Brendan McKay

Why are you encouraging people to be woke. Poilievre will lock you up for that.

Thanks eve6 I think you’re alright too

Pull your head out of the sand

I don’t disagree that the industry is mostly grifters, but I never see anyone in these threads reckon with the fact that ai, unlike crypto, is already useful. Programming, protein folding, mathematics have all been significantly impacted.

True. It seemed like a benign little thought experiment but set us on the path to this, The Age of Bullshit.

There is an interesting divide emerging between people who are primarily exposed to ai as a bullshit generator and people who make software for a living. Hard to see it as another crypto type scam when it’s already profoundly impacted your day to day work.

In any case, it’s a blog post not an academic paper and I liked aspects of it while rejecting the conclusion. I shared some links I thought you might find interesting/provocative but you don’t seem interested in engaging with them or considering other views, which is fine. Have a lovely day.

In a technical sense, the argument in the piece is not invalid but is unsound. A premise of the piece was that there are no useful applications of ai. I’ve provided two examples of useful applications, so the premise is false. Therefore the conclusion is not supported.

Should the opinions of Cory Doctorow be evaluated on their merits or are we obligated to agree with them

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.

Ok blog article but hard to take his opinion seriously when he doesn’t mention programming or alphafold.

Consider the dollar value of saving a programmer an hour at work. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Consider also the dollar value of alphafold. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do you have any information to justify your confidence in that prediction? Because it seems like wishful thinking to me. No offense intended, I happen to have the same wish. But better to be clear eyed about what’s happening.

Sorry not seeing how this parable connects

I don’t think it’s replacing coders in a 1:1 manner. I think it’s increasing the productivity of some coders enough that engineering orgs can get way with smaller teams.

Fair but there’s a huge variance in how it’s being used. To your point, I’ve seen early career devs open PRs with obviously ai generated code that did not pass muster.

On the other hand, I’ve used it myself to complete work in hours that would normally take days.

Out of curiosity what are the three great problems?

I don’t think we’re close to completely replacing devs or even necessarily on that path. But I do think the tools can increase the productivity of a sr. engineer enough that the number of employed developers is permanently suppressed.

Sure but cloud services are already very profitable businesses, so the server farms already exist and aren’t going away. I don’t know about image/video/audio generation but useful coding tools can run on consumer PCs. Seems unlikely that these tools will end up being cost prohibitive.

Thanks I think I get it now. Very ominous and aligns with how weirdly warm this year felt in my area.

Not sure I agree. The money saved by axing a couple of devs would pay for an awful lot of compute.

I believe this is true in most cases and that there there will be some legitimate disruption. I use some of the ai programming tools and they are powerful enough to make me suspect ai is already displacing people in the software industry.

I’m not sure I understand this visualization. Does it indicate, for example, that there were no days colder than average in 2023? And that the 1940s were much much cooler than today?

Hey, we’re talking g about it aren’t we

Huh. Pretty good.

Only dinosaurs can see dinosaur ghosts

How do you access these older/more obscure movies? If digital rental, what’s the least annoying platform? If physical media, are you building a collection or is there some way to rent discs these days?