Is there a newer 'be autonomous' culture? Or did I just grow up a bit?
10-20 years ago people would love to talk about technical topics. Ask help, give help, offer pointers, debate merits.
Now I guess we ask AI, figure it out ourselves, and/or grin and bear it?
What happened? Is it from remote work? Or everything's easy now? Or nobody wants to stick their neck out? Time constraints? Knowledge gaps?
I don't struggle, exactly, but I run up into all kinds of situations where there's no obvious best choice (everything's awesome and everything is too limited all at once), so either some tough choices need to be made or maybe there IS a better way but it's just VERY non-documented or too much of a PITA to do right away (or simply, silo'd and well-protected).
There ARE avenues to get things done. There ARE multiple valid channels to ask or follow up in. The answer is basically: do it, don't ask. And yet...
GIVEN an culture/expectation/want to be "autonomous" (heck that's what agents need to be, mostly), I think something is missing.
It's like people learned somewhere "be independent", "be autonomous", "don't require help" as somehow "virtuous" outside of the "normal" bounds.
Am I the only one noticing this? Or did something shift?
It's a new culture. Combination of AI making junior engineers redundant, new grad skill levels cratering if they used AI to skate their way through college, and filtering through job applications being functionally impossible with huge floods of perfect ai generated resumes etc leading people to fall back to hiring through their network instead of applicants from open listings (and senior engineers are going to have better developed networks). And at least personally (+ for people around me) - AIs increased productivity comes with increased cognitive load and workload.
Plus you don't want to take a risk on training a new grad anymore because usually they'll leave after a couple years, which was a good thing since you'd backfill with a new grad some other company had trained/ideas circulated in the industry/early career engineers built their networks and got exposure to different tech stacks and company styles etc. that's really tough now too since nobody else is hiring and training juniors so you would be wasting time and effort training some for some other company to hire away - nash equilibriulm vibes.
So yes something shifted- the new grad/junior market is in the gutter rn. And if AI plateaus in this range of capability idk what happens as the current generation of engineers age out/retire. The juniors that aren't being trained today are going to lead to a vacuum of senior engineers tomorrow.
Really cool. I'd love to be able to order cheap ones in packs of 5 or 10, with custom led colors/locations/sizes/brightness, fitting into a printed card...
I wondered if people would be interested in purchasing them. The challenging part is that they become cheap only when ordering large quantities, and most fab houses consider a different silkscreen to be an entirely different job. I'd have to order, say, 500 blanks, and then print onto them myself. Maybe there's a market for that -- but it's open source, so it's not too hard to make your own :)
Arguably, there were different values in effect in the past.
There was more emphasis on values like: God-as-god. Country. Family. Courage. Integrity.
The newer values are more like: Money-as-god. Survival. Cats. Dopamine maxxing.
I may get downvoted for mentioning religion in the context of a question about values. But to bring data into it, it's reportedly a fact that "None" [0] as a dominant religious self-identity is indeed a newer/increased phenomenon. It would be hard to argue thats that's not a clear measure of shift in values.
To get a perfect steak with nice X-shaped sear marks on both sides:
1. Turn grill on all the way. Close lid. Wait for grill's gauge to reach >400 F (>200C).
2. Put steak on grill. Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
3. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
4. Flip steak over, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
5. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.
It's been 8 minutes of grilling. Steak is about done. Stab it with a meat thermometer into the middle part, it should read 350 F (or 176 C) to be medium done (pink in middle).
Tips:
a) Optional but recommended: rub steak with olive oil and steak seasoning on both sides, including the edge.
b) If steak is thicker: add a little more time. If thinner, use less time.
c) If steak is frozen (buy good cheap steaks and freeze to last a long time): add a little time.
d) To cheat, put a little dab of butter on top for the last segment of each side.
e) Leave the steak out for 15-20 minutes to get to room temp before making it.
f) Let it sit on a plate for 8 minutes before serving. It's still cooking, and the juices settle in. You can "tent" foil over it if you want.
g) Don't cut the steak when checking it. "Fast" and accurate meat thermometers are cheap now.
This is for grilling. The stove, broiler, and cast iron skillet instructions are different.
8minutes, that's just pure waste; even medium rare (which is hardly tolerable) is 56-57C. Also cooking the steak without any salt is travesty (that should not be an optional step)
Suppose I wanted you or someone else on Upwork or Fiverr to port a Rails 4 app to Rails 8 (or React or HTMX or anything up to date and maintainable).
Assume the business logic and all edge cases work in the legacy app. The app is "done", just too old to work on or run on modern hosts. Hence the project.
Would/could you use AI to deliver the project at 10x the speed? Or at 1/10 the price? Or charge the same amount as ever?
I have a feeling the lowest-cost developers on freelance marketplaces are not very good at using the AI tools (and whatever related acumen) and need a lot of hand-holding, the same amount of effort almost as if I decided to guide AI to do it myself.
IMO, there's value you can sell in being someone that (even developers) can hand off a project to, to do end to end, if it's fully specified. Even though the buyer could do it themselves, the developer would be taking on managing it and having AI do it until it's correct, and all the little things, few as they may be.
AI should be giving contract developers superpowers. If it's not, then the limited set of contractors with the AI superpowers will be able to charge 10x as much for their time, and the actual cost of the project remains the same even if it's done 10x as fast/easily.
Curious if you see/feel this, or if there's a marketplace for "please vibe code this for me, make sure it works and is what I want".
There is still some use to having someone else supervise it and/or test it etc. But most of that gap could probably be closed by setting up your harness so that it can efficiently do the end to end testing including UI itself. Recent model releases seem to know how to set up playwright or whatever and test the live page on its own. But I still see some improvement to be made when I look at it myself.
I would say 90% of outsourced developers are going to use AI just like someone making top US dollar. Actually for the majority of projects on Upwork, the need to generate with AI is much greater. And I think it's nonsense the idea that an overseas programmer can't figure out how to make adequate requests to a frontier model.
The models are smart enough that someone could literally just say "convert to Rails 8 like you are real real good best Railsdev" and follow up with a few "now test and make the bestest code Base" and if they are repeating that maybe with a few different leading models.. will a real Rails dev be able to find some fault? Sure. Would they have also found issues with the work of another human Rails dev? Yes probably.I just don't think it takes as much actual skill at this point. And certainly there is no secret ability that people in San Francisco have but not in Bangladesh or only certain neighborhoods or whatever.
One guy I was talking to said he was frustrated because his developer was not using AI enough. I came to the conclusion based on his requirements and relatively generous project timeline that that developer was deliberately avoiding using AI or admitting that he was using AI because he knew if he did then the main project phase would be finished in less than a month.
It does help dealing with what previously were often impossible timelines. Recently my Upwork profile has focused on AI agents so I have not been seeing many of those typical line of business type jobs.
But also more than half of those more typical business web apps are now starting with "I have already generated a prototype" and they want it to be made. "production ready" which I think contractors are taking advantage of how vague that is especially since the majority of these projects have pretty modest actual usage. I actually don't like that because it's much less concrete than delivering actual features.
Wow, speaking of safety -- I just looked it up to see if Un-Cure superglue/CA debonder would be safe enough to use on hands, or would just cause the chemicals to be broken down and absorbed through the skin at a fast rate too (which I personally wouldn't want), and the initial results I see say that it's ok to use on hands. Wow again.
I sensitised my hands with a single exposure to acetone, and now even isoprop gives me painful flaky fingers for days. I wish I'd worn chemical gloves.
10-20 years ago people would love to talk about technical topics. Ask help, give help, offer pointers, debate merits.
Now I guess we ask AI, figure it out ourselves, and/or grin and bear it?
What happened? Is it from remote work? Or everything's easy now? Or nobody wants to stick their neck out? Time constraints? Knowledge gaps?
I don't struggle, exactly, but I run up into all kinds of situations where there's no obvious best choice (everything's awesome and everything is too limited all at once), so either some tough choices need to be made or maybe there IS a better way but it's just VERY non-documented or too much of a PITA to do right away (or simply, silo'd and well-protected).
There ARE avenues to get things done. There ARE multiple valid channels to ask or follow up in. The answer is basically: do it, don't ask. And yet...
GIVEN an culture/expectation/want to be "autonomous" (heck that's what agents need to be, mostly), I think something is missing.
It's like people learned somewhere "be independent", "be autonomous", "don't require help" as somehow "virtuous" outside of the "normal" bounds.
Am I the only one noticing this? Or did something shift?