Hey, I don't think this sounded like snark at all. Super grounded take.
> I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development.
This I agree with completely. You can see it in the difference between a prompt where you know exactly what you want and when things are a little woolley. A tool in the hands of a well trained craftsperson is always better used.
> So I think we’re going to keep talking for quite a while
Me neither, and to be clear I'm okay with that. This was mostly a rant at the lack of diversity of discourse.
Agree, the diversity of the discourse is not great. There's a lot of "omg I just got started waaauw" articles out there along with "we're all gonna die!" stuff. And then a few seams of very excellent insight.
Deep research at least helps with dowsing for the knowledge...
> And this one will be different?
I think you're talking about my blog post here, in which case no, I'm afraid not. Hence the admission at the bottom.
>Umm.
??
> It’s all positives. So what’s the problem?
The article is trying to say that these things are great, but the level of conversation leads to a lack of novelty.
> It’s just the discourse around it is “boring”. And the managers are lame about it.
Exactly.
> OP can’t even resign himself to being a Type. Sigh. “I know what I just did hehe”
Very self-aware.
This is a really intersting take, and maybe shows that I haven't been thorough enough with my reading. My guess is that the deep technical articles are few and far between and the higher level 'hot takes' are what fills the room. Do you have any recommendations for interesting places to start?
I've been meaning to try Mastodon for a long time (I was never really a Twiiter user). As others have said elsewhere though, I'm not sure where to start. Did you just download the app and join mastodon.social?
I did much less. Just went to mastodon.social in my browser and read what is there. I think you can create an account from there. You can also choose another instance to read and create the account from.
If you create an account, it may be worth looking into "starter packs", which are lists of accounts around specific topics to follow. That's an easy solution if you run into the "I don't know who to follow and there's no algorithm that'll tell me" problem.
I think in most places on the internet the negative comments are the ones that will win out. Same for AI I suppose. I tried not to bemoan the whole concept here, just the amount of 'airtime' it gets. Sort of like when something happens in the news (lately it's been the Epstein files for me), and you wish you could see a more balanced picture of world events.
This is a great saying, thank you for sharing it. Out of curiosity, do you have any links to intersting AI articles you've read recently? Maybe I'll change my mind.
I don't like the hype language applied by the channel host one bit - and so this is not something where I expect someone tired of the hype to be swayed - but I think his perspective is sometimes interesting (if you filter through the BS): He seems to get that the real challenge is not LLM quality but organisational integration: Tooling, harnesses, data access, etc, etc. And so in this department there's sometimes good input.
This is really interesting. I've been out of education for a long time, but I was wondering how they were dealing with the advent of AI. Are exams still a thing? Do people do coursework now that you can spew out competent sounding stuff in seconds?
I teach CS at a university in Spain. Most people here are in denial. It is obvious to me that we need to go back to grading based on in-person exams, but in our last university reform (which tried to copy the US/UK in many aspects) there was so much political posturing and indoctrination about exams being evil and coursework having to take the fore that now most people just can't admit the truth before their own eyes. And for those of us that do admit it, we have a limited range of maneuver because grading coursework is often a requirement that emanates from above and we can't fundamentally change it.
So in most courses nothing has changed in the way we grade. Suddenly coursework grades have gone up sharply. Anyone with working neurons know why, but in the best case, nothing of consequence is done. In the worst case (fortunately uncommon), there are people trusting snake oil detectors and probably unfairly failing some students. Oh, and I forgot: there are also some people who are increasing the difficulty of the coursework in line with LLMs. Which I guess more or less makes sense... Except that if a student wants to learn without using them, then they suddenly will find assignments to be out of their league.
> Except that if a student wants to learn without using them
My son, who is a freshman at a major university in NYC, when he said to his freshman English professor that he wanted to write his papers without using AI, was told that this was "too advanced for a freshman English class" and that using AI was a requirement.
I don't understand what they think it is they're teaching? Will we teach kids to "read" by taking a photo of their bedtime story and hitting a button next?
One of the teaching methods is "look at the context, like pictures, and guess what the word is". One example I remember was thinking "pony" is "horse" due to association without being able to sound it out.
I use it all the time and have worked in several startups which do. For me personally, inline styling is the point. I can open up any tailwind project and see exactly how that element is styled without cmd + clicking around through layers of CSS.
Obviously it’s all personal taste, but in my mind it feels like the successor to bootstrap in a lot of ways.
Saame. I wonder if the use of AI will lead to less invention and adoption of new ideas in favour of ideas with lots of training data.