The word “never” is a dangerous word. In my lifetime I have seen it many times where something was supposed to “never” happen only to see it happen a few years later.
I'll buy that - but, how often does one need an honest-to-goodness expert? 99% of the time most people's requirements can be satisfied with general-competence, and, while the AI systems we have today are mostly only generally competent in porting code from one language to another - they are getting consistently better. I expect we'll start to see general competence in many more areas in the next few years.
> I'll buy that - but, how often does one need an honest-to-goodness expert?
Any time you are doing anything important, where the outcome actually matters. For example, I was recently applying for a study permit and if I generated my application using an LLM instead of consulting with an immigration lawyer and writing it myself, I would not have gotten my study permit. I was recently applying for internships, and if I hadn't paid a real recruiter to review my resume and advise me, I would not have gotten my interview. And trust me, I spent at least an hour trying to get an LLM to generate what I wanted, but no matter how I begged or described what I wanted, it was no use. Good luck fine tuning an LLM to be good at any of this.
> they are getting consistently better
No, they are not getting better, and they will never replace an actual human expert, because a human expert has the actual experience and up-to-date knowledge of what they are an expert at, and also all the complementary context and the current state of affairs in that area. The LLM has none of that.
Then hopefully at some point they get to experience the consequences of having low quality thresholds, and perhaps then their quality thresholds will increase.
There are plenty of areas where a "low bar" is more than enough. "low" doesn't necessarily mean bad here, it can simply mean "not the best".
I would argue the majority (in the true sense of the word) of white-collar service work does not require an expert.
It requires someone who has reasonable qualifications in the given field, and the motivation ($) to help you with your task.
So no one needs a top-shelf $900/hour lawyer to draw up a basic low-stakes contract where both parties agree to all the terms as written. You just need someone to ensure that the contract is legally valid as written.
Lol no one cares. Most of that is smoke and mirrors anyways. Stokes was plagiarized. Most of these "breakthrough" solutions are actually present in the training data and in the prompts researchers and mathematicians input into ChatGPT themselves, prompts OpenAI then steals even when you don't agree to improve the model.
PS: I use LLMs every day, basically let Codex write most of my code (after 15+ years of professional programming), these are amazing tools, smart in some ways, but completely demented in others. People just need to fucking stop being AI doomers and AI coomers. Is this technology great? Yes. Is it worth 10 trillion? Hell fucking no. If we get to a point where RSI is a thing, then maybe. So far it's not a thing and its not even close.
Yes. But (as a side effect) this has entailed resolving a number of conjectures that have been open for decades, only one of which (the Navier-Stokes blow-up) is attached to any controversy.
From my experience, professional content creators tend to either have little idea of the actual topic they create content on, or their knowledge is very outdated. For example, one might have been a software engineer previously, but at some point they pivoted towards being a writer, and over the years their software engineering skills became atrophied and outdated. Martin Fowler in particular appears to have only worked for two companies, PwC and "Thoughtworks," both obscure outstaffing/consulting firms, and yet he claims to be "a leading authority on agile, refactoring, architecture, and software design." I am not convinced he has the credibility to call himself that, or claim to be some kind of expert in software engineering. Would be happy to be proven wrong.
You've read his writing outside this blog post? Or is this a first-impression take (in which case the degree of negativity would be a little unexplained)?
There is no negativity in my previous message, and I have read some of his writing on DDD a long time ago, so this is not a first impression. In fact, at the time I did not find anything wrong with his DDD writing, but I also didn't know much about him. It's just that in general, I have experienced at numerous instances consuming a piece of content, and later out of curiosity investigating the author's background, and finding out that they had no credibility to back up the authority they were claiming. Even in person, I have seen people go up on stage, spout complete nonsense, especially about AI, and having the crowd cheer.
I think you're completely right to by skeptical, and I mostly agree with you. I'm also not that familiar with his work.
But to play devil's advocate, working at consulting companies is probably the best way you're going to get exposed to the outcomes of different design decisions. I feel I've learned a lot more being brought onto different legacy projects than I have starting a dozen greenfield projects at the same company, where you may not even stay long enough to see if that trendy design choice pays off. You also get very used to seeing different management/programmer dynamics.
So I don't think working at only two consulting companies is a bad thing.
McDonald's food is not even that unhealthy. I just tried a Burger King burger the other day and it's terrible. I think it's like 2000 calories in a single burger or something.
2k cal would be around 250ml of oil. or 350grams of peanuts. So doing with bread, meat, and other stuff alike requires over 600g of food, an excellent value to energy.
"Designer" is a very broad term and can mean very different things to different people, not everyone is doing stuff that can be represented nicely by vectors.
It's not about the rate of speaking but rather about what is actually being spoken. I am currently going through the Neetcode DSA course and it's just obnoxious. His video on Union Find, a 15 LoC algorithm, is 20 minutes.
I've not tried it myself, but I consistently hear good things about Math Academy. It uses a knowledge graph so that it knows whether you've satisfied prerequisites for a topic, and it adapts itself to your level. I've never taken the plunge because it's very expensive at $49 a month, but it seems to be the one that serious maths learners use.
I did the trial of Brilliant the other day. You can get 7 days free, then another 7 days added if you cancel the first trial before the end. After that you can continue to get 2 free lessons per day with ads. I think it's about $20 a month for unlimited lessons. The maths problems are more visual (which makes them quite intuitive) and it has a nicer, more polished UI than Khan Academy. It's easier to stay in the mood for doing more lessons. The main downsides compared to Khan are that the explanations are quite minimal (short descriptions, no videos), and it doesn't reach as advanced a level as Khan. I'm looking at it as more a way to do a refresher on the maths I already learned at school rather than a serious learning tool. If it were $5 a month I'd probably consider subbing for a couple of months and trying to blitz through all the material before switching back to Khan to fill in the gaps.
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