Hacker Timesnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | mxkopy's commentslogin

I don’t think it could be the most important skill to have. The most common, and the most standardized one for sure, but if coding agents are doing fundamental R&D or running ops then nobody needs skills anyway.

> As it turns out, neural nets “won”

> The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much.

I get the feeling you don’t know what you’re talking about. LLMs are impressive but what have they “won” exactly? They require millions of dollars of infrastructure to run coming around a decade after their debut, and we’re really having trouble using them for anything all that serious. Now I’m sure in a few decades’ time this comment will read like a silly cynic but I bet that will only be after those old school machine learning losers come back around and start making improvements again.


Neural nets are used in way more applications than just LLMs. They did win. They won decisively in industry, for all kinds of tasks. Equating the use of one with the other is a pretty strong signal of:

> you don’t know what you’re talking about

Consider: Why did Google have a bazillion TPUs, anyway?


They are saying coding agents are winning similarly to NNs and that’s what I’m pushing back on

The market hasn’t been built out yet. There’s that post from a couple days ago where someone frontloaded the entire UX of an operating system onto an LLM, so you just tell the hardware what you want to do and it does it. https://qht.co/item?id=47557165

The growth is there but it’s going to be a marathon, not a sprint. I don’t know why everyone’s in such a goddamn hurry all the time


I mean they did execute a wealthy banker a couple years ago. So I think the mercantile class occupies a different place in society there than in America

This is one ruling out of many, many of which directly benefit Trump. See Trump vs. United States 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

There’s absolutely 0 reason to be optimistic towards a court stacked explicitly in his favor.


One thing I will give to them is the MSVC ecosystem. (Something something developers)

No doubt it’s starting to show its age but it’s like watching a lion die. Win32 amenities just being automatically available is quite sick and I wish there was something similar for Linux.

It’s like windows devs and users live in alternate realities, I’m sure a lot of cool things can happen if they bring some of that dev love over to their UX.


The phrase you’re looking for is “anatomically modern human”, which has been around for 200,000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human


I'm not disagreeing that humans 200,000 years ago were approximately anatomically equivalent to humans today; I'm disagreeing that they would be just as intelligent without today's language, technology, or knowledge. I don't think you can define or measure intelligence in a way that ignores those things.


Eh I don’t think it’s something we can ever discount. Some cavewoman could’ve daydreamed the entire theory of general relativity in her own private language while weaving a basket and we would never know because she never felt the need to talk about it. On the other hand there are people today who will emit novels of profound nothingness.

Technology and language is sort of like speaking in this sense, it’s evidence of mind but it’s not mind. And the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence and all that


It honestly seems a little control freakish to think this way. People leave companies and that’s a good thing, they explore the industry and generally become more capable. If you leave on good terms there’s nothing holding back a renewed relationship, now with the added benefit of new perspectives; maybe meeting at conferences or working on a project. My gut is telling me these companies don’t part on good terms with their employees.


The reason LLMs fail today is because there’s no meaning inherent to the tokens they produce other than the one captured by cooccurrence within text. Efforts like these are necessary because so much of “general intelligence” is convention defined by embodied human experience, for example arrows implying directionality and even directionality itself.


I’d like a source for that. College graduates are no longer at an employment advantage compared to their uneducated peers. The average age of a new hire increased by 2 years over the past 4 years.

Young people in the west have definitely seen declining salaries, if only by virtue of the fact that they’re not being offered at all.

https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/social/65-and-still-clockin...


Real wage growth has been positive for the last 3 years:

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000013?output_view=pc...


Money and power don’t usually make you smarter, in fact they usually make you dumber. You can have every anti social belief and the intentions of the antichrist, but if you’re smart and run your system well everyone will still benefit.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: