I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14.
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@liw There were things that pulled stuff away from programmers though. Much of it at the time was hidden by the growth in demand.
Excel, BASIC, some expert systems, Hypercard, DBase and friends all enabled an army of not-really-programmer people to get real work done without having to become programming experts of any kind.None of them hallucinated or ate entire data centres for lunch. Their output was predictable if slow and they kept working over upgrades in general.
@etchedpixels That is very true, of course.
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@liw There were things that pulled stuff away from programmers though. Much of it at the time was hidden by the growth in demand.
Excel, BASIC, some expert systems, Hypercard, DBase and friends all enabled an army of not-really-programmer people to get real work done without having to become programming experts of any kind.None of them hallucinated or ate entire data centres for lunch. Their output was predictable if slow and they kept working over upgrades in general.
@liw The real sad thing is the tools that were heading towards making some programming obsolete or at least much easier - stuff that worked off formal proofs and graph theory all got thrown under the bus when shiny "AI" stuff came along.
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw I'm not going to lie; to me this time *feels* different.
I learned to program at about the same time you did, though I was younger then. And it might not *be* different; I might just be easier to worry now.
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
Found this earlier today.
"Sorry, can't use AI. I'm afraid I'll void my professional indemnity insurance."
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw My concern isn't being made obsolete, at my age I don't really care.
My concern is the environmental and social harm caused by the needless waste LLMs produce.
Got an already trained model running on your laptop? More power to you, it's no worse than Visual Studio.
Your company is laying off 30,000 people to build datacenters in the desert with illegal fossil fuel plants that use all the groundwater? That's bad
I got a problem esp when it's used to create fakes that scam or harm people.
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@liw I'm not going to lie; to me this time *feels* different.
I learned to program at about the same time you did, though I was younger then. And it might not *be* different; I might just be easier to worry now.
@datarama @liw I feel the difference is about the power structures that keep pushing this "new paradigm". We're talking about some of the worst and the most powerful people on this planet, it ultimately doesn't matter if they make the world worse for everyone while doing it - they have an incentive to do so and they will profit from it.
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@liw The real sad thing is the tools that were heading towards making some programming obsolete or at least much easier - stuff that worked off formal proofs and graph theory all got thrown under the bus when shiny "AI" stuff came along.
@etchedpixels @liw Programmers who think they need LLM coding assistants really just need better languages and libraries.
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw I don't really think it was like that. Maybe way before that, when computers were still mostly analog, digital computers emerged together with prog languages, those made the older analog computers and their operators quite quickly obsolete. But after that there had been no strong claim by anything that would make programmers and developers obsolete (until now with AI, that is.) I'd say it was rather the opposite for long. Everyone was rather strongly encouraged to learn some coding skills, because that was supposed to be a necessity in most future jobs. Specially younger generations and educational programs leaned that way for long. I'd say from way before 2010, and till after covid, at least right up till the AI hype exploded couple of years ago with chatgpt passing some "high level knowledge" exams, formerly out of league for any computer programs.
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@liw The real sad thing is the tools that were heading towards making some programming obsolete or at least much easier - stuff that worked off formal proofs and graph theory all got thrown under the bus when shiny "AI" stuff came along.
@etchedpixels @liw Formal proofs? You mean, something that requires writing a clear, well specified definition of what you want a system to do?
An LLM (the equivalent of a pub conversation on requirements) is always going to be more attractive to most.
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw <salutes fellow year Epoch engineer>
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw I do think there are some reasons to worry - but not about skilled programmers losing their privileged position in the job market.
My impression is that a lot of the frenzied discourse is caused by two facts: 1) a few corporations are spending ridiculous amounts of money, and some of it on propagandizing, and 2) these LLM techniques do have some kernel of utility for some software engineering-related tasks.
I enjoyed the perspectives in this recent conversation: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/116237328338979566
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@etchedpixels @liw Formal proofs? You mean, something that requires writing a clear, well specified definition of what you want a system to do?
An LLM (the equivalent of a pub conversation on requirements) is always going to be more attractive to most.
@mbpaz @liw Most of your proofs are implied before the project - like not scribbling on things. For a lot of other stuff you then have a standard interface definition so that guides most of the rest of it.
Imagine a Linux driver of a given class. If there's a formal description of that interface then a formal methods based tool can verify you meet the formal methods, you meet the general rules for the kernel and you meet the language don't scribble rules.
and it's way cheaper than debugging!
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw
I'd say it's not panic per se, it's an anxiety "I, personally, won't have a job and means to live because a)... b) ...c)", where LLMs are just a cover or an accelerator for some of these a, b or c. -
@etchedpixels @liw Formal proofs? You mean, something that requires writing a clear, well specified definition of what you want a system to do?
An LLM (the equivalent of a pub conversation on requirements) is always going to be more attractive to most.
I saw very expensive CASE tools become "shelfware" because the prevailing business culture was to wing it. Also known as the Why the Hell Isn't Somebody Coding Yet? (WHISCY) methodology.
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@liw I don't really think it was like that. Maybe way before that, when computers were still mostly analog, digital computers emerged together with prog languages, those made the older analog computers and their operators quite quickly obsolete. But after that there had been no strong claim by anything that would make programmers and developers obsolete (until now with AI, that is.) I'd say it was rather the opposite for long. Everyone was rather strongly encouraged to learn some coding skills, because that was supposed to be a necessity in most future jobs. Specially younger generations and educational programs leaned that way for long. I'd say from way before 2010, and till after covid, at least right up till the AI hype exploded couple of years ago with chatgpt passing some "high level knowledge" exams, formerly out of league for any computer programs.
@raulinbonn @liw I remember the adverts in the computer press saying that companies wouldn't need programmers to write applications - that was probably the late 80s/early 90s, whilst I was still at school.
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@raulinbonn @liw I remember the adverts in the computer press saying that companies wouldn't need programmers to write applications - that was probably the late 80s/early 90s, whilst I was still at school.
@raulinbonn @liw I also remember having to learn COBOL in the late 90s!
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@datarama @liw I feel the difference is about the power structures that keep pushing this "new paradigm". We're talking about some of the worst and the most powerful people on this planet, it ultimately doesn't matter if they make the world worse for everyone while doing it - they have an incentive to do so and they will profit from it.
This.
Companies are getting away with being more more rapacious, and their managers have become more lazy, ignorant, and reckless.
American business disregards legitimate issues unless it comes in the form of a court order.
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@liw I'm not going to lie; to me this time *feels* different.
I learned to program at about the same time you did, though I was younger then. And it might not *be* different; I might just be easier to worry now.
@datarama @liw I'm of three minds myself: maybe LLMs will take over (whether they're any better or not, the history of programming is full of such mistakes); maybe they'll fall by the wayside; maybe they'll become a useful tool, in effect the next step in the evolution of programming languages, but with skilled programmers still needed.
I'm also at the point where I can retire whenever I want, and perhaps that is just as well.
