I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.

The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.

> ... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.

I think part of your naiveté was thinking this goal was likely to turn out as a net benefit for humanity. Maybe it eventually will. But the current scenario was always the most likely scenario for machines rivaling or surpassing humans in intelligence.

Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.

I think that plenty of 'nerds' would very much disagree about that. Steering agents effectively is something that can take massive amounts of creativity and talent and be quite helpful wrt. the final result. There's no real analogue of this in traditional programming.

Sure there's an analogue.

It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong.

Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.

Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.

Oh it's different alright. Yell at a human employee to tell them they're a fucking loser enough times and at best they'll quit on you. The way some people talk to their LLM is ghastly.

Yes.

As AI improves every white collar job becomes a management job. With the previous conception of an Individual Contributor role disappearing.

And isnt that management job also tomorrow's disappearing IC role? A management agent seems quite possible to me.

What’s hard to automate about management is getting employees on board, not the concrete tasks. If an AI instructed you to spend 5 minutes a day talking to it about your day, would you do it?

Hm, on each interview since ever, every time the inevitable "where do you see yourself in X years" question popped up, I was like, I have no ambition of getting promoted to managers, if that's what you mean. I like coding. I want to keep coding. I can advise juniors if _that's_ what you mean. But I want to code.

And here I am. Coding is becoming management in front of my eyes.

Meh :-|

Sure there is, offshoring, now the chat window is with my computer instead on the other side of the planet.

Not everyone wants to be a team lead not doing coding any longer.

Also, I'd rather lead a team of humans that I can interact and talk with in real life instead of a team of bots.

How so?

The models get better and better at understanding the intent of a prompt and doing more useful work with less intervention.

You keep telling yourself that.

The problem was very few nerds realized this was the most likely outcome as they devoted themselves to improving machine intelligence.

And yet even more nerds than ever are devoting themselves to AI. I just wonder - to what end?

The phrase "fuck you, I got mine" comes to mind.

The logical end seems to be another case of pulling up the ladder behind them as they climb up, others be damned. Sadly seems to be a pretty universal human trait, whether intentional or not.

Oh... I was wondering why every single chat (including "Hello") was being flagged.

Seems I am barred from using Fable just for being a biologist :(

Holy shmoly... I'm a biologist who has used Thermo antibodies before, and this is seriously disappointing to see.

Just discovered the documentary, and it's such an interesting time capsule. That period simultaneously feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.

Exactly the same as my experience in the UK.

during GCSEs (nationally held exams at 16 for non uk people) i was sick in hospital for two weeks. when i came back i had to sit the missed exams in a special sitting.

exact same processes with external monitor etc. but with the backup exam papers that was different to the ones everyone else already did.

which is kind of in contrast to university (organised by the institution) where someone stole the exam paper for a difficult module in our final year. so they assigned one of the past year’s papers instead, as if everyone hadn’t memorised it already.

one of the benefits of scale with central organising bodies where you have to get things right (organising GCSEs nationally) is being forced to prepare for edge cases because they become a lot more common.

Ugh... that worked, but I gave up once I got to the home page.

To quote the late, great, Ray Arnold...

"I hate this Hacker crap!"

It can't be a good idea to condition yourself to be comfortable around an exposed wire that's near to a real power socket.

It's soldered to the rebar, which is grounded through the actual power cable

fair point. gotta trust that everything is properly hooked up and won't shift.

you'll only know when you find out the hard way

Reminding me that early Windows versions used to have this colour as the default desktop colour -- and I remember seeing similar tones on Mac and Unix desktops in the 90s.

https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-sof...

That would require technical know-how.

It's much easier for clueless lawmakers to write "the computer check the age", and make it everyone else's problem.