Sure LLMs can churn out code, and they sort of work for developers who already understand code and design, but what happens when that junior dev with no hard experience builds their years of experience with LLMs?
Over time those who actually understand what the LLMs are doing and how to correct the output are replaced by developers who've never learned the hard lessons of writing code line by line. The ability to reason about code gets lost.
This points to the hard problem that the article highlights. The hard problem of software is actually knowing how to write it, which usually takes years, sometimes up to a decade of real experience.
Any idiot can churn out code that doesn't work. But working, effective software takes a lot of skill that LLMs will be stripping people of. Leaving a market there for people who have actually put the time in and understand software.
Modernity has caused us to lose touch with our roots. When kids were a necessity in the household or farm they would naturally learn the skills they needed to thrive as adults.
Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer.
Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia.
My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.
Modernity has also made life really fucking complicated. A 16 year old could walk to the factory, get some paper money and then do what they wanted with it.
Nowadays lets say your 16 year old wants a car and a job. To do that they need to schedule multiple tests with DMV, lessons with a driving instructor, update insurance documents and find the time to do hours of practice with you. At the end of that they need to navigate buying a used/new vehicle and setting up insurance. Then they need to navigate the world of job applications, and if they manage to get hired they will need to have their direct deposit bank account setup and have some kind of credit card payment system setup so they can use the money.
Seriously just typing this I get exhausted. It makes sense why parents are hovering over their kids because there are 10,000 things that need to get handled just to like be a "person". You can either watch your kid drown in a mire of bureaucracy or just let them focus on school and offload all of it from them.
That's true, but the parenting part isn't actually that complicated, particularly at a young age when you're laying the foundation. Basically just stay out of the way and let your kids do stuff. Don't do anything for them that they can do for themselves. That way they learn problem solving skills and gain the confidence to follow through on things, so when they're 16 they are capable of navigating buying a car and getting a job.
Somehow this isn't intuitive for parents, though. They feel like they need to show and do things for their kid, rather than letting them pick up the experience of doing themselves.
When I was growing up my parents were borderline neglectful in how they handled my brother and I, but in that neglect we were forced to deal with situations ourselves, gain experience, and discover who we were. Counterintuitively, that approach was actually more fruitful than being over-present.
If you want truly, truly heavy and thought-provoking you need to get away from brick-and-mortar bookstore, commercial, non-fiction, and get into work that's produced within and for academia.
For example, I've learned more from Anthony Giddens, Crawford Young, and Peter Berger in a handful of books than almost everything I've learned from pop books combined. The real stuff you want to read is in academia and fairly hidden from public view.
Not to argue, but your comment was also thought-provoking, thanks :) It seems like most works of academia are not provoking; rather, they are shaping. Many are written by specialists in the area who carefully choose what to state and suggest, and very often follow the structure of a big "thought" that is further explained and explored. Few pop books that might meet my criteria are basically digests, but fact-based ones. It's interesting that "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a middle ground in some sense. Daniel Kahneman is definitely from academia, and in my opinion, he wrote a digest of what he touched on during his career, which was also thought-provoking for me, but not on a big scale.
Can you name some works by the mentioned authors that might be called thought-provoking digests of some area of expertise?
Not really, that's kind of my point. A lot of pop non-fiction takes a few, minor commercial ideas that could be an essay and stretches them out into a book with a lot of fluff.
Academic books will literally change the way you view the world in fundamental ways, they go beyond the digests you mention.
I think they are bad decisions despite the economics of it, though. Maybe they're good for Zuck and execs in that they're squeezing every ounce of remaining life from the company before it dies. But they don't seem to have much of a coherent plan in making their products actually enjoyable for real people. It's always the path of least resistance, automated crap, or safe but dumb decisions.
Google and Amazon strike me as companies who build good products. Meta does not, despite it being the 'free' internet.
I would genuinely like to know why I'm wrong and these decisions aren't as bad as they seem.
> I would genuinely like to know why I'm wrong and these decisions aren't as bad as they seem.
Because it's not a $1.6 trillion dollar hobby or charity. They need to make money, full stop. This can't be emphasized enough.
As such, they view users more as a hybrid of volunteers and products. Then they monetize generally by selling the engaged users to advertisers. At this point I'm pretty sure they have financial models customized to individuals and they probably determined you're not worth providing service to unless you view more adverts... thus forcing you to engage more with the feed system.
They did what they had to do and you went ahead and accepted it; that's a good design. If you stop using them or switch to another service; then it would be a bad design.
What's the alternative? Put together some aesthetically beautiful design that lets users walk all over them while Meta foots the bill? That won't work because they'd go out of business. It's a matter of give and take.
Right, I think everyone gets that, but clearly treating the actual users of their applications as products isn't working and hasn't worked, as evidenced by most people abandoning those applications
But maybe it's too late in the game for them anyway. Even if they tried to build a more engaging product the trust the public has in them has vanished, and few tech savvy users would care.
The alternative I'm suggesting though would be a design that attracts people to and sustains the product. But they likely needed to do this fifteen years ago while also avoiding all of their scandals.
Every minor dehumanizing decision they make chips away at their credibility among all but the dumbest people. Those people may stay because Meta has their contact list, but after a while absolutely nobody is going to be loyal to them. Being human sometimes goes a long way.
Forget the speculation and aesthetic/subjective judgments for a moment. My point is they have to do something with users who free ride on their system. They decided to give them an ultimatum. And, this sounds like a reasonable design decision to me.
What else do you do with those users... let them free ride ad infinitum? Do you have a better solution? After all, you can only woo those users for so long before it's a sunken cost.
I don't see how, in the scenario I mentioned, that just allowing a user to click away from a modal is a problem, though. Are they not losing value from alienating users who they do stuff like this to? Are they really gaining any value by forcing them to follow accounts they don't want to follow?
It just sounds like they have no better ideas to me. Why not just make the feature human and build a little bit of customer loyalty? That's kind of my point. After a while people get so tired of this crap this might be why these users provide Meta no value.
And I guess, if they're already making ridiculous profits, why not just accept that some of your users are low value monetarily but do provide value by being on the network at all.
> some of your users are low value monetarily but do provide value by being on the network
That's not how advertising works. If you're not looking at the advertising, you don't provide any value, nothing. In that case you're now a losing proposition and they don't want those users because they're lowering margins and ROE. It's about good decisions that make money... goodwill only goes so far on the balance sheet.
Now, you got my full explanation. If you still don't understand why it's not as bad a design as you first thought... we'll just have to disagree ;-)
The world is going to be underwater in a couple decades and we're fighting the world's biggest companies from eviscerating children's public education. It's not looking good.
If there's any lesson to come from this (ha, learning) it's that we need to stop venerating successful business people. It turns out they're just people who like money and don't think about the consequences of their actions.
Sure LLMs can churn out code, and they sort of work for developers who already understand code and design, but what happens when that junior dev with no hard experience builds their years of experience with LLMs?
Over time those who actually understand what the LLMs are doing and how to correct the output are replaced by developers who've never learned the hard lessons of writing code line by line. The ability to reason about code gets lost.
This points to the hard problem that the article highlights. The hard problem of software is actually knowing how to write it, which usually takes years, sometimes up to a decade of real experience.
Any idiot can churn out code that doesn't work. But working, effective software takes a lot of skill that LLMs will be stripping people of. Leaving a market there for people who have actually put the time in and understand software.
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