- cross-posted to:
- Tech@europe.pub
- lobsters@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- Tech@europe.pub
- lobsters@lemmy.bestiver.se
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(let me preach a little, I have to listen to my boss gushing about AI every meeting)
Compare AI tools: now vs 3 years ago. All those 2022 “Prompt engineer” courses are totally useless in 2025.
Extrapolate into the future and realize, that you’re not losing anything valuable by not learning AI tools today. The whole point of them is they don’t require any proficiency. It “just works”.
Instead focus on what makes you a good developer: understanding how things work, which solution is good for what problem, centering your divs.
Key skill is to be able to communicate your problem and requirements which turns out to be really hard.
It’s also a damn useful skill whether you’re working with AI or humans. Probably worth investing some effort into that regardless of what the future holds.
As an old fart you can’t imagine how often I heard or read that.
You should click the link.
Hehe. Damn, absolutely fell for it. Nice 😂
Yeah but it’s different this time!
I do wonder about inventions that actually changed the world or the way people do things, and if there is a noticeable pattern that distinguishes them from inventions that came and went and got lost to history, or that did get adopted but do not have mass adoption. Hindsight is 20/20, but we live in the present and have to make our guesses about what will succeed and what will fail, and it would be nice to have better guesses.
Quality work will always need human craftsmanship
I’d wager that most revolutionary technologies are either those that expand human knowledge and understanding, and (to a lesser extent) those that increase replicability (like assembly lines)
It’s tricky, because there’s no hard definition for what it means to “change the world”, either. To me, it brings to mind technologies like the Internet, the telephone, aviation, or the steam engine. In those cases, it seems like the common thread is to enable us to do something that simply wasn’t possible before, and is also reliably useful.
To me, AI fails on both those points. It doesn’t really enable us to do anything new. We already had chat bots, we already had Photoshop, we already had search algorithms and auto complete. It can do some of those things a lot more quickly than older technologies, but until they solve the hallucination problems it doesn’t seem reliable enough to be consistently useful.
These things make it come off more as a potential incremental improvement that is still too early in it’s infancy, than as something truly revolutionary.
Well it’ll change the world by consuming a shit ton of electricity and using even more precious water to fill the data centres. So changing the world is correct in that regard.
Had to click through to change my downvote to an upvote, lol.
I still think PWAs are a good idea instead of needing to download an app on your phone for every website. Like, for example, PWAs can easilly replace most banking apps, which are already just PWAs with added tracking.
They’re great for users, which is why Google and Apple are letting them die from lack of development so apps can make them money.
it’s funny, but also holy moly do I not trust a “sign in with github” button
Might I ask why? There are some pages where I see that as the least evil option, I.e. duckdns
Basically because my Github account has an important job, and I don’t want to increase its attack surface by using it as a pseudo-Facebook
Remember when “The Cloud” was going to put everyone in IT out of a job?
Many of our customers store their backups in our “cloud storage solution”.
I think they’d be rather less impressed to see the cloud is in fact a jumble of PCs scattered all around our office.
Naming it “The Cloud” and not “Someone else’s old computer running in their basement” was a smart move though.
It just sounds better.
Once both major world militaries and hobbists are using it, it’s jover. You can’t close Pandora’s Box. Whatever you want to call the current versions of “AI”, it’s only going to get better. Short of major world catastrophes, I expect it to drive not only technological advances but also energy/efficiency advances as well. The big internet conglomerates are already integrating it into search, and I fully expect within the next 5 years to have search transformed into an assistant-like chatbot (or something thereof).
I think it’s shortsighted not to see the potential of accumulating society’s knowledge and being able to present that to people in an understandable way.
I don’t expect it to happen overnight. I’m not expecting iRobot or Android levels of consciousness any time soon, but the world is progressing toward the automation of many things - driven by Capital(ism) - which is powerful in itself.
energy/efficiency advances
the potential of accumulating society’s knowledge and being able to present that to people in an understandable way.
We call this Wikipedia, please consider donating to keep it running!
I completely agree about supporting Wikipedia. I actually do donate to Wikipedia via subscription and recommend others do as well. Being able to just download Wikipedia is also just such a boon. That being said, Wikipedia is just that, a pedia, like an encyclopedia. It’s static knowledge. It can’t rephrase things or simplify them or provide more context than it already has. A phonebook to a phonecall.
I would love to see a breakthrough in energy solutions for high-processing, but I doubt I will in my lifetime, and am pessimistic about such advances even being possible.
I’m not defending AI here, but “people have been wrong about other things in the past” is a completely worthless argument in any circumstance. See: Heuristics that Almost Always Work.
Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: “people said flight was impossible”, “people said the earth didn’t revolve around the sun”, “people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad”.
It’s cherry-picking. They’re taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.
And here’s the thing, the “information superhighway” was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.
Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here’s some actual reasoning:
GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can’t solve the fidelity problem can’t do information work. Information work requires fidelity.
And “fidelity” is just a fancy way of saying “truth”, or maybe “meaning”. Even as conscious beings we haven’t really cracked that issue, and I don’t think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.
Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”. We’re just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it’s not space technology.
Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn’t know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior.
Cannons weren’t really a factor in space beyond that.Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.
