To be fair, when you're in Gambukistan and you don't even know what languages are spoken, a smart phone can bail you out and get you communicating basic needs much faster and better than waving your hands and speaking English LOUDLY AND S L O W L Y . A good human translator, you can trust, should be better - depending on their grasp of English, but there's another point... who do you choose to pick your hotel for you? Google, or a local kid who spotted you from across the street and ran over to "help you out"? That's a tossup, both are out to make a profit out of you, but which one is likely to hurt you more?
MangoCats
joined 5 months ago
Always keep an open mind. I stuck around in my first job until the sad and pathetic end for everyone, and when I finally did start looking the economy was worse than it had been when the writing was first on the wall.
I’ve had too many arguments with management about letting them merge and I’m not letting that ruin my code base
I guess I'm lucky, before here I always had 100% control of the code I was responsible for. Here (last 12 years) we have a big team, but nobody merges to master/main without a review and screwups in the section of the repository I am primarily responsible for have been rare.
We have a new VP collecting metrics on everyone, including lines of code, number of merge requests, times per day using ai, days per week in the office vs at home
I have been getting actively recruited - six figures+ - for multiple openings right here in town (not a huge market here, either...) this may be the time...
It's not the purpose of LLMs to lower human skills' value, it's just the inevitable outcome.
Transcriptionist? Industry died with good voice recognition 10-20 years ago.
Ditch digging shovel crew? Dramatically de-valued with the advent of the steam-shovel...
and on and on... The theory goes that it gives people more free time, but the way wealth is distributed it is dividing people into those with jobs serving the wealthy and those who live on handouts.
I think: non-stigmatized "handouts" for everybody are the way of a brighter future. UBI FTW.
I've always had problems with junior engineers (self included) going down bad paths, since before there was Google search - let alone AI.
So far ai overall creates more mess faster.
Maybe it is moving faster, maybe they do bother the senior engineers less often than they used to, but for throw-away proof of concept and similar stuff, the juniors+AI are getting better than the juniors without senior support used to be... Is that a good direction? No. When the seniors are over-tasked with "Priority 1" deadlines (nothing new) does this mean the juniors can get a little further on their own and some of them learn from their own mistakes? I think so.
Where I started, it was actually the case that the PhD senior engineers needed help from me fresh out of school - maybe that was a rare circumstance, but the shop was trying to use cutting edge stuff that I knew more about than the seniors. Basically, everything in 1991 was cutting edge and it made the difference between getting something that worked or having nothing if you didn't use it. My mentor was expert in another field, so we were complimentary that way.
My company (now) wants metrics on a lot of things, but they also understand how meaningless those metrics can be.
I have to spend more time helping the junior guys out of the holes dug by ai, making it net negative
https://clip.cafe/monsters-inc-2001/all-right-mr-bile-it/
Shame. There was a time that people dug out of their own messes, I think you learn more, faster that way. Still, I agree - since 2005 I have spend a lot of time taking piles of Matlab, Fortran, Python that have been developed over years to reach critical mass - add anything else to them and they'll go BOOM - and translating those into commercially salable / maintainable / extensible Qt/C++ apps, and I don't think I ever had one "mentee" through that process who was learning how to follow in my footsteps, the organizations were always just interested in having one thing they could sell, not really a team that could build more like it in the future.
it’s just another tool.
Yep.
If you had to answer how much time autocomplete saved you, could you provide any sort of meaningful answer?
Speaking of meaningless metrics, how many people ask you for Lines Of Code counts, even today?___
Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency
Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That’s the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.
Does Gnome have too much dependency on Gnome: yes or no?
Absolutely. If you don't mind using Gnome exactly as Gnome wants you to - this year - then it's usually a pretty refined desktop experience, but if I wanted to be told what to like, how to like it, and to shut up and be happy, I'd use a Mac.
I prefer XFCE for its modularity... don't want a launcher bar? Don't run the launcher; nothing else misses it when it's gone.
Mess around with Gnome too much and it becomes a nightmare mess of dependencies.
Like search engines, and libraries...
LOL sure
I'm not talking about the ones that get hired in your 'leet shop, I'm talking about the whole damn crop that's just graduated.
I have limited AI experience, but so far that's what it means to me as well: helpful in very limited circumstances.
Mostly, I find it useful for "speaking new languages" - if I try to use AI to "help" with the stuff I have been doing daily for the past 20 years? Yeah, it's just slowing me down.
Now you make me question whether it's a future deportation destination...
I like to understand what I work with, but I also like to keep my tools (like: Docker container images) as close to "stock" as possible, because that way they benefit the most from security testing and patching that others do, and make as little work for me as possible when I install upgrades.
Having said that, some tech (especially Bluetooth) is best "reinvented locally" IMO, simply because so much effort is being put into breaking Bluetooth security, and nobody really cares to break our products, but if we use Bluetooth we will be slapped with CVEs to patch constantly. So, yeah, use the Bluetooth supporting hardware, but roll your own reasonable security appropriate for your applications and get the hell out of the firehose of whack-a-mole security patches.