alt Hacker NewsI like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world. The useless toil and labor associated with rebuilding the same solutions into different contexts is finally at an end.
Coding was never the reward. Acting as a translator for a machine is far worse than allowing the machine to solve the mundane parts and leave you with bigger building blocks to play with.
After 25 years I have to confess I hated being a software engineer. It felt like grinding in a video game.
Now I can finally create and innovate at the speed of thought, and I'm very grateful to have this technology now.
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You got nothing.
Giant corpos hold every sliver of your so called freedom, you dont innovate, you repeat what others created before you. You use a tool that shackles your thoughts and creativity in a never before seen way, what you perceive is an illusion of liberty that is no present. Without others you are nothing and they can take it away any seconds, you are an addict, not an innovator.
Viva la revolution!
Serious question - what do you do for fun? I find fishing with friends enjoyable, and using my hands tidying up the old place I bought. It’s not innovating software I’ll never use but I’ll never tire of writing the same old ASP that delivers my clients the results they’re after.
You lost leverage. Now be great full for the crumbs. If there remain any.
> I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world.
Yes, when I think of OpenAI and Anthrophic and Google and Meta and any AI labs and their intentions, i cry a single tear for how these great instituitions are working so hard to bring freedom for humanity.
I share the sentiment but the question here is how long can we maintain the balance point where the human in the agentic loop is required. It might be a window lasting only a few years, or for the foreseeable future; I think the answer lies the opaque compute economics of the frontier lab: how well models keep scaling and how economically sustainable is serving those models under the current market conditions.
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For me code still is the reward; I made and make my fortunes with boring code people on HN say no one needs or wants, my hobby is, and has been for 45 years, writing, perfecting and optimizing code manually until I find it perfect. I have been working for 10 years on a programming language and OS (with niche 2 dbs that are now prod quality and we use) and those are the best moment of my day, I couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of it or ever uses it. But the lessons learned do flow into LLMs to write the boring code and I can say that our million$ paying LoB code can handle 100s req/s on shite hardware and even if the LLM did a crap job. Which is almost 100s times more than the client will ever need.