Very strange if you ask me and disturbing. I don't know if I'd let such a dev touch a database. Of course nowadays we just vibe code and YOLO everything, but still. This is making me feel old.
I'm shocked, shocked to find out capitalism's tricks are going on here.
Yet we keep praying at its altars. Delta are just playing the game. It might not be the nicest thing to do, but it is honest at least. All entrepreneurs are pounding their collective fists on their skulls to think of ways to extract as much value from the market as possible. Let's blame the game instead of the players.
That's assuming there is a substrate that can be disturbed. That's where the parent's analogy breaks down.
As an example of an alternative analogy: think of how many bombs need to explode in your dreams before the "substrate" is "rippled". How big do the bombs need to be? How fast does the "matter" have to "move"? I think "reality" is more along those lines. If there is a substrate - and that's a big if - IMO it's more likely to be something pliable like "consciousness". Not in the least "disturbed" by anything moving in it.
It's a pretty exact description: the universe is made of fields, smashing stable excitations of those fields together produces disturbances in other fields (“virtual particles”) that sometimes makes (fleetingly) stable excitations in other fields, which then fall apart through the same dance into different stable excitations than we started with, allowing us to prove that the field in the middle exists and start to determine its properties.
Another way to think of it. Consider breaking out of Minecraft. Can you do it?
Maybe. There are certainly ways to crash it today. But now let's go through some cycles of fixing those crashes, and we'll run it on a system that can handle the resource usage even if it slows down in the external reality's terms quite a bit. And we'll ignore the slash commands and just stick to the world interactions you can make.
After that, can you forcefully break out of it from the inside?
No.
It is not obligatory for systems to include escape hatches. We're just not great at building complex systems without them. But there's no reason they are necessarily present in all systems.
Another brain bender covering the same idea in a different direction: The current reigning candidate for BB(6) runs an incomprehensible amount of computation [1]. Yet, did it at any point "break out" into our world? Nope. Nor do any of the higher ones. They're completely sealed in their mathematical world, which is fortunate since any of them would sweep aside our entire universe without noticing.
Once they start making deals with the relevant organizations, book rooms, handle insurance, replacement hotels, etc, then they'll replace travel agents. These guys don't just Google a bunch of tickets you know.
We're getting into semantics now, but I'm talking about the kind of person who used to sit in a physical store, waiting for someone to walk by and go into the travel agency.
In the 80's and 90's, this is how most people booked their holidays. It was labour intensive, people would spend some time talking with a travel agent in a store, who would have a good idea of the packages available, and be able to make recommendations and match people with holidays.
The remnants of agencies still provide the same services, but (for the most of us) it's all online, it's all tick-box based, and much of the protection is via ATOL/ABTA.
These services still exist, but they're no longer all over the high-street. Names like Thomas Cook, Lunn Poly, have either been absorbed (mostly by TUI), or collapsed, and largely disappeared from the high-street with just a few left. (Mostly Tui).
And those that are left, have been reduced, much like retail banking, to entering your details into the same websites and services available to anyone, and talking you through the results that the computer spits out, that you could have browsed yourself at home. The underpaid travel agent in the store isn't any better connected than you are. In fact, they're possibly even more pushy about pushing you toward the hotels with the best commission than the website is.
I imagine a travel agent would have local knowledge and connections, and would know the quality of the hotels they're trying to send to you, a high commission isn't worth it if your customer is unsatisfied and goes to a different agent for their next trip. Of course this is based on the assumption that the customer always wants to use a travel agent (an unrealistic assumption nowadays, because it's so easy to switch to the Internet).
Someone like Rick Steves(1) still goes to the destinations every summer to check out hotels, restaurants and local companies, I imagine someone with more budget would travel with his company rather than try their luck with some booking.com hotel with a high rating...
What you're imagining is what it was like in the 1980s, or possibly now for a boutique place, not the reality of the post-internet high-street travel agent.
You're not realising the reality of the typical high-street worker, and the sheer lack of autonomy that they have in their roles.
There is this interesting thing called the Paradox of Automation where increasing automation increases the importance of human intervention. We are trying this out on a societal level. It will be.. interesting, to say the least.
Also, congratulations on becoming a team. I sure hope you have the mental bandwidth to check all that output carefully. If so, doubly congrats, because you might be the smartest human that ever lived.
I appreciate you're incredulity and snark! Dismissing without engagement is a fun ability to exercise. I look forward to talking past each other going forward :-)
HackerNews typically doesn't appreciate and will ban accounts for that type of engagement as it is just personal and not a factual wrestling with the point of discussion, I see you are new here and I would encourage you to not continue to engage in the patterns you show.
At core, I think perhaps we have a different interpretation of what 20% of a Sr. Engineer can accomplish and what Jr. Devs are capable of accomplishing.
To be fair to your point, I think one of the enablers is that I actually enjoy working longer hours now so my net time engaging with code has gone up as well.
But I'm from the old school and I've always preferred time in code vs having outside hobbies, that's been true since the 90s.
I find code reviews relaxing and enjoyable and not particularly mentally taxing for 90% of what a decent jr. dev writes. I find it a nice little break from working on problems that can actually be classified as "hard".
Coincidentally, I've worked in human in the loop automation for quite a long time, making Sr. individuals more efficient with their time and removing busy work has been a big focus.
There is a lot in that space to consider from a human factors perspective, the intersection of creation vs editing is a big one, decomposing problems for sure, each individual seems to have different capabilities and natural bents in that regard. I've long been a thought dump and edit person and that's part of what I attribute my high personal productivity to.
I confess I might be showing signs of unlawful thought patterns. I will correct that, fellowniusmonk. Thanks for pointing that out.
I am in the "code is not an asset, it's a liability"-camp and our recently acquired ability to swiftly defecate metric tons of it is not something I am particularly thrilled about. In fact, I find "senior" engineers using LoC as a productivity metric highly suspect - at best. I thought we passed that phase a decade or two ago. Not saying you are one, but in the spirit of talking past each other I thought it prudent to put up a good straw man.
All in all to be completely honest I find it hard to parse your original point so I concur I wasn't engaging properly. To be fair you opened with "in terms of code output" so that's what triggered me I guess.
You did not and you are not proficient. LLMs and AI in general cater to your insecurities. An actual good human mentor will wipe the floor with your arrogance and you'll be better for it.
I think you're under the impression that I am not a software engineer. I already know C, and I've even shipped a very small, popular, security sensitive open source library in C, so I am certainly proficient enough to rewrite Python into Rust for performance purposes without hiring a Rust engineer or write shaders to help debug models in Blender.
My point is that LLMs make it 10x easier to adapt and transition to new languages, so whatever moat someone had by being a "Rust developer" is now significantly erased. Anyone with solid systems programming experience could switch from C/C++ to Rust with the help of an LLM and be proficient in a week or two's time. By proficient, I mean able to ship valuable features. Sure they'll have to leveraging an LLM to help smooth out understanding new features like borrow checking, but they'll surely be able to deliver given how already circumspect the Rust compiler is.
I agree fundamentals matter and good mentorship matters! However, good developers will be able to do a lot more diverse tasks which means more supply of talent across every language ecosystem.
For example, I don't feel compelled at all to hire a Svelte/Vue/React developer specifically anymore: any decent frontend developer can race forward with the help of an LLM.
I realize I came across as harsh and I surely don't want to judge you personally on your skills as A) that's not necessary for my point to make sense and B) uncalled for. I'm sure you are a capable C developer and I'm sorry for being an asshole - but I am one so it's hard for me to pretend otherwise...
Being able to program in C is something I can also do, but it sure as heck does not make me proficient Rust developer if I cobble some shit from a LLM together and call it a day.
I can appreciate how "businesses" think this is a valuable, but - and this is often forgotten by salaried developers - as I am not a business owner I have neither the position nor the intention of doing any "business". I am in a position to do "engineering". Business is for someone else to worry about. Shipping "valuable features" is not something I care about. Shipping working and correct features is something I worry about. Perhaps modern developers should call themselves business analysts or something if they wish to stop engineering.
LLMs are souped up Stack Overflows and I can't believe my ears if I hear a fellow developer say someone on Stack Overflow ported some of their code to Rust on request and that this feature of SO now makes them a proficient Rust developer because they can vaguely follow the code and can now "ship" valuable features.
This is like being able to vaguely follow Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which is something any amateur can do, compared to being able to engage with it academically and rigorously. I deeply worry about the competence of the next generation - and thus my own safety - if they believe superficial understanding is equivalent to deep mastery.
Edit: interesting side note: I am writing this as a dyed in the wool generalist. Now ain't that something? I don't care if expertise dies off professionally, because I never was an "expert" in something. I always like using whatever works and all systems more or less feel equal to me yet I can also tell that this approach is deeply flawed. In many important ways deep mastery really matters and I was hoping the rest of society would keep that up and now they are all becoming generalists who don't know shit and it worries me..
I'm nearing forty and I have a sneaky suspicion it's a weird cultural thing. A bit like the Romans lamenting the fall of their culture right at the start of their golden age and they never stopped doing that. Always looking back saying shit sucks now and how in the old days everything centered on competence and morality. Men were actual men back then. That sort of thing. Some parts of it might have made a tad kind of sense, but a lot of it was baloney.
I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that. There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.
I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk with some fresh ideas.
By experiencing the sheer existential horror that Nietzsche and others spoke of and coming out of it knowing the only way out is through. There is nothing to lean on. You decide you start caring and it will happen.
I think this is reasonable. Came to the same conclusion. I need to at least pretend to myself that I care, but I will not allow it to bleed into my PL. If it does I check out and chill for a bit.
