I don't see demand dropping in the medium to long term. Businesses like to grow, and two devs with AI are better than one. And one dev with AI is better than one non-dev with AI.

The job is changing, and I don't like it in many ways, but there we go. It's not the first time new tech has nuked my dev job and I had to change.

I have personal projects that I hand-code, and personal projects I hand to Claude. Depends on how boring the project is. If it's stuff I've already solved a bunch of times, I hand it off. If I have room for good learning, I code it myself.

> Short of voting, protesting and getting into arguments with MAGA people I don't know what else I can effectively do.

Also:

Give money to organizations that are doing the work on your behalf. Lawsuits are still important.

Call or write your reps *frequently*. They use software to automatically tabulate voter positions. (And they look at it--they want to keep their jobs!)

You're getting downvoted, but people should be aware that arguments like this sometimes only reinforce the other party's position in their minds. My recommendation is also not to bother with those debates (unless you're doing it to find deficiencies in your own position).

There are elements of truth to this, but then there's other elements (here) who have said that we somehow owe it to people to argue in good faith with them when they are talking of (the ones I've personally had mentioned): post-birth abortion ("in several Democrat states, abortion is legal up to one month post birth!"), adrenochrome harvesting, etc.

That it was my/our fault such views propagate because we're not "willing to understand their perspectives".

The thing is, their perspectives are a lie. And in many cases, they know they're a lie, they just don't. fucking. care.

So they can go online and whine about being dismissed or criticized, or pat each other on the back for "knowing the truth". There's a subset who, I'm sure, see such things as actual literal truth, and that's a different issue altogether, but not sure it's my responsibility to solve, or that failure to engage on my part makes the current situation "my fault".

> It's not really a choice but a demonstration of intelligence and empathy. Still, if you deliberately decide to remain ignorant, or simply fail to understand the opposition's position even despite your best efforts, it shouldn't surprise you when you also fail to convince people your position is the correct one.

Like huh? It is okay for them to be objectively dishonest, and have zero shred of empathy, curiosity for my position, but refusing to engage on a good faith basis is a failing of mine?

> Once you reach this stage, your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining, which makes a poor impression of yourself and actually pushes people away from your position.

This is literally Idiocracy in the making.

If I make a poor impression on people by repeatedly shutting down their horseshit about doctors performing "abortions" up to a week or a month after birth, or that babies are being harvested in the basement of a pizza parlor for their adrenachrome, and you're more concerned about how I should be "understanding" of that perspective, again, you're also supporting the idiocracy.

But we also at HN have historically called your experience "anecdata" and take it with a grain of salt. Don't take offense. Provide more data.

I humbly suggest that a more hacker response would be, "That's really interesting that my experience doesn't agree with that study. Let's figure out what's going on."

From my naive standpoint, LLMs like this seem to have some big strengths. One: possession of a superhuman expanse of knowledge. Two: making connections. Three: tireless trial and error.

If you put those three things together, you end up with some cool stuff from time to time. Perhaps the proof of P!=NP is tied to an obscure connection that humans don't easily see due to individual lack of knowledge or predisposition of bias.

Unless my understanding is incorrect about how these tools work that last point isn't really a quality of LLMs as such? It gets attributed because the lines are blurred but the tireless trial and error is actually just a quality of a regular programatic loop (agent/orchestrator) that happens to be doing the trickiest part of its work via an LLM.

Three: tireless trial and error. Cannot agree more. I figured this probably be the biggest advantage of LLM considering for other variables humans hold the same-level competency.

This is why the whole "LLMs for mass surveillance" thing is scary imo.

Yeah, this is a dictator's dream scenario and hell for the citizens. Not only do you not want to get caught for saying something that The Great Leader disapproves of, but you're terrified that anything you say might get flagged by an AI.

Well put.

>If you put [possession of a superhuman expanse of knowledge, making connections, tireless trial and error] together, you end up with some cool stuff from time to time.

Hard to argue.

I agree partially, but I think there might be a ton of connections in the training data that aren't obvious to humans. And being a word prediction engine is all about making those connections.

Oh shit... Ok... Um... Beej's Guide to Network Programming is now $500! Respect me!

Oh! Thank you mighty capitalist god! Now I appreciate the value add you bring this world! I was blind before, but now I see!

> But, it was so much better to do this than to try to synthesize that in my brain

For some definitions of "better", that is. :(

Nor does it matter if code has no value.

I do think what happens in this case is SCOTUS will ultimately rule that AI-built code is copyrightable while art is not. I'm sure there's some rationale thick enough for them.

It's strange how hard it is to think of a situation that could lead to that case. Who would bother filing an infringement lawsuit for code whose very existence proves that it can be derived by anyone from LLM prompts? What would the damages even be?

Interesting world we live in. Soon it'll be faster to one-shot the tiny slice of functionality I need from Adobe CS than to navigate their subscription cancellation obstacle course.

> Soon it'll be faster to one-shot the tiny slice of functionality I need from Adobe CS than to navigate their subscription cancellation obstacle course.

Pretty sure you're already in that world. ;)

This is precisely why copyright is practically obsolete. You can't legally forbid someone from paraphrasing, and now we can easily automate it to just within the threshold set by legal cases.

I view this as a massive personal challenge. Can I write instructional materials that are better than an AI summary? I'm going to keep trying, even as books become obsolete.

It makes no sense to people who want to live in a globally-competitive democracy. But other people don't share that goal, and the moves make perfect sense in their context.

I think this is an important point. Think about the mindset it takes to understand this proposal as a "great" thing for America. What would you have to believe? What values would you have to change in order for a foreign scientist ban to be "great". Be sure to try to limit you understanding of science to wha you might receive from watching the most popular cable news channel as your definitive source of information.

This is not the mindset of all MAGA but it's a difficult exercise for most thoughtful engineers to try to live in that mind space for a while. It's a very different world, and I can only do it because I have many conversations with family members to draw on.

for comparison's sake, how many foreigners work in Chinese labs?

Why do you want to become China so badly? Why do you admire it so much that you want to copy it?

Not the GP, but I'll answer: their now-inevitable global leadership in technological and scientific advancements--that is what I want to copy.

It's not just the war, obviously. This time the President has immunity levels that are unprecedented. And his cronies in Congress and SCOTUS don't seem inclined to rein him in on much.