It’s ok. In the future, no one will do math. Mathematicians will be directors, with a team of math bots that they administer and direct. Instead of being managed, they will become the managers of mathematic autonomons. Universities need to get with the program.
I find that junior engineers like to use it “up the authority” of their arguments when my experience clashes with their desires. OTOH, I am humbly aware that sometimes my experience is wrong and a curse to me. I DO need to be careful to not “hold on to old ways”. But I’m not convinced this is the right way to level the fields between wisdom/experience and innovation/freshtake.
Reading the BBC article about poisoning the real time AI well of info yesterday, I was super struck by this point
> "We're moving towards this 'one true answer' world. Before, Google would give you 10 blue links and you would kind of do your own research. But AI just gives you one answer. It becomes so easy to just take things at face value. You need to be careful."
In a world of insecurities, and a world where we crave out-facting or out-proving our fellow discussioners, this “one right answer” is like synthetic drugs to the social experience. And we suspect “it’s not good for us” but it’s just so damned addictive.
What is unclear to me is how less skilled people gain useful experience, when using these amplifying tools. I’ve been at this for 35 years; I like to think that sometimes i get some pretty amazing results.
I work with two pretty green developers. The rate that they can make a mess is now phenomenal. And the sense of confidence the tools give them with early successes, means any experience I might have to offer means less now. Which is ok, I’m not going to be that “my experience has to be useful to you so I still fell relevant” old guy. But I do find myself curious how “lessons are learned” that lead to greater and greater tool exploitation in this brave new world.
> But I do find myself curious how “lessons are learned” that lead to greater and greater tool exploitation in this brave new world.
(I think I'm reading this the right way but if not feel free to correct).
In a word: pain.
Until there's a legitimate threat to their well-being (emotional, psychological, or financial), the lessons won't be truly "learned." Until you know the true cost of a decision, you're flying high.
Older engineers have dealt with this organically so it's kind of encoded into their DNA. The very reason certain things aren't done (or a certain way) is because that pain has already been felt/encouraged learning a better way.
People are never going to quit doing this. I'm surprised we still get "incensed" by being "watched without consent". There is
No. Way. It's. Going. To. Ever. Get. Stopped.
The only way to level the effects are to radically increase the surveillance so that everyone ends up in a Dark Forest "I know shit about you too" deterrence stand off. And/or flood the sensors with so much input/noise that meaningful signal is tough to suss out.
Probably where the mismatch is in this discussion. The measure of what is quality code is all over the place. For some, some form of "good enough" is quality. And for others, metrics like terseness, readability, vacuous amounts of comments, cleverness, various fuzzy measures of "idiomatic", etc, make "quality code" much more of a moving target.
Been using Kagi search for more than a year. Been happy. I use GPT/et al for the little things (e.g. unit conversions, rather than search for and then try to use an enshittified web page from 10 years ago). But for actual real tech leaning content, Kagi has been pretty good.
A lot of unit conversions are just built into Kagi (and Google!). "Searching" for "10nzd in usd" gives me a price, "10kg in lb" gives me a converted unit, etc.
There will rise a PETA like organization that will protest this. Probably call themselves the Lorax and protest that we're practicing colonialism on plants now.
All satire aside... this is pretty cool. And so are groups that look out for the little guy.
/s
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