Remember that you are also collecting the responsibility of 10 and the pay of 1.
Shift + Tab + Fuck it.
🫠 too real
Not even. Your job isn’t to protect prod, it’s to take the blame when prod goes down.
If they expect you to write or go through 1000s of lines of code in a single day. your whole job isn’t programming, is to be the scapegoat.
If I can’t understand the code, and you can’t explain, I’m not validating your pull request.
End of story.
Just ask ChatGPT to explain the code
It’s great at that, had a colleague run a diff through Claude and it explained how the new code was better and how the optimizations worked. Then my colleague realised they’d run the diff the wrong way round, fed Claude the new diff and Claude happily explained how the new code was better and how the optimizations worked.
Mixed feelings because obviously studying for a degree implies maths and sciences which does qualify you as an engineer, but imo “software engineer” isn’t a real thing. You’re either a computer engineer or a code monkey.
“Software engineer” will be a thing when it’s licensed by the state. Until then, we’re all just glorified cowboy-coders with no accountability.
(Speaking as computer programmer with an EIT in a different field.)
Yeah, I moved into software from electrical engineering. “Software engineers” are rarely doing engineering. Though, weirdly, the LLM-assisted coding methods seems to be leading to more of a focus on specs, design documents, and testing methodology, which almost makes it more like actual engineering.
i think the word “engineer” has something to do with the word “ingenuity” … now ask yourself, how much creative thinking do you need as a coder?
Depends on the task, somewhere between next to none and actual engineering.
I get your point but I’m not going to pull out my whole resume when, at the end of the day, I write software for a living.
Programmer is shorter and more honest than software engineer, tho
Programmers and Software Engineers are different things, tho
Programmers and Engineers are different things, tho
Yes. But software engineers are engineers. Not all programmers are software engineers.
I think the pace of development is such that it’s only a few years before humans are no longer in the chain of decision making. It was just 2017 when the infamous transformer paper came out.
A stupid person would believe this.
“AI” in its current iteration is a distillation of human knowledge. It lowers the barrier to access to long standing programming libraries that make people think it is some sort of smart. It seems intelligent because it’s imitating the things we have already created.
it’s imitating the things we have already created.
dont you think thats exactly what most people want? they dont want to create next Linux :(
Its more how unbelievably wasteful “AI” is to give dumbshits access to very basic tools. If and when it gets more efficient it will be viewed as we see search engines.
There was literally the dark version of Google to save energy on CRTs, and now it’s energy consumption is low and normalized.
LLMs are incapable of reasoning. They just guess the next token.
Neurons are incapable of reasoning they’re just firing based on a deterministic action potential. What are neural networks doing but creating internal models of reality and guessing what’s next based on patterns?
LLMs do not fit as neurons in your comparison.
Brains can reason, LLMs cannot.
I’m not saying they are identical but they are similar in the sense that a neuron cannot reason. It’s only in a quite large and densly connected neural network we believe there is reasoning.
But the closest equivalent of a neuron in the AI world would be a node, and I haven’t been talking about that. So your comparison does not fit or make sense.
LLMs as a genre of AI research are incapable of reasoning. At best they can pretend to reason, and even then they are terrible at it.
We would’ve bullied those nerds more for misusing the word neuron. It was cute at the time, but now they’re running around being all weird thinking that since they can pretend to read that one paper a better way to do one computer thing, it makes them experts in how brain works, just because there are similar words.
I don’t think anyone who is aware enough is under the assumption that neural nets are a one to one replication of neurons. It’s more of a special type of graph. That said one could also represent a human brain as a special type of graph.
The amount of good computer people specialised in ml, who think this knowledge gives them understanding of human mind that even neurobioligists don’t posess is staggering. And depressing.
Also not really the point I was arguing. It’s pretty clear NN are very different than a human brain. It does though give us some insight to minds more generally but I don’t think current networks are on the order of complexity necessary to really be generating abstractions similar to a human neural network. That said there’s strong arguments to be made about glimpses here and there like models spontaneously creating their own internal workspace like an inner monologue or quasi subconscious. To be clear I’m not saying it is aware or identical to a human mind but it’s interesting to see it self assemlble similar looking structures without any direct guidance.
t does though give us some insight to minds
And that’s the whole thing, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. The same way knowing how computer RAM works doesn’t give you insight into how human memory works, even if the word memory is used in both cases. A bunch of llm bros think it does though.
models spontaneously creating their own internal workspace like an inner monologue or quasi subconscious
The fuck they aren’t. The token predictor predicts a token. The probability of a token is reinforced by human reactions to it. When it started generating words that usually describe inner monologue, humans started freaking out, which reinforced this probability. It’s literally “say I’m alive - I’m alive” meme.
It gives us a good glimpse into human psyche however. It shows how easy it is to full people by pretend language, how willing we are to ascribe agency to anything that can pretend to write words. And even that’s not new, ELIZA was 60 years ago.
What is the transformer paper
Worst people you know pretend they read a math paper from 10 years ago, and it gives them deep understanding of all the complex problems you can imagine. It’s hard to overstate how much this one paper fried their brains. It’s even harder to overstate how it’s actually just one paper about computer math
