24 ms·
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in: FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 To get
by arjie 8mo ago
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
- pelma 8mo agoI thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
- RGamma 8mo agoAnd simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
- pixl97 8mo agoThis is the history of every empire. It's also why every empire in history collapsed.
- martin-t 8mo agoHumans are not smart enough. People are either proactive or reactive. Proactive think about the system and its incentives and how to align them for everyone's benefit. Reactive people only complain after they have been exploited. Most people are reactive. If AI is not a scam, we're gonna see a massive wave of unemployment and only then will many people realize they have spent half of their waking hours making someone else richer and they have no control over what they created. And I don't meant just those who build AI. I mean everyone whose work isn't mostly manual/physical. They're OK with open source code being turned into statistical patterns and plagiarized en masse. They will only start complaining once their work has been stolen and they are broke.
- lm28469 8mo agoWe're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c. But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
- lstodd 8mo ago[flagged]
- anamexis 8mo agoRetirement is the withdrawal from active working life, i.e. having a job. It is not a US concept.
- samf 8mo agoRight, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do. I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.
- lstodd 8mo ago[flagged]
- RataNova 8mo agoLearning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.
- coldtea 8mo ago>I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future. The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".
- dkh 8mo agoFunny, I also accidentally formatted my dad’s hard drive, destroying work, while trying to install Red Hat, though in my case it was 6.2 “Zoot” somewhere around 1999.