The flip side of this is that AI tools can enable much faster learning, so the time to go from junior to senior can potentially become much shorter for people who are motivated.
It could (and ultimately I agree it's probably what they should), but that's not what people are seeing juniors do. They're seeing them blindly trust the AI tools and think they don't have to learn what they're doing. So they're building at best a fragle understanding of the code their writing.
Since the results of that approach are predictably bad, I think it will sort itself out. A junior who works like that is already less productive than an LLM in the hands of a skilled engineer, so there isn't really any reason to keep that junior around. But a junior who is using LLMs to rapidly improve their skills can be seen as a good investment even if it takes them some time to become a net positive on the team.
I agree, but I think it'll take far longer to happen than people expect. Kids are making it all the way through college (at state or regional universities) without needing to adjust this approach at all.
These kids are going to be convinced that it's a valid strategy. I'd be surprised if many didn't claim they were being unfaily discriminated against in their first couple of jobs instead of fixing the behavior.
It depends how you use them. If your goal is learning and understanding, you will use LLMs much differently than if your goal is to produce copy-pastable code with as little effort as possible.
Honestly, I do a bit of both depending on the situation. Sometimes I just want a one-off script that does xyz and I don't really care enough to have a deep understanding of every detail. Other times I'm getting a crash course in some advanced concept and in an hour I have knowledge that previously only someone with years of experience in a niche domain (and a lot of patience for my dumb questions) could have given me.
I’m always deeply uncomfortable with this argument. It sounds like justification for a “slave” class to do undesirable jobs with no legal protections and sub minimum wage, just so Americans can save a few bucks at the supermarket. But at what moral cost? We can’t have it both ways—if they’re here working, then it needs to be at full American wage with full American regulation/oversight. But that itself defeats the purpose of hiring undocumented workers.
Part of what perpetuates this sort of thing is a general idea in society that one can’t do or learn something because that’s not possible for them. I’m of the opinion that if sufficiently motivated and with sufficient constraints removed, anyone can learn and do anything. The only difference between an engineer and someone breaking their back for work is that the engineer was probably coddled from birth into being told they can do anything including engineering. Not as a pipe dream but a clear path: take these classes, apply to this college, take this internship, take this job.
Meanwhile the laborer was probably told all their life they don’t have what it takes, either explicitly or not, and that thinking held them back their entire life. Why try hard in school if I am “not smart”? Why try and go to college if I can’t pay for it? Why not just do what my neighbor or my uncle does that I know is possible? Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.
<< I’m of the opinion that if sufficiently motivated and with sufficient constraints removed, anyone can learn and do anything.
Anyone can do anything if they believe enough..
It is a nice sentiment and I cling to it myself more often than not, because there is something soothing about it. The unfortunate reality, however, is that being forced onto thing for which I have no predisposition, is, uhh, counterproductive at best.
In short, I disagree with pre-supposition that your position requires ( we are all amorphous blobs that can be molded into whatever with sufficient amount of force ). And that is before we get to the question of whether it is even worthwhile to teach a kid with down syndrome calculus? Not possible. Worthwhile.
<< Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.
No. People need to understand themselves. They need to experience their limits and then cater to their strengths and weaknesses accordingly. It is unhelpful to think that billions people on this planet are interchangeable cogs. We are not.
I am extremely unlikely to ever be like Georgi Gerganov. I simply do not believe I have the brain capacity needed.
It is fine to aspire, but I am not changing the world tomorrow.
If you believe that anyone can do anything, you have never done something properly difficult and watched yourself and / or others fail despite trying hard.
Inappropriate dissuasion surely exists, but you don't help your case by making such claims.
>It sounds like justification for a “slave” class to do undesirable jobs
It's the exact opposite. The slavery is being trapped in Cuba which the person decided to leave by their own free will to make it to America, where working a terrible factory job is going to make them ten times richer than they would have been otherwise.
Is you being uncomfortable with this idea actually more important than giving that person a shot to work himself to a normal American life within two decades and certainly for their kids?
Because it’s functionally impossible to deport all “illegals” without massively disrupting legal immigrant communities? How exactly do you propose the illegal immigrant gestapo determine someone is here legally? Race? Accent? Stop every brown person on the street and ask for papers…? What don’t republicans understand by this
I think you could get 90% of the way to “all” with information that’s already in federal databases. People have jobs. Look at the fake / duplicate SSNs. So, John Smith with SSN 999-99-9999 is a White Male born in 1943, but the family at his residence is Asian and in their 30s? Absolutely no need to harass random people.
> require proof of citizenship/legal residence for housing, jobs, etc.?
Gestapo comparisons aside, you do understand that this is a significant deviation from the status quo in the US, right? The US can't even agree on a unified federal ID; what makes you think we're anywhere close to accepting a world in which the government is a party to civil matters like leases?
(And to be clear: enforcing this kind of introspection absolutely would require an enforcement agency with unprecedented visibility into the paychecks and housing statuses of every single person in this country.)
Er, this is already the law right? Every job I’ve held in the US, I needed to prove I’m eligible to legally work. Obviously this doesn’t work to resolve the issue at all.
Illegal immigrants have been working small restaurants, ethnic supermarkets etc. since time immemorial, law enforcement has turned a blind eye is all. Now with the rise of gig economy, there are tons of jobs where you never even see your employer, so it’s even easier: there are citizens/permanent residents/others with work permits renting out their gig accounts like Uber Eats to illegals.
Some industries, like agriculture or restaurants, rely so heavily on cheap immigrant labor that enforcing this would cause an economic crash and food prices would soar. Other industries will ask prospective employees their SSN, which illegal immigrants don't have. So, which part do you wish to change?
You're saying the only way for America, basically the richest nation in the history of the world, to produce food is to rely on illegally paying and exploiting foreigners? How do all the other less rich countries make food then?
Illegal immigrants have many methods of getting SSNs. Like, it's not even difficult.
I'm saying that it's force massive changes, and, really, increase prices significantly (food is more expensive in Europe for example). Same in restaurants, you'd have far less staff.
It's not impossible but it'd have to go with cultural changes, and have a dire impact on poor people. Just because the US is rich doesn't mean it's working well, just look at healthcare and how costly and unfair it is.
It’s a bit of a futile strategy though, kind of like trying to build a wall thick enough that a state actor can’t bust through. That is impossible because the state has access to nuclear weapons, gigantic drills, thousands of intelligent people whose sole mission in life is to break down that wall, nearly infinite budget, etc.
The only strategy that might work is to make it expensive or unviable to crack every single device. But in the case of something like this, an assassination attempt, then it’s a given that all stops are going to be pulled to crack it.
> That is impossible because the state has access to nuclear weapons, gigantic drills, thousands of intelligent people whose sole mission in life is to break down that wall, nearly infinite budget, etc.
Those generic statements are great and all until you realise that every year, dozens (hundreds, thousands???) people disappear without a hint of a trace and the government is powerless to do anything about it and can't find them.
Or when a large, wealthy company commits crimes (or just government officials sometimes), all they have to say is "we lost the data" and suddenly, there is nothing that can be done about it, it's lost to the ether for ever without any possibility to find out anything about it.
But that is my point - you can make it unviable to go after _everybody_. But if the state is targeting one person in particular, and has a super strong motivation to break the wall, like specifically in this case of domestic terrorism/attempted political assassination, there is no technology that is gonna stop them.
In those cases that people get way with crimes, it is much more likely that there is no political motivation to go after them for whatever reason du jour. I don't think it's because the technology is so strong that they can't.
I can’t imagine the merchant gets that extra currency conversion money, nor why they’d care, they are still getting the exact same amount in their local currency while it’s their bank who profits on the arbitrage.
Viewed from another angle, the CTO successfully psychologically manipulated his team and almost literally beat a working, cheap solution out of them, and will almost certainly get full credit for this victory done on the backs of others. SO, was he truly not competent? Or was he extremely, dangerously competent?
Not only that, but while the CTO is busy counting his bonus money and accepting his new shares of equity from a satisfied performance condition, he managed to get the rest of the team to simply be proud of doing it for a pat on the back and the feeling of doing "live theater" or whatever.
Yep, the whole article was infuriating, yet I kept expecting a big windfall for the team in the end to justify it all, but instead we got:
"But you also want to feel like a rock star when all your hard work hits real users for the first time and you feel that thrill of I did that. People like what I did. I overcame the impossible."
Y'all got rewarded with an attaboy and a 'rock star thrill' while the CTO probably blasts off in his career and collects his $millions. Well done!
Ventless driers typically use a condenser to pull out the humidity, condense it into water, and drain it into the same drain your washer uses. If it's working correctly, the humidity shouldn't be going into the air.
Cool, I learned something. But it also does seem like that would take additional energy(due to the particularly high enthalpy of water, if I remember my concepts correctly) so at least where I am, venting the excess moisture is the most expedient method.
Venting the moisture also vents the heat. A modern dryer uses a heat pump for both heating the air and pulling the water out of the air. Although I guess with lifetimes of the devices and the relative cost of power (or gas even) between NA and EU they might be much more common around here. With an insulated house you also don't really want to have too many holes in the building, especially not ones intended to remove heat.
So… in conclusion, it could be worse. That’s some valuable insight. Obviously somebody out there always has it worse. How can doctors even complain when there exist 3rd world subsistence farmers?
A startup that is firing engineers on the spot who dare to disagree probably won't last much longer anyway. Best of luck with their "critical" deadline then...?
While software engineers have definitely had a few good recent years (especially during the work from home boom during COVID times), I would say it was equally dire around 2009-2012 post-financial crash. And 20 years ago was 2004 - just off the heels of the dot com bust, where the job market was much much worse than today. Anecdotally, from what I hear, I would agree it's not a cake walk anymore like it was in ~2021 but it's also not quite a hopeless situation either.
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