6 ms·

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and ea

Thank ghod I'm retiring in six months. I'm very thankful I came of age during the golden age of personal computing. I was able to own my own computer(s) and earn a living writing software on them and for them. Fifty years was a good run, and I consider myself lucky to have participated in it. IMO we've gone full circle: dumb terminals chained to mainframes and the whimsey of someone else's rules, restrictions, and rent-seeking, to my own bought-and-paid-for computer sitting on my desk that did exactly what I told it to do using software that never changed unless I wanted it to change, and now we're back to dumb terminals (browsers) that talk to mainframes (the cloud) that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software and have gone back to renting me the software and pushing changes that I never asked for and never wanted in the first place. I will never use spicy autocomplete for anything, and I find it depressing that people are being forced to use it in order to keep their job. I see a very dark future for computing if real skills are all replaced with garbage being vomited out by rules engines that harvested their "guess the next word" results from today's internet.

dsiegel2275 5mo ago
Take me with you, please.
- raffael_de 5mo ago
  Where he goes, he has to go alone.
  - classified 5mo ago
    That sounds like it could be a quote from a book or a movie. Any hints?
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      The Road by Cormac McCarthy
    - raffael_de 5mo ago
      Basically a generic movie trope.
joe_mamba 5mo ago
[flagged]
- tristor 5mo ago
  That is not what the GP said at all. I am definitely not a Boomer, and I fully agree with them. They are lamenting the loss of control over your own general purpose computing system, and how our capitalistic society run by oligarchs is enforcing that through economic pressures. There is nothing in their comment that praises their hard work, intelligence, or claims younger people are incapable.
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    > our capitalistic society run by oligarchs is enforcing that through economic pressures. Which the people retiring soon, like the one I'm replying to, helped build with their labor, funded with their investments to get rich and enjoy their 401ks, leaving the current generations holding the bag. Nobody's innocent here. When Zuckerberg brought out his checkbook to poach engineers to build the Spybook 9000 social network, everyone flocked there without thinking, "hey, are we fucking up the future of the world?". When people here were flaunting Crypto as the second coming of Jesus, they weren't thinking "hey, are we maybe helping people get scammed?" Every past generation of workers has their own guilt in to how we got here to the present situation.
    - tristor 5mo ago
      Oh, I fully agree with you that the Boomers completely fucked the world to advantage themselves and then pulled the ladder up for their kids and grandkids. But I don't think it's fair or reasonable to reply to a single individual by trying to foist the responsibility of an entire generation onto their shoulders, especially when they were not expressing any of the words you that were trying to put into their mouth.
    - saltcured 5mo ago
      > Nobody's innocent here. I'm not as old as the GPP who is thankful to be retiring, but that's absurd. What would it take, in your mind, not to be complicit in this? Would we have to form militant groups who fire bomb datacenters and social media operators..? We didn't all work for Facebook, nor any FAANG, nor embrace or hype the crypto scams. Hell, I abstained from using Facebook due to my principles. I spent my career writing open source software, at academic salary levels. Though I'm not happy to end my career today, the AI agent stuff may well be the hill I retire on, if the mass delusion spirals hard enough and employers demand that I bend my principles.
hmokiguess 5mo ago
Going full circle is what we do, it's everywhere throughout human history. Actually, one could argue it's how life works. Nature has seasons to help life grow and be balanced. We're only starting to understand how this affects us in a larger scheme of things. Who knows, maybe we will wipe ourselves to dust and be discovered by the next iteration until we reach v1.0.0
bluegatty 5mo ago
It's a bit arrogant and borderline Luddite to suggest that 'your era was legitimate' and that somehow these new things which you don't understand are somehow 'lesser' or illegitimate. In the long arc of history, I'm doubtful we'll see 'the last 50 years' as 'the Golden Age' - that's just a personal, contemporary romanticization. More than likely, the advent of computers -> web -> AI etc. will be one block of the 'informational industrial revolution'. The people who made the ostensible 'Golden Era' were pioneers, just as those breaking new ground are pioneers today, it's honestly 'depressing' that people who consider themselves 'Engineers' wouldn't see that as clear as day, an be hopeful for the future on some level. AI is very real phenom, obviously vastly over-hyped in many ways, and it doesn't feel nice to have to get caught up in a tectonic shift against one's will, but it is bringing about legitimate progress in every sense that the Engineers and Creators before us did. In the exact same spirit as DaVinci or Babbage. If one wants to keep a horse in the stable, or a typewriter around for posterity or any other reason that's fine, but not under the notion that somehow they are better or more useful.
- happytoexplain 5mo ago
  The Luddites were rational. It's immature to use that word as an insult. Nothing the parent said was arrogant.
  - bluegatty 5mo ago
    That the Luddites were acting on principle doesn't mean wouldn't use the term. Also, if you want to 'go there' you could find a much better word than 'immature' to say what you're trying to say. The OPs posture is not tonally arrogant, but it's it's definitely intellectually arrogate. The OP claiming heritage of the 'Golden Era' which is a dramatic, egoic romanticization. To place one's 'own story at primacy' above all others, insinuating that 'his skills' are those which are 'true and relevant' and that those using new tools are 'lesser' or 'not substantial' , and also grossly myopic to the truly great Engineering that's going on ... is arrogant and insulting frankly. We can empathize with having to yield to a changing world, or being too out of scope to even fathom the 'new tech', but that's very different with saying that 'Frank Sinatra was the Only Great Singer, those that came after him had not talent'. If it were the case, then fine, but it's obviously not. AI is a legitimate advancement that narrow minded people are struggling to fathom, and it's coming out in some ugly ways. A true creator would probably take magnanimous position that after having made their contribution, they are sad to not be able to participate in what is maybe an even more substantial era of progress, and all of the wonders that will come of it. Good gripes - we're all about to have robots in our homes (!) probably within 5-15, we're witnesses Sci Fi unfold in front of us ...
buffalobuffalo 5mo ago
I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been. The fact of the matter is, a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person. It makes research faster. It makes experimentation faster. It makes output cleaner. And this is true across many disciplines, not just tech. Also, it is a skill. Yes, anyone can chat with an LLM. But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult. Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined. If i had to guess, I'd say we'll probably see major breakthroughs across multiple disciplines within the next decade, largely because researchers and engineers can cover much more ground individually now, freed from the slow moving coordination mechanisms that team dynamics require. Pretty good for "spicy autocomplete" as you put it.
- LaGrange 5mo ago
  > I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been. There are jobs outside of IT. They are harder, they have less benefits, they pay less. It's a whole project to switch your lifestyle so you can even afford them. I know nobody who regrets making the jump. I hope to make it within this year. I'll be poor, but at least I won't work in IT. > But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult. No it's not, you can learn it in less than a day. I've done it a few times while evaluating how much the agents have progressed (despite what people keep saying, not much). > Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined. Some of us learned technical writing to communicate with _humans_ before, and we're sitting here alternating crying and laughing as y'all scramble to figure it out just to put all that into a hallucination machine.
  - eleventen 5mo ago
    > I hope to make it within this year. What's your plan?
mondomondo 5mo ago
[dead]
raffael_de 5mo ago
[dead]
btschaegg 5mo ago
> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
- archagon 5mo ago
  Kinda funny that you're quoting a real author who would never in a million years have resorted to using slop generators. "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." -Hayao Miyazaki
  - raddan 5mo ago
    I’m not so sure. Douglas Adams was an avid technologist who worked on two interactive fiction games: the famously-cruel Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide and Starship Titanic. I don’t remember whether there was anything free-form about the dialogue in the HHGG game, but Starship Titanic had many bots you could talk to. It was immensely fun, and I suspect he would have loved the ability to spin out dialogue a little more naturally. On the other hand, the HHGG universe is just packed to the brim with deranged robots. Everybody loves Marvin, of course, but my favorites were the sycophantic ones like the elevators that sigh with pleasure upon delivering you to your destination. Adams always seemed to do perfectly anticipate the insanity of marketeers, and I expect that we’ll actually get some of this someday…
- happytoexplain 5mo ago
  True. Even Adams himself would have been sickened by GenAI.
  - RajT88 5mo ago
    Happy Service!
- 5mo ago
rurp 5mo ago
A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me. I would say empowering, if that weren't such a cheesy overused term. If you were any good at it, you could get a great job at an interesting company. Now like you said we're entering a world where anyone with a computer can pay a giant tech company thousands of dollars a year to spin up some agents for them. That's much less exciting to me, and I'm certain I would not enter the field if I were just starting out right now (assuming there even was a junior job available). We've seen how big tech monopolies treat domains they control like search and social media. They try to extract all of the value, leaving nothing for the individual or common good, and they're quite effective at it. I'm not looking forward to them gatekeeping the field of software development as a whole.
- znpy 5mo ago
  > A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me. but you can still do that, AI is not preventing you from doing any of that in any way.
  - benterix 5mo ago
    True, but this is like saying 10 years ago: you don't need to learn React, you can continue coding in Angular. People do want to learn and use new tech but instead what is promoted is an access to a proprietary and (increasingly more) expensive API.
    - raxxorraxor 5mo ago
      React is really a bad example because you really don't need it. I am no web dev, but I think React is an abomination. The reason I can confidently say it without knowing every detail there is to it is simply that there aren't impressive websites that show it. There should be some that by now. The number of reused components is probably quite analogous to reused classes in OO. It can make sense, but sometimes it also sometimes doesn't. Some suggested it could become web standard and I just hope it doesn't. React is beyond opinionated. It certainly has a raison d'être for some applications, but the problem is simply that it didn't put our less buggy or generally better sites.
sph 5mo ago
Good to see another Luddite (as they’d call us) on here! I am quitting tech in a month. I chose to go through 6 month of identity crisis, depression and reinventing my life after 20 years in software than having those bullshit generators imposed upon me to compete with those for whom thinking is démodé. Meanwhile the front page is people complaining that using a particular word causes their evil genie to go haywire. You guys still call this stuff engineering? Writing requirements in prose, because programming languages are too hard? Fuck that, I’m out.
znpy 5mo ago
> that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software yeah i'm gonna call BS on that. what you describe was happening well before modern-day AI (LLM, agentic stuff etc) became mainstream: think of google accounts binding your identity to your searches, gmail, google adsense, facebook, instagram and twitter (and others). And the products and services that do what you describe can do that just as well without ai. So yeah the problem is absolutely real but AI is not the culprit here.

dsiegel2275 5mo ago

Take me with you, please.

raffael_de 5mo ago
Where he goes, he has to go alone.
- classified 5mo ago
  That sounds like it could be a quote from a book or a movie. Any hints?
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  - raffael_de 5mo ago
    Basically a generic movie trope.

joe_mamba 5mo ago

[flagged]

tristor 5mo ago
That is not what the GP said at all. I am definitely not a Boomer, and I fully agree with them. They are lamenting the loss of control over your own general purpose computing system, and how our capitalistic society run by oligarchs is enforcing that through economic pressures. There is nothing in their comment that praises their hard work, intelligence, or claims younger people are incapable.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago
  > our capitalistic society run by oligarchs is enforcing that through economic pressures. Which the people retiring soon, like the one I'm replying to, helped build with their labor, funded with their investments to get rich and enjoy their 401ks, leaving the current generations holding the bag. Nobody's innocent here. When Zuckerberg brought out his checkbook to poach engineers to build the Spybook 9000 social network, everyone flocked there without thinking, "hey, are we fucking up the future of the world?". When people here were flaunting Crypto as the second coming of Jesus, they weren't thinking "hey, are we maybe helping people get scammed?" Every past generation of workers has their own guilt in to how we got here to the present situation.
  - tristor 5mo ago
    Oh, I fully agree with you that the Boomers completely fucked the world to advantage themselves and then pulled the ladder up for their kids and grandkids. But I don't think it's fair or reasonable to reply to a single individual by trying to foist the responsibility of an entire generation onto their shoulders, especially when they were not expressing any of the words you that were trying to put into their mouth.
  - saltcured 5mo ago
    > Nobody's innocent here. I'm not as old as the GPP who is thankful to be retiring, but that's absurd. What would it take, in your mind, not to be complicit in this? Would we have to form militant groups who fire bomb datacenters and social media operators..? We didn't all work for Facebook, nor any FAANG, nor embrace or hype the crypto scams. Hell, I abstained from using Facebook due to my principles. I spent my career writing open source software, at academic salary levels. Though I'm not happy to end my career today, the AI agent stuff may well be the hill I retire on, if the mass delusion spirals hard enough and employers demand that I bend my principles.

hmokiguess 5mo ago

Going full circle is what we do, it's everywhere throughout human history. Actually, one could argue it's how life works. Nature has seasons to help life grow and be balanced. We're only starting to understand how this affects us in a larger scheme of things. Who knows, maybe we will wipe ourselves to dust and be discovered by the next iteration until we reach v1.0.0

bluegatty 5mo ago

It's a bit arrogant and borderline Luddite to suggest that 'your era was legitimate' and that somehow these new things which you don't understand are somehow 'lesser' or illegitimate. In the long arc of history, I'm doubtful we'll see 'the last 50 years' as 'the Golden Age' - that's just a personal, contemporary romanticization. More than likely, the advent of computers -> web -> AI etc. will be one block of the 'informational industrial revolution'. The people who made the ostensible 'Golden Era' were pioneers, just as those breaking new ground are pioneers today, it's honestly 'depressing' that people who consider themselves 'Engineers' wouldn't see that as clear as day, an be hopeful for the future on some level. AI is very real phenom, obviously vastly over-hyped in many ways, and it doesn't feel nice to have to get caught up in a tectonic shift against one's will, but it is bringing about legitimate progress in every sense that the Engineers and Creators before us did. In the exact same spirit as DaVinci or Babbage. If one wants to keep a horse in the stable, or a typewriter around for posterity or any other reason that's fine, but not under the notion that somehow they are better or more useful.

happytoexplain 5mo ago
The Luddites were rational. It's immature to use that word as an insult. Nothing the parent said was arrogant.
- bluegatty 5mo ago
  That the Luddites were acting on principle doesn't mean wouldn't use the term. Also, if you want to 'go there' you could find a much better word than 'immature' to say what you're trying to say. The OPs posture is not tonally arrogant, but it's it's definitely intellectually arrogate. The OP claiming heritage of the 'Golden Era' which is a dramatic, egoic romanticization. To place one's 'own story at primacy' above all others, insinuating that 'his skills' are those which are 'true and relevant' and that those using new tools are 'lesser' or 'not substantial' , and also grossly myopic to the truly great Engineering that's going on ... is arrogant and insulting frankly. We can empathize with having to yield to a changing world, or being too out of scope to even fathom the 'new tech', but that's very different with saying that 'Frank Sinatra was the Only Great Singer, those that came after him had not talent'. If it were the case, then fine, but it's obviously not. AI is a legitimate advancement that narrow minded people are struggling to fathom, and it's coming out in some ugly ways. A true creator would probably take magnanimous position that after having made their contribution, they are sad to not be able to participate in what is maybe an even more substantial era of progress, and all of the wonders that will come of it. Good gripes - we're all about to have robots in our homes (!) probably within 5-15, we're witnesses Sci Fi unfold in front of us ...

buffalobuffalo 5mo ago

I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been. The fact of the matter is, a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person. It makes research faster. It makes experimentation faster. It makes output cleaner. And this is true across many disciplines, not just tech. Also, it is a skill. Yes, anyone can chat with an LLM. But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult. Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined. If i had to guess, I'd say we'll probably see major breakthroughs across multiple disciplines within the next decade, largely because researchers and engineers can cover much more ground individually now, freed from the slow moving coordination mechanisms that team dynamics require. Pretty good for "spicy autocomplete" as you put it.

LaGrange 5mo ago
> I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been. There are jobs outside of IT. They are harder, they have less benefits, they pay less. It's a whole project to switch your lifestyle so you can even afford them. I know nobody who regrets making the jump. I hope to make it within this year. I'll be poor, but at least I won't work in IT. > But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult. No it's not, you can learn it in less than a day. I've done it a few times while evaluating how much the agents have progressed (despite what people keep saying, not much). > Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined. Some of us learned technical writing to communicate with _humans_ before, and we're sitting here alternating crying and laughing as y'all scramble to figure it out just to put all that into a hallucination machine.
- eleventen 5mo ago
  > I hope to make it within this year. What's your plan?

mondomondo 5mo ago

[dead]

raffael_de 5mo ago

[dead]

btschaegg 5mo ago

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

archagon 5mo ago
Kinda funny that you're quoting a real author who would never in a million years have resorted to using slop generators. "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." -Hayao Miyazaki
- raddan 5mo ago
  I’m not so sure. Douglas Adams was an avid technologist who worked on two interactive fiction games: the famously-cruel Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide and Starship Titanic. I don’t remember whether there was anything free-form about the dialogue in the HHGG game, but Starship Titanic had many bots you could talk to. It was immensely fun, and I suspect he would have loved the ability to spin out dialogue a little more naturally. On the other hand, the HHGG universe is just packed to the brim with deranged robots. Everybody loves Marvin, of course, but my favorites were the sycophantic ones like the elevators that sigh with pleasure upon delivering you to your destination. Adams always seemed to do perfectly anticipate the insanity of marketeers, and I expect that we’ll actually get some of this someday…
happytoexplain 5mo ago
True. Even Adams himself would have been sickened by GenAI.
- RajT88 5mo ago
  Happy Service!
5mo ago

rurp 5mo ago

A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me. I would say empowering, if that weren't such a cheesy overused term. If you were any good at it, you could get a great job at an interesting company. Now like you said we're entering a world where anyone with a computer can pay a giant tech company thousands of dollars a year to spin up some agents for them. That's much less exciting to me, and I'm certain I would not enter the field if I were just starting out right now (assuming there even was a junior job available). We've seen how big tech monopolies treat domains they control like search and social media. They try to extract all of the value, leaving nothing for the individual or common good, and they're quite effective at it. I'm not looking forward to them gatekeeping the field of software development as a whole.

znpy 5mo ago
> A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me. but you can still do that, AI is not preventing you from doing any of that in any way.
- benterix 5mo ago
  True, but this is like saying 10 years ago: you don't need to learn React, you can continue coding in Angular. People do want to learn and use new tech but instead what is promoted is an access to a proprietary and (increasingly more) expensive API.
  - raxxorraxor 5mo ago
    React is really a bad example because you really don't need it. I am no web dev, but I think React is an abomination. The reason I can confidently say it without knowing every detail there is to it is simply that there aren't impressive websites that show it. There should be some that by now. The number of reused components is probably quite analogous to reused classes in OO. It can make sense, but sometimes it also sometimes doesn't. Some suggested it could become web standard and I just hope it doesn't. React is beyond opinionated. It certainly has a raison d'être for some applications, but the problem is simply that it didn't put our less buggy or generally better sites.

sph 5mo ago

Good to see another Luddite (as they’d call us) on here! I am quitting tech in a month. I chose to go through 6 month of identity crisis, depression and reinventing my life after 20 years in software than having those bullshit generators imposed upon me to compete with those for whom thinking is démodé. Meanwhile the front page is people complaining that using a particular word causes their evil genie to go haywire. You guys still call this stuff engineering? Writing requirements in prose, because programming languages are too hard? Fuck that, I’m out.

znpy 5mo ago

> that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software yeah i'm gonna call BS on that. what you describe was happening well before modern-day AI (LLM, agentic stuff etc) became mainstream: think of google accounts binding your identity to your searches, gmail, google adsense, facebook, instagram and twitter (and others). And the products and services that do what you describe can do that just as well without ai. So yeah the problem is absolutely real but AI is not the culprit here.