sanderjd

3 ms·

1.
by sanderjd 8d ago
Yeah I don't think we disagree that much about this. But I'm not really worried about this particular habit forming risk. I can see where you're coming from though.
2.
by sanderjd 8d ago
As I said in another comment, to me this seems like it must have a strong personality or psychological component of some kind. I'm really not trying to be condescending or anything, but I just simply do not experience that reaction. I
3.
by sanderjd 9d ago
Maybe. But I don't just use it for coding. For instance one thing I use it for is helping me track and evolve my workouts over time. It helps that it can remember the weight and number of reps I did the previous time. I could make an a
4.
by sanderjd 9d ago
In general, yes.
5.
by sanderjd 9d ago
I guess I'm also pretty skeptical of the "automatically remember things about me" functionality. But I really like being able to say "hey make sure to remember this fact" and being able to ask about those things lat
6.
by sanderjd 9d ago
Yeah to me it's just "oh what a nice interface for compressing information and accessing it upon request!", not at all "I'm talking to a person". But I dunno, maybe we're the weird ones.
7.
by sanderjd 9d ago
I use memory all the time so that I can ask it about things. That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do, it's just more convenient to search.
8.
by sanderjd 9d ago
Yes I think it's just flatly a mistake to want them to "provide new perspectives". Weights are much better at encoding consensus than heterodoxy. What they are good at is finding, summarizing, and providing links to perspecti
9.
by sanderjd 9d ago
But ... there is no "social dimension of LLMs" for me, they are just tools.
10.
by sanderjd 9d ago
Sometimes I wonder if this is a personality thing. It has never occurred to me to anthropomorphize these things. But it seems like a huge number of people struggle with this.
11.
by sanderjd 9d ago
I see what you're saying, but I don't really think understanding how they work is the problem. We do understand how they work. You can go read the many papers that have been published as the technology has been developed. It is no
12.
by sanderjd 10d ago
Yes, but then it's really important to demonstrate that this is true. If they invest in what you propose, time to market for new features needs to actually become faster, or customer churn needs to actually decrease. It's not enou
13.
by sanderjd 10d ago
You have to pick metrics to show management that they understand the importance of, and then be able to demonstrate degradation in those metrics when you don't do what you propose, and improvements when you do. Accomplish this and you&
14.
by sanderjd 10d ago
Sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't. The hard part is figuring out which is which. The most effective engineers are those who maximize the amount of time they spend picking the right point in the trade-off at the right times.
15.
by sanderjd 10d ago
I totally agree with the skepticism that we'll ever get to a point where natural language becomes the "formalism" and stop needing people who understand the actual formalism underneath. And I agree that you don't need
16.
by sanderjd 10d ago
No, this is clearly not true of accountants! Using digital spreadsheets is not "skill erosion", it is the skill! That doesn't mean they don't still need to learn how to do the calculations that are encoded into the spr
17.
by sanderjd 12d ago
It was quoting a word from this sentence in your comment: > An entire generation of potential competition is getting addicted to the subsidized corporate tooling. I think that using LLMs as tools for work is just like accountants using
18.
by sanderjd 12d ago
IME, it works, but at the cost of a pretty large amount of overhead, both in performance and (I think more importantly) cognitive. Honestly I never did come to a satisfying conclusion on whether I thought it was worth it. The teams I worked
19.
by sanderjd 13d ago
Ok.
20.
by sanderjd 13d ago
I have no clue what you're talking about.
21.
by sanderjd 13d ago
I don't think this is in any way a disagreement between us. In just the same way that spreadsheet software did not kill demand for accountants, I do not believe AI will kill the demand for other professionals.
22.
by sanderjd 15d ago
What niche knowledge? It seems to me that applying general knowledge to new niches has never been easier.
23.
by sanderjd 15d ago
It's the domains, the problems being solved, that are interesting, not the lines of code. I want to have expertise in the former, not the latter.
24.
by sanderjd 15d ago
AI is a very useful tool for finding problems in codebases. I'm very far from an "AI is going to take everyone's job" doomer, but I really do think "there will be programming jobs that don't involve using LLM b
25.
by sanderjd 15d ago
Maybe! But probably not, IMO. There have been a number of generations now that have been "addicted" to using digital spreadsheets rather than doing bookkeeping by hand.
26.
by sanderjd 15d ago
I don't know what your comment means. Can you say more? But generally, yes, I think cynicism has run amok among the very-online.
27.
by sanderjd 15d ago
IMO the crypto / blockchain dominated periods were worse than the AI dominance of the moment. But YMMV I suppose!
28.
by sanderjd 15d ago
I also experience this as a great loss, but honestly yes, I can't get excited about perfecting the craft of writing computer code now that there are AI systems that have done so. I'll always be sad about this! But the flip side is
29.
by sanderjd 15d ago
HN is often dominated by a Thing that is happening, during periods when there is some dominant Thing going on. In my time here, that has been many different Things over the years; social media, SaaS, Ruby on Rails, javascript frameworks, Ru
30.
by sanderjd 15d ago
I'm unconvinced that this is a pattern that is distinguished by the nation being reported on. Headlines vary. Both of your example headlines might appear at different times in the outlets I read. I think this was just a stylistic choic

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