HarkMahlberg

Why would I bother?

It’s not for the sake of right wing media, it’s for the sake of the normal people who call Los Angeles home.

I get your point, but calling it a war zone is exactly what right wing media wants everyone to hear. It’s a protest, we’ve had one every single weekend since 1/20, in nearly every state, and nobody needed to call the NG.

Let it not go unsaid: fuck waymo, I’m happy to see those death traps burn.

(and sometimes newer)

My God man, say it louder for the folks in the back. A 21 year old answer, heck even an 8 year old answer like OP said, might not STILL be the best answer in the current age. Technology evolves, new languages get invented, old languages gain some new features, and all of that happens at a rapid pace.

I get super dismayed using SO and seeing the top answer predates Rust. (Note I don’t mean to say Rust is always the answer, but that Rust is already 13 years old. Things change.)

which kinda sucks

Can’t wait to meet the successor to M1 Abrams: the M2 Sad Tin Can.

I’ve seen lazy developers take solutions from Stack Overflow, and paste them directly into code with no scrutiny, no testing, no validation. I’ve also seen talented developers take solutions from Stack Overflow, verify them, scrutinize them, simplify or expand on them. The difference wasn’t the source of information, but what the developer did with it.

AI is a crutch for the shameless, careless developers who create more problems than they solve. It’s just made them more efficient at it. Which only creates problems faster than than the talented developers can solve; it’s easy to destroy, but difficult to build. I know talented developers who use AI, but it hasn’t made them faster or more efficient, because their strength is also their weakness: they take their time, they evaluate their options, they scrutinize AI output because they know its prone to mistakes.

My greatest worry is the folks in the middle - they’re neither experts nor novices, just average. I want to see more engineers develop the skills needed to make them experts, but I worry that AI will just make them lazy.

That sounds like treating the symptom rather than the disease. Why automate the toil, when we could remove it instead? The other commenters brought up examples:

generating (the boring) parts of work documents

when I notice auto-generated parts, which triggers that I use AI in turn, and I ask it to summarise all that verbose AI generated content.

The AI wrote a document a human didn’t want to read, so AI then read the document AI wrote. The incentive thereafter is to save, and use, the shorter AI doc over the longer one.

Was any value created by this cycle? We just watered down the information with more automation. In the process, we probably lost nuance, detail. Alternatively, if we all agreed the document wasn’t worth a human’s eyes or keystrokes in the first place… why have the AI do anything? Sounds like we would all be happier to not have the document in the first place.

Yeah they were never learned to begin with.

I’m with you. I used to build maps, models, and textures for Battlefront 2 and share the files for free on Filefront. I got into programming for the joy of creating things that make people happy, or solve some little problems they have. I still make mods, the communities are out there and I’m glad I found them.

But tech evangelists and bro culture ruined the idea of programming as a career for me. The greed of late stage capitalism infected our industry the moment Facebook hit the scene, crypto accelerated it, and AI may as well be the final nail in the coffin. It’s no longer a worthy or noble profession.

@Xanza@lemm.ee Among my friends, it replaced Facebook Messenger, Teamspeak, and Mumble instantly. It was fast and the voice quality was excellent. The appeal in 2017 was obvious. The bloat that it had tacked onto it since then is egregious.

Don’t get me started on the “rewards”…