> adding that "The demand for new programmers is still very high"

This is false. The tech job market in the US has been garbage since late 2022.

And even if it were to recover somewhat (e.g. from Fed rate cuts), we still have AI nipping at our heels.

You misunderstand. It's not NaNoWriMo that OP is saying is a cult, it's the woke ideology that is a cult (viewing everything as colonizer vs. oppressed, etc.). And for that there is there heaps of evidence.

"I burn my finger when I touch the hot stove. Maybe we should engineer a cooler stove?"

It's amazing how people will do everything except address root causes of an issue.

Meat is terrible for the environment, not great for health, to say nothing of the animal suffering it perpetuates.

Also he was disparaging work from home with no grounding in fact or reality.

> Yes, I am conversant with non-classical logic in many forms.

r/iamverysmart

Back when I was a wee QA tester lad at Intel many years ago, I had a weird coworker who SWORE by Monkey's Audio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I wonder what that guy's up to now. He used to do an hour on his stationary bike every morning.

I first encountered Usenet in my late teens in the late 90s on a 14.4k modem. I was amazed at the range of topics. It showed me the potential of the Internet as a place of vast possibilities.

Continued using it into my early 20s in the early 2000s. Mostly for porn and "warez" (broke college student) heh.

Exactly. We're *already* seeing AI (in the loose sense of the term) making inroads on copyediting, copy-writing, graphic design, transcription, etc. We're already seeing it deployed to make scams more sophisticated (e.g. voice cloning).We're already at the cusp of it being used for disinfo / propaganda during elections.

We don't need Terminator 2-style AGI / ASI for things to get bonkers. Even a "good enough", mostly-replacement AI for many white collar jobs could see salaries plunging and unemployment up.

Contrast is almost comically low. They need to admit they made a mistake on the g-suite icons for mobile, too. They're hard to distinguish. What's going on over there? Aren't they supposed to have smart people working for them? What's the matter, LeetCode interviews not working like they thought?

Are you using GPT-4? I just tried it and it passed with flying colors:

https://chat.openai.com/share/...

Output is readable and correct.

Now, I did the same prompt for 3.5 and the code is a bit ugly, sure. But it still produces correct output.

GPT-4 is worth the $20/mo. It's quite a bit better than 3.5 you get with the free version.

I suggest coming up with a new test. This one, GPT-4 has no trouble with. :-)

This is an exaggeration of the current state of the art. In reality: limited context windows, hallucinations, and needing to supervise its output to make sure it didn't make a bizarre assumption that a human would have avoid via common sense. And a LOT of back-and-forth with the AI if the problem is anything beyond trivial. But I agree it's great for quick syntax junk.

Thank you. That was my impression, too. He seems like a wide-eyed, easily-impressed enthusiast, but not an actual developer paid to write industry software.

Oh boy. There's a lot wrong with this lazy essay. It's obviously geared toward the liberal arts crowd. I mean, it's the New Yorker, not Wired or Scientific American.

* There's no rigorous testing done of GPT-4 in this piece. Any of us who've spent a lot of time with it know its strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, it can spit out boilerplate quickly. Or solutions to common problems that are well-represented in its training data. But in my year-long experimentation with it, including using it while I do small- to medium-size programming projects, it struggles with: coordinating several layers/components of abstraction, keeping things simple (I frequently notice it over-complicating things), genuine creativity -- so much of its output from fiction writing to code is the most generic and bland possible, and of course there are the much-talked-about hallucinations.
* I question how informed this author is. He seems like the dabbler he think he isn't. The "centaur" idea in chess was discredited many years ago. Humans can't beat the strongest chess AI even with assistance. He struggled with "Hello world"? Seriously? Come on, man. I can't take this seriously.

It's a neat tool. I use it for getting syntax in languages/frameworks I'm less familiar with, for boring boilerplate, for getting ideas when stuck. But it absolutely does not have the "qualities of a senior engineer". That's laughable.

Now I'm sure long term we will see AGI. I think we'll see AGI in five years or less. But it's not replacing humans at this time except for the most low value, trivial tasks. It won't even replace a bright intern or new junior software engineer. It simply does not have the ability to self-direct, follow-through on long goals, use common sense and abstract reasoning, etc.

It's a good assistant and power tool -- as long as you know its limits and double-check its work -- but this article jumps the gun in reporting on the "waning" of the craft. We're not there yet.

I wait until I have 2-3 things I want to watch on a service, subscribe for a month, then bail.

The only services I have year-round are:

* Amazon Prime Video -- because I use the grocery delivery, etc.; I don't specifically subscribe for their video content
* YouTube Premium -- YouTube gets a lot of (deserved) crap these days, but it has an immense amount of content if you do any kind of curation of your subscriptions at all. I love the content around science, engineering, history, book and film analysis, investigations, etc. like Nile Red, Barely Sociable, John Michael Godier, Quinn's Ideas, RealLifeLore, Veritasium, Technology Connections, Mark Felton, Thomas Flight... I have 128 subscriptions and it's basically my "TV"

You might consider hobbies that are more active and engaging -- too often it's easy to fall into the trap of unchallenging, passive consumption. There are plenty that are cheap too:

Coding Projects (free resources and compilers available online)
Puzzle Solving and Escape Rooms (puzzles can be found online for free)
Brain Teasers and Advanced Mathematics (online resources and books from libraries)
Learning New Languages (free apps and websites available)
Origami and Papercraft (materials are relatively inexpensive)
Creative Writing and World-Building (requires only imagination and basic writing tools)
Collecting (depending on what you choose to collect, can be inexpensive)
Nature and Urban Exploration (mostly free, unless travel is involved)
Playing Musical Instruments (affordable if you already own an instrument or use virtual software)
Tabletop RPGs (requires only a set of dice and imagination, many resources available for free online)
Parkour or Geocaching (minimal equipment needed)
DIY Home Lab Experiments (using household items)