Yep. Having gotten better-than-most-beginners at a few things in life, the most apparent thing is that there are levels to everything and your best competition is yourself yesterday, because someone's always naturally better at whatever you're working hard at.
Another one of these cats is Bettina "Betti" Hanlon who is working on her CS PhD and totals 572.5kg at 76kg in raw, drug-tested powerlifting with a lot of her career ahead of her in both CS and Powerlifting.
And here's the thing about both of them: they're mutants, they obviously work extremely hard, and they're not the best in their fields. Bettina was 53kg off of first place at IPF Classic Worlds this year. You can have a gift, work that gift extremely hard, and still be "only" in 8th place in the world. Hell, everyone who plays Nigel Richards says it's like playing tennis with a wall, and they're even beating him sometimes because there's a lot of luck in Scrabble. (He once successfully challenged "sulfidic" because that spelling is in one international dictionary, but not in the dictionary in the tournament he was playing in). There's levels to the levels, you know?
To me this reads as naive as saying by the time you are 60 you should be a director or VP or whatever. The trades are just as much of a pyramid as white collar work is.
Anecdotally, I grew up in a very blue collar area and most of the 60 year old guys I knew were either medically retired (read: too fucked up to work anymore) or getting by through brute force and pain pills.
Agreed, My uncle worked as a tile setter for most of his life. Was very good at it, had his own company and contracted to other companies. I only ever heard good things about his work.
His knees were dead before he was 50. Never made it to "stable", has never owned a home, now living in a van in his 70s.
There were many other issues in his life which prevented things...don't get me wrong...but his case is more the norm from my observations of workers.
It is much easier to be a good "worker" than it is to be a successful one.
Also, Drug/alcohol use in the trades is incredibly common. As is the habit of planning your life around claiming unemployment every winter (at least in my area).
Growing up, my dad was really good friends with two general contractors.
They could not be different from one another, and that was the reason dad invested time in befriending both. When he needed something that only technically solved a problem by the barest of margins, he called the one guy. When he needed help patching the roof or any kind of visible finishing work, he called the other.
One was alright to have over for beers and roughly 100lbs over weight, the other was a formal dining room dinner kind of guy and was built like a model.
One lost his kid in the divorce and is still working today if he's not passed. The other built himself a grand house full of custom hardwood, beautiful hand-built spiral staircase in the foyer, all at the head of the neighborhood he built, and retired about 15 years ago.
Purely in terms of "can they do the job I expect them to do", both were perfectly competent. But the actual trade itself isn't what set them apart. Neither could understand the mentality of the other. "Why do all the extra work to make it look nice if all it's got to do is work" vs "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right".
Their approach to the trade work showed in everything they did; one did verbal contracts, the other made sure every permit was pulled and gave you a receipt detailing the number of nails used. So, when the city put out for bids, only one of them was in any position to submit and win the contracts. He didn't win all of them because there's a multi-generational contractor with family in government but it'd be crass of the city to award all the contracts to that company, but the point remains that only one of these two had positioned themselves such that they could take and profit from larger jobs.
I like to say that the greatest cook in the world could be an ass of a restaurateur, and the world's finest restaurateur will need to hire fine chefs.
We all know brilliant techs that could never hack it in corporate, and people sailing through corporate without a lick of technical ability. While both are "in tech", they have very different goals that lead to very different daily work, very different career paths, and very different retirements.
I think every category of work has a spectrum of success, and it will be determined by a mix of ones ability, goals, and market forces.
>and then you just sit there looking at the 3 dots indicating they're writing something.
I know it's not exactly your point, but I turned off the "X is typing..." indicator in Slack and it made my day to day life at work surprisingly better.
I do this occasionally. But it's because my company's security org has a ridiculous policy enforcing 0 CVE images for anything running on our infra (including internal CI images).
In some cases baking a dependency into an image is signing myself up for perpetual toil to keep the image CVE free.
This. We have (well, had) customers running in me-south-1 and once the first AZ went down we wanted to proactively move their data to other regions even just as cold backups. But our legal department slapped that down pretty quickly.
This entire post seems like a strawman? What do Oakland or Skid Row have to do with people not wanting Flock cameras installed in their communities tracking all of their movements?
I don't care about Flock tracking petty criminals, I care about Flock tracking _me_.
But why? For most people all they'll find out is "this guy commutes to work, goes to Costco, and has an affair". Big tech knows about the affair from text messages already.
There are already numerous examples of law enforcement abusing data from Flock to track and stalk citizens who have done nothing wrong.
There are already numerous examples of Flock misidentifying citizens as suspects of crimes and them being arrested or otherwise harassed by law enforcement.
You can say that these are individual problems rather than systemic problems, but with the US' gradual descent towards authoritarianism and being a militarized police-state I do not see how this technology will be used to make a positive impact on the lives of everyday citizens (which IMO has been happening since the 80s at least before you just imply I don't like the current administration).
I am personally willing to incur a higher risk of being the victim of a crime if it means government/police/private companies/etc. are not able to violate my privacy every waking moment of my life.
> I am personally willing to incur a higher risk of being the victim of a crime if it means government/police/private companies/etc. are not able to violate my privacy every waking moment of my life.
This is it precisely. Thank you for stating this so clearly.
And I am not. Practically speaking, invasion of privacy from the government or private companies affects me not at all. Petty crime does make daily life unpleasant. And before you say "but you don't know how that'll turn out" - we do. There is China, there is Russia, there is Dubai. These are places where a female can walk around safely in the middle of the night.
Flock collects data which is given/sold to police departments or other entities. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement having this data, how do you feel about Flock being a middle-man who controls the flow of the data? How do you feel about knowing Flock is VC-driven and will be making decisions based on ROI, not societal benefit?
And a public officer would instead be driven by corruption, like that nice San Jose policewoman who signed off on customs forms for fentanyl shipments.
The "you shouldn't need privacy if you aren't doing anything wrong" is such a tired yarn.
There are many many many examples of abuse, both in the short term (flock gymnastics pedophiles, cop loveint, cross state abortion suspicion tracking) and long term (the "red scare", the administration performing loyalty tests). There are also plenty of discussions outlining how everyone should support privacy because some need it more than others and we're all on the same team.
Pretending people who are against flock or government illegal surveillance care more about criminals then their families is so bad faith it makes them an asshole (not you but a comment above).
And this administration has been talking about “the enemy within” for so long, when do we see the Executive Order declaring protesters as “treasonous enemy combatants” (or similar nonsense) followed by a beefed up ICE-style militia offshoot making arrests from a Flock list of 100,000+ Americans who were tracked within the vicinity of No Kings protests. If republicans maintain control of congress, I’d give it a greater than 1% chance which is way too high.
But think of it from another angle. It's easy to assume that everyone is on board with your cause when you are in a bubble and all of your friends are. But it could be that there's no grand conspiracy to suppress the public opinion. It's just that public opinion isn't quite what you think.
And yeah, there will be bad apples. On the balance, I think these bad apples are better than the ones they replace.
Because when the government decides you've done something wrong from said video (even if you haven't), it's up to you to prove your innocence. That's a direct contradiction of what the US was founded upon, and creates a very slippery slope.
I'm reminded of a book I read a few years ago, Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O'Connell, which discusses (among other things) the phenomenon of "prepper" culture.
The cynical view would be that all of our politicians are already bought and paid for, and existing political establishments would block any "serious" candidates who support those sorts of policies.
Personally I think that's likely the case _today_, but who knows if that would hold if/when there comes a time when UBI becomes an economic necessity.
I lost my desire to learn anything about web development twenty years ago and specialized my career in a completely different direction. I had not touched HTML at all since then until earlier this year, when I discovered that AI robots could do it for me. Now I am happy to whip up HTML/CSS/JavaScript visualizers, explorers, and even one-off interactive report presentations whenever they might be useful, precisely because I don't have to learn any of that crap to do it. My time & attention are far more productively spent focused on the work I am actually good at and interested in doing.
Working with the browser technology stack is living in a dystopian world of overcomplicated, often duplicative features defined in many thousands of pages of specifications, often revised and/or contradicted by other specifications, many of which do not apply to the reality of actual implementations, so encyclopedic knowledge of the specifications is not enough -- you need familiarity with everything written on the internet about these APIs. Accessing even conceptually simple features can require navigating through multiple APIs that purport to provide that feature, most of which have fatal shortcomings in design, specification, or real-world support. AI is a godsend here, at least for now ... I wonder what the impending post-human-developer "model collapse" will yield.
There was some learning, but also a lot of waste. As a self-learner, I've never been able to learn so fast as I can now with an LLM to instantly answer my specific questions, and incrementally correct and grow my mental model. And while with some subjects you need to worry about accuracy, LLMs are generally very good with programming questions, and (for most types of questions) you can verify their claims yourself.
The problem with CSS is it's a) all broad and no depth and b) constantly adding major new paradigms. If you don't get up to speed and stay there, you lose it.
Pre-AI I'd say I've gotten over the hump 3 times with CSS, only to lose it again by the next time I had to use it in volume.
Why do you think thats worth learning? Doing a few times manually sure… but to force yourself to solely rely on it is foolish. Just use the calculator.
I am a frontend engineer and I see so many bugs from vibe-coded CSS from people who think just like you. CSS is very powerful and easy to get wrong if you don't understand it. Since most CSS code on the internet is not good, LLMs do not generate good CSS code and create a lot of bugs ranging from bad performance to completely broken reflow.
How familiar? Do they ever look at the .S files? know what ar and nm do? Deal with objdump? How important are those details for day-to-day compiling of C code for regular programmers?
Yes, they know what ar and nm do. Whether these things are relevant for day-to-day compiling of C code is watching the goalposts sail over the horizon; the original statement being mocked here is "we don't need to learn ASM because GCC is so good", which completely betrays ignorance of why people learn still learn and deal with ASM to this day. Even if LLMs were comparable to compilers either in predictability (they're not) or code quality (they're not), the people who know what they're doing still take pains to understand how their tech stacks work, because that makes them better programmers, and this will continue to be true.
Not sure what your point is here since wrong code doesn't mean non-deterministic. How many of these yield different results with the same input and architecture?
The people who make the tools that generate your assembly instructions need to learn it. Just like the people who make the browser rendering engine and push CSS forward still need to learn it.
The people who don't need to learn asm never needed to learn it. If you wouldn't code in asm now, you wouldn't have ever.
I just want to point out the exception - the person who the AI learns from.
Someone has to know it. And to advance it to the next level requires domain level expertise. Or are we allowing LLM's to determine the next CSS snapshot/version/level/whatever?
Honestly, we don't really need to learn any more. These days, I mostly copy and paste from tickets to the LLM, and then rubber stamp the output. I have people in my team that try to care about what they're making, but they're generating less code, and filling tickets more slowly, than I am. Even when it comes to system design and architecture, the LLMs aren't great at it, but honestly, they're better than my coworkers (I'd say system architecture is probably at the same readiness level that coding was last year). Expertise wouldn't really help you get things done faster.
You could probably replace me with a minimum wage worker to do some manual testing and copy-paste errors from the console into the LLM, and still be fine.
Let's see how long it is before the next round of layoffs, I guess. For now, the money's fine and the work's boring but ok.
But, no, the LLMs rewarding expertise line is pure cope. Software is not really skilled labor any more.
(obviously, throwaway -- I'm not interested in potentially advertising this to my employer)
> Honestly, we don't really need to learn any more.
Perhaps for your task of closing Jira tickets that’s true - but the you have a decision to make: wait until you’re eliminated or try to anticipate where future competitiveness comes from.
Yeah, that's the thing; future competitiveness isn't going to come from learning, at least not from learning about software. The LLMs have that covered, and software is becoming low status work anyways.
It's largely going to come from interpersonal skills and being likeable enough to be the face of the projects and companies. Technical skill is rapidly dropping in value.
All? obviously not, but enough that I can ship more than my colleagues while not really paying attention to the output or fully understanding it. Technical skills aren't unnecessary, they're just becoming something that nobody will pay for.
LLMs debug extremely well, generate code well enough, and do high level design acceptably, but fail in weird ways, so my actual work these days (outside of delegating to the LLM) is mostly manual testing. I need to give them nudges sometimes, but a year ago they needed constant nudges. In another year, I expect that it'll be good enough that pasting in a bug report with the right jargon will be all the nudging I need to get something that customers will accept if it gets shipped. They're already close.
It's obviously going to remain pretty manual without some breakthroughs, but it's largely not work that needs a ton of intelligence or skill. The world hasn't caught up with software development being a few steps up from burger flipping, so I'm still getting paid well to do it, and I'll keep collecting that paycheck as long as it lasts. But learning about code is rapidly becoming relatively valueless.
I wish it was different, I actually enjoyed getting paid to learn, but I play with the cards I'm dealt.
It's inefficient though. With LLMs you can get a correct answer instantly for asking the right question, and if it's not perfect you can iterate on it. With your typical googling loop you wasted a ton of time on things you didn't need.
Yes, but sometimes I don't need and want to learn. One example from my recent experience in research -- building custom dashboard pages for results of scientific analyses. Each analysis is bespoke, and building interactive webpages is simply not the skill many researchers have (and it's boring IMO). But here with LLM you could easily explore the results visually/share them with collaborators etc. There are plenty examples like that.
But certainly there are cases where learning is required.
I think there's a large middle ground between relocating somewhere undesirable (or to a developing country) just to stretch your money as far possible vs "keeping up with the Joneses".
Even if your goal is financial independence, it's reasonable to not drastically decrease your existing standard of living just so you can retire _now_.
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