Programmer Humor

Key skill is to be able to communicate your problem and requirements which turns out to be really hard.

Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: "people said flight was impossible", "people said the earth didn't revolve around the sun", "people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad".

It's cherry-picking. They're taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.

And here's the thing, the "information superhighway" was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.

Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here's some actual reasoning:

GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can't solve the fidelity problem can't do information work. Information work requires fidelity.

And "fidelity" is just a fancy way of saying "truth", or maybe "meaning". Even as conscious beings we haven't really cracked that issue, and I don't think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.

Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of "what progress artillery science has made during the last few years". We're just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it's not space technology.

Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn't know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior. ~~Cannons weren't really a factor in space beyond that.~~

Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.

Is it worthless to say "(the current iteration of) AI won't be a huge revolution". For sure, it might be, the next decade will determine that.

Is it worhtless to say that many companies are throwing massive amounts of money at it, and taking huge risks on it, while it clearly won't deliver for them? I would say no, that is useful.

And in the end, that's what this complaint seems like for me. The issue isn't "AI might be the next big thing", but "We need to do everything with AI right now", and then in a couple of years when they see how bad the results are, and how it negatively impacted them, noone will have seen it coming...

I can't help but read this while replacing "rock" with "large language model"

Heuristics that almost always work. Hmm.

You should click the link.

Yeah but it's different this time!

I'd love to read a list of those instances/claims/tech

I imagine one of them was low-code/no-code?

/edit: I see such a list is what the posted link is about.

I'm surprised there's not low-code/no-code in that list.

Naming it "The Cloud" and not "Someone else's old computer running in their basement" was a smart move though.

It just sounds better.

I don't think it was supposed to replace everyone in IT, but every company had system administrators or IT administrators that would work with physical servers and now there are gone. You can say that the new SRE are their replacement, but it's a different set of skills, more similar to SDE than to system administrators.

Many of our customers store their backups in our "cloud storage solution".

I think they'd be rather less impressed to see the cloud is in fact a jumble of PCs scattered all around our office.

Can't predict the future, but I can see the past. Specifically the part of the past that used standards based implementations and boring technology. Love that I can pull up html with elements using ALL CAPs and table aligned content. It looks like a hot mess but it still works, even on mobile. Plain text keeps trucking along. Sqlite will outlive me. Exciting things are exciting but the world is made of boring.

They're great for users, which is why Google and Apple are letting them die from lack of development so apps can make them money.

Which is honestly its best use case. That and occasionally asking it to generate a one-liner for a library call I don't feel like looking up. Any significant generation tends to go off the rails fast.

Microsoft Flash. Netflix used it for a while. I don't remember anything else using it.

Be glad, you never had to interact with that 'technology'. I once did at an internship in 2016.