooo many of them, and there are way too many connections directly and indirectly across layers. You have to find higher level methods because it's too much for a direct comprehension. I saw a main code contributor in a startup I worked at work kind of like that. Not all his fault, forced to move too quickly and the code was so ill defined, not even the big boss knowing what they wanted and only talking in meta terms and always coming up with new sometimes contradicting ideas. The code was very hard to comprehend and debug, especially since much of it was distributed algorithms. So his approach was running it with demo data, observing higher level outcomes, and tweaking this or that component until it kind of worked. It never worked reliably, it was demo-quality software at best. But he managed to implement all the new ideas from management at least. I found that style interesting and could not dismiss it outright, even though I really really did not want to have to debug that thing in production. But I saw something different from what I was used to, focus on a higher level, working when you just can't have the same depth of understanding of what you are doing as one would traditionally like. Given my Oracle experience, I saw how this would be a useful style IRL for many big long-running projects, like that Oracle code, that you had no chance of comprehending or improving without "rm -rf" and a restart which you could not do. I think education needs to also show these more "biology-level complexity" and more statistical higher level approaches. Much of our software is getting too complex for the traditional low-level methods. I see LLMs as just part of such a toolkit for the future. On the one hand, there is supplying code for "traditional" smaller projects, where you still have hope to be in control and have at least the seniors fully understand the system. On the other hand, LLMs could help with too-complex systems, not with making them understandable, that is impossible for those messy systems, but with being able to still productively work with them, add new features and debug issues. Code such as in the Oracle case. A new tool for even higher levels of messiness and complexity in our systems, which we won't be able to engineer away due to real life constraints.
• deleted 2y ago
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• zombot 2y ago
  This kind of ruins the bogus startup founder narrative of disruption being an unconditionally positive thing.
• ElevenLathe 2y ago
  I think payola diplomas will probably continue to be valuable, since they represent non-falsifiable economic power/sacrifice. Even if schools just literally sold diplomas for 100k, they would still be useful for business to filter out people who are too poor to matter (i.e. they have such divergent interests from shareholders/management that it would be more trouble that its worth to try and socialize them to a particular professional role). This is a bit less cut-and-dried, but IMO cryptocurrency has normalized this kind of view where simply wasting resources is itself a way to generate, or at least represent, value.
• mbs159 2y ago
  I've completed a Master's course in CS and some students came from other technical studies, like applied mathematics and physics. Of course after only 2 years they did not learn any particular programming language well, but they learned other skills related to CS, performed experiments in very narrow fields.
• colonial 2y ago
  Worse, some professors encourage this! I had a data structures professor (over a year ago now) that actively encouraged a class of sophomores - most of whom were fresh out of "intro to Java" - to have Copilot (GPT-4 at the time I believe) help churn out assignment code on the university's dime. Being somewhat ahead and an avowed LLM hater, I mostly forgot about this and plowed through the assignments unassisted... until the first midterm (on paper, in person) hit. The mean was something like a 40. I eventually spoke to some classmates that weren't in my immediate group, and predictably heard several variations on "I let Copilot become a crutch." Ugh. Fortunately there was ample opportunity to turn grades around, but I'm sure some people are still feeling that bad advice in their GPAs.