That's an expression of class thinking from the beginning IMO. People think of themselves as thinkers and creators, while those who do labour they rely on without getting too much into details are merely doers and can ideally be replaced. But it's really thinking and creativity all the way down if you try to learn to do things well
You must have had limited exposure to uncreative types. You might be shocked to find there are people that can do nothing more than follow checklists.
Sometimes it's a lack of capacity for novel thinking. Sometimes it's fear caused by past trauma. Or it can be age. Or an inability to overcome habits. The list goes on, but the point is that I've had to work with or supervise employees (even in IT!) that didn't have a creative bone in their body. It wasn't a lack of motivation, it was usually something on the list above.
These people absolutely deserved the feeling of being useful, and those are the people I'm most concerned for in this new post-LLM world. The creative types will most likely be fine, but we have words to describe creativity as an acknowledgement that there can be an absence of creativity.
You are only thinking about people and creativity in the workplace. Creativity can be applied anywhere: cooking, a new route on your way to somewhere, read some random paragraphs in a book that spawns new thoughts, a new game with a child, optimize the way you paint the walls on your house, choose the plants in your garden (and how you'll water them), do a doodle, try or buy a new outfit, typing this paragraph in response to your message (kinda LLM-y maybe).
I think this is what makes me uneasy about the whole LLM/"consciousness" debate. I may be wrong, but as far as I know, we still don't really understand how a bunch of feedforward networks and attention modules result in the kind of crazy semantic context understanding and planning-in-human-language behavior we observe in LLMs. Neither do we know how the billions of neurons in a human brain do it.
The debate how similar or dissimilar LLMs are to brains wasn't solved by any kind of scientific finding, it feels we just sort of decided at some point that they'd have to be fundamentally different, because everything else would be highly problematic.
> Salespeople sell things that already exist. If you can envision new things that would sell well, that's a bit more than sales talent
A lot of gadgets that were claimed by Steve Jobs to have been envisioned by Apple (or rather: by him) - as I wrote: Steve Jobs was an exceptional salesman - already existed before, just in a way that had a little bit more rough edges. These did not sell so well, because the companies did not have a marketing department that made people believe that what they sell is the next big thing.
> Jobs envisioned the iPad and iPhone. [...]
Everyone around him at that time has commented on this. Are you going to claim they’re all lying?
I don't claim that they are all lying, but I do claim that quite some people fell for Apple's marketing (as I wrote: "Jobs' talent was that he was an incredibly talented salesman.").
> But it's really thinking and creativity all the way down if you try to learn to do things well
Yes, everyone starts out creative.
But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows.
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But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows.
Rather: the workers who are (still) creative are typically a huge annoyance to their bosses.
Yeah, and that is how people stop being creative as they get punished for it while their uncreative peers gets praised. It happens to most people in school or early in their career, few gets to keep their creativity.
In a new world where creativity is valued higher more people could probably keep their creativity.
I have never met an uncreative kid, and studies show kids tend to be more open and creative. But I have to admit I haven't met and interacted with that many average kids, so there maybe some that aren't creative, but a majority are.
Reminds me of some British MP who said around Brexit time Britain is not leaving Europe geographically. Anyway, Russia or Turkey are geographically in Europe too, but when we are talking about "European regulation", it's pretty obvious that these are excluded, and so is Britain after 2020.
I understand there is context in this thread. I also understand that statements like "The UK is no longer part of Europe" are frequently used with political motivations, to sow division.
Also, being geographically close, and only recently an ex-EU member, and with strong alignment on defence/Ukraine, it is not like we are wholly separate and unaligned. We retained some EU law, such as GDPR and EU261 (copy-pasted into a law referred to as 'UK261'). Yes, I understand the UK not being a member state means that EU laws wouldn't automatically apply – but the world is more complex than that.
The Labour party shares a lot in common with many parts of the EU and EU governments when it comes to control, privacy etc.
The UK has been re-aligning with the EU and the rest of Europe for a little while now, repairing relationships, for obvious reasons.
I am still not sure why everyone jumped on uv. Sure, it's quicker than pip, but an installation rarely takes so long as to become annoying. Anyway, pip is still there, so whatever impact they have made can be rolled back if they try to pull the rug
I'm not sure but it seems to be because of dependency management behaviors I find confusing. Like, I found out that apparently people or packages would just do this `pip freeze > requirements.txt` or otherwise just not pay attention to what version limitations there are. It's not something that I ever really ran into much though
You can easily hire a person from Ohio to work for your company incorporated in California without having a separate legal entity in Ohio. Not the case in EU.
True but you do have to register with the state of Ohio, and jump through some hoops.
It’s possible to be registered in a state you’ve never been to - how many people have actually been to Delaware or Wyoming - and employ nobody at.
Some countries play this game too - after the Cayman Islands enacted anti money laundering laws, they tried to keep companies with privacy and efficient dispute resolution.
Are these comments from 2018? 'Pro' models of iPhones have been $999 or more, not adjusted for inflation, at their lowest tier since 'Pro' has been a thing. I would expect the same of a Samsung 'Ultra' flagship?
I find the same problem applying to coding too. Even with everyone acting in good faith and reviewing everything themselves before pushing, you have essentially two reviwers instead of a writer and a reviewer, and there is no etiquette mandating how thoroughly the "author" should review their PR yet. It doesn't help if the amount of code to review gets larger (why would you go into agentic coding otherwise?)
What is the category of code that does not need quality? You need it to not interact with real world, with people's finances, with people's personal data. Basically it's the code that only exists for PMs to show to investors (in startups) and VPs (in enterprise), but not for real users to rely on.
> What is the category of code that does not need quality?
For example there exist "applications"/"demos" that exist "to show the customer what could be possible if they hire 'us'". These demos just have to survive a, say, intense two-hour marketing pitch and some inconvenient questions/tests that someone in the audience might come up with during these two hours.
In other words: applications for "pitching possibilities" to a potential customer, where everything is allowed to be smoke and mirrors if necessary (once the customer has been convinced with all tricks to hire the respective company for the project, the requirements will completely change anyway ...).
Yeah, that's what I mean - prototypes. The caveat is though that before agentic coding skills to build a prototype and skills to build a production system were generally the same, so a prototype did not only provide a demonstration of what is possible in general, but what your team of engineers can do specifically. Now these skills will diverge, so prototypes will not prove anything like that. They are still going to be useful for demonstrations and market research though.
I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored them or created conditions for their success and growth.
When one side of the discussion makes their ignorance a point of pride, defining themselves entirely based on what they now need not know, I believe you've inadvertently insulted yourself.
I don't see many on one "side" with prideful ignorance. There are a few loud ones, sure. But I love to see the many ideas I've not had the time to implement come to fruition. I don't get the same satisfaction. It doesn't seem as much "mine" as if I did it all by hand. However once the tool is built, I use it to build more things. More tools.
Not having to know the lower levels means you can free your mind for things at higher levels of abstraction. It's not a void in our brain you don't fill with other things.
I've noticed that too and it's not too different from political discussions. At the end of the day, I think the split is really about different values people have, their identity, and justice.
A lot of developers' identities is tied to their ability to create quality solutions as well as having control over the means of production (for lack of a better term). An employer mandating that they start using AI more and change their quality standards is naturally going to lead to a sense of injustice about it all.
Disagree. I think it was always obvious to me that there are at two kinds of developers. To make an extreme example: developer A writes long, sometimes tedious, security-minded, thoroughly tested code, and has written the CI pipelines too. When tasked with some ticket, they'll develop it to the letter, not one inch further, and even if it makes zero sense from the point of view of the users. Developer B knows nothing of that, doesn't write tests, can't be arsed about security and has no idea of how to deploy stuff, but thinks backwards from what the users (or other developers, or their future self) might like a lot and tries to make that. Both have been useful, though the first kind usually much more appreciated (maybe because it's really essential, while type B's contributions are harder to measure).
Probably AI has come a little bit earlier for type A, but type B will follow soon anyway. In the meanwhile, they're enjoying the ride a bit more since AI takes care of all the tedious but essential details.
That has become pretty controversial recently, but I think the difference is that in software development, building knowledge is the work. You write software and simultaneously build expertise in your team regarding what the software does that allows you to maintain it and move forward.
Part of figuring out where the pieces should go is usually in trying to put them in, because you generally can’t visualize the complete solution in your mind just by looking at all the pieces and only thinking. I don’t think this is a good analogy.
Puzzles have a correct solution that is known in advance, the pleasure consists in the work you do to reach it. It's a bit different when the solution has a beauty in itself.
How about people that understand things are changing whether anyone likes it or not and want to stay relevant. What about the people who care about the end product and not rabbitholing design decisions on a proof of concept. What about someone who understands there is more nuance than assuming people with a different perspective on AI are lesser than or lower than people who resist the technology. You may feel you know the “right way” but to everyone else who is interested in operating in a world changing beneath our feet and not whining about the fact that everything will be different, and denigrating the people who want to succeed in it, this opinion is not exactly convincing. You want to cludge your way through a problem you’re welcome to but it’s not necessarily logical to suggest this is the only “right” way and infer that people who build with AI don’t like “understanding systems”.
When I build with AI I build things I never would have built before, and in doing so I’m exposed to technologies, designs, tools I wasn’t aware of before. I ask questions about them. Sure I don’t understand the tools as deeply as the person who wasted like 10 hours going down rabbit holes to answer a simple question, but I don’t really see that as particularly valuable.
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