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scrozart

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The devs have been co-opted into marketing roles now, too - they have to say it's that good to keep the money coming in. IMO this reinforces the original post - this all feels like a scramble.

Whether it's indicative of patterns beyond OpenAI remains to be seen, but I don't expect much originality from tech execs.

You're not wrong about funding, but OP is correct about industry influence.

It varies a little by division/subject matter, but they basically have to run everything by industry and are subject to FOIAs and public shaming by senators and representatives beholden to industry.

Source: long-term partner of FDA employee, though this stuff is pretty widely understood.

I can't imagine using MS products for anything important these days. There are more reliable options for servers, databases, and OS, and those options all have better docs.

Agreed. Additionally, negative sanctions have been part of human life since the beginning. Anyone who has raised a child or pet understands this.

This discussion of far more nuanced than many of the comments in this post address. It's true people are often swiftly found guilty in the public eye without due process - see most true crime - but it's also true such sanctions have their place.

The answers to stay until you find something else are correct.

I would also add that it's probably pretty easy to fake it - in my experience management, especially executive level, have no idea how things actually get done.

If they aren't prescribing a very specific workflow, you can create you own/install whatever tooling you want.

It's also worth pointing out - if you really are sufficiently experienced, these tools could prove to be a force multiplier and may actually be worth an investigation. You still have to review code and provide clear specifications in discrete, easily palatable chunks.

Hard not to feel this way sometimes given the quality of some job listings and the negativity bias here and broader media. In such moments of despair I recall two axioms: change is inevitable and ongoing, and talent rarely resides in the C-suite.

I'm only 10 years in and currently at a science non-profit using a dead/toy framework, and honestly woefully unprepared for market at the moment. I'm constantly looking at job listings, though, and engaging with scads of recruiters to maintain a good feel for the market to inform my next steps. I see plenty of ads that are hyper-specific about the tooling du-jour, but a non-trivial percentage of the listings I see make it clear that higher-level prowess, like understanding a language and best practices, are more important than what ultimately boils down to the ability to RTFM for whatever widgets the CTO/CE is currently enamored with. These are the jobs I'm looking at. Sure, this could narrow your pool during what appears to be a tight market, but you're more likely to have worthwhile interviews. I'll apply to less intriguing jobs to avoid getting rusty at interviewing, though.

This kind of funk also inevitably drives me harder to just _do what I want to do_. What language and tools _do I want to use_? _What kind of problems do I want to solve_ moving forward? If you've sorted these out, great. Sure, this could _also_ narrow your pool even more, but you're more likely to find a high-quality match.

Finally, all of these companies foaming at the mouth to replace people with AI will regret it; it's already happening, in fact. It's happening in less/non-technical jobs (lol Klarna), so I'm not worried about coding jobs at all in the long run (not to diminish and current or short term turbulence, though). Smart execs/founders will see AI for what it is: a force multiplier, only as good as your existing staff. That said, I think it behooves devs to get right with AI/chat-assisted development. Of all the buzzy tools people fall in love with, I think this is the highest ROI I've seen yet.

TL;DR: I'm just not going to apply to jobs that don't give me "smart exec" smells, and I'm only applying if it really looks like something I'll care about doing. I realize this exudes some degree of privilege, hubris, and/or naivete, but I work my ass off and you only live once.

Lots of good answers here about part of your question: is it hype or not? In that it likely isn't going away, and is becoming a valid force multiplier, it's not.

However, this question is better answered by asking yourself what you're interested in. Do you _want_ a deeper understanding of AI/ML? If so, jump in. If you're not genuinely interested it'll be an interminable slog, and you'll revert to doing whatever you actually want to do eventually.

Nothing wrong with continuing to develop web/full stack apps while leveraging the new tools; that's also quite interesting.

Will scaling work? 3 years ago

does the world really FEEL that different now, than pre-internet?

Yes. You said it yourself: you used to have to WALK somewhere to look things up. Added convenience isn't the only side affect; that walk wasn't instantaneous. During the intervening time, you were stimulated in other ways on your trek. You saw, smelled, and heard things and people you wouldn't have otherwise. You may have tried different routes and learned more about your surroundings.

I imagine you, like I, grew up outside, sometimes with friends from a street or two over, that small distance itself requiring some exploration and learning. Running in fresh air, falling down and getting hurt, brushing it off because there was still more woods/quarry/whatever to see, sneaking, imagining what might lie behind the next hill/building; all of that mattered. The minutae people are immersed in today is vastly different in societies where constant internet access is available than it was before, and the people themselves are very different for it. My experience with current teens and very young adults indicates they're plenty bright and capable (30-somethings seem mostly like us older folks, IMO), but many lack the ability or desire to focus long enough to obtain real understanding of context and the details supporting it to really EXPERIENCE things meaningfully.

Admittedly anecdotal example: Explaining to someone why the blue-ish dot that forms in the center of the screen in the final scene of Breaking Bad is meaningful, after watching the series together, is very disheartening. Extrapolation and understanding through collation of subtle details seems to be losing ground to black and white binaries easily digested in minutes without further inquiry as to historical context for those options.

I abhor broad generalizations, and parenting plays a large part in this, but I see a concerning detachment among whatever we're calling post-millenials, and that's a major, real world difference coming after consecutive generations of increasing engagement and activism confronting the real problems we face.

Sleeping in more than one long chunk of time is called polyphasic sleeping [0]. It's postulated that sleeping in one go is an industrial age phenomenon.

Anecdotal, but I embraced a mild form of this during college, using "Einstein naps" (brief naps ended just after dozing) for a recharge between my work day and night classes. I experienced nitably improved focus and less evening burnout.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

The idea that only these 2 companies can provide a platform for secure apps is patently absurd. What's stopping another company other than these companies' stranglehold? If you want to say resources, I guarantee I'm not alone in a desire to use smaller vendors if they had a good track record of hosting secure apps.

I lean WAY left and still agree the free market would have solved this ages ago.

Rewriting history and books is actually exactly what's happening in Florida under ostensibly fascist rule, which is precisely what Orwell was referring to.

I don't want my street named after a slave owner, period. No, it doesn't destroy history to change it. History recorded safely, in many other places, is exactly why street names and books are being updated - to include more accurate, less sugar-coated retellings of history.

If you have a problem with the increased scrutiny and exposure of how deeply our systematic failures run, you're the problem.

This is, unequivocally, rubbish.

Denouncing recovered memories is precisely how the Baltimore Archdiocese covered up years of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Only utter dirtbags like Paul McHugh [1], who astoundingly still has an ~emeritus position at Hopkins after helping the Archdiocese continue their cover-up, denounce the suppression and later recovery of memories. Such dirtbags are outliers, and there is no legitimate debate about this as far as I'm aware.

Sadly, I can give a personal example of this phenomenon. My brother and I were both subject, from different rooms, to something utterly abhorrent when we were young. For reasons beyond me, other than maybe our age disparity, and the fact he also saw what I only heard, he suppressed what happened and I did not. It was horrible enough that it was only ever discussed once or twice over the intervening decades before, in his 40s, he called me crying, indicating he remembered. Having not seen it myself, there wasn't any detail for me to add or fill in for him in the scant discussions we had, yet he remembered in detail what he had seen. Yes, this is anecdotal, but there are many other similar cases.

This sort of unscientific spew has no place on HN, except maybe to incur a pile-on to shine a light upon it.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._McHugh

I've done LSD numerous times, including "heroic" doses, as have many of my friends, starting 30 years ago (I haven't in a while as i no longer feel the need to blow open those doors).

Not one of us has ever had a single flashback, let alone "persistent" flashbacks. If they were ever really an issue, it was long ago with different/absurdly strong formulations.