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Comment by John23832 | Hacker News Reader

These GPT programs literally don't know what the code does (or the meaning of their output in general). They are Large Language Models. They just know (roughly) how to make responses in a particular language that make sense (english, C++, wingdings). They do not understand the "sense that is made" however.

This requires subject matter experts, like yourself, to use and implement.

These LLM are tools. They are not sentient.

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Whether the model "knows" something or not is irrelevant. It makes expert skills much less valuable. A big boon for individual productivity if you are not an expert in some field. What worries experts like the OP is their skills become much much less important. If you are an expert in some area and suddenly everyone else catches up almost, it will surely impact your wages.

The OP spoke about personal development, not wage and market value. I would advise everyone to "work to live" not "live to work".

> If you are an expert in some area and suddenly everyone else catches up almost, it will surely impact your wages.

Find something that compels you and don't be a wage slave. That used to be what programmers did.

Being entertained compels a lot of people. You can't make a living doing it. Programmers had the luxury to talk of passion projects because you could find something you liked and still made good money (Again talking of the average programmer, quoting one extreme side would be neither here nor there). People don't work in warehouses because if compels them.

If all the things that compel you don't make money, you should introspect instead of thinking about the glory days of what programmers did.

There is a large gulf between “LLM’s making my skills less valuable” (which I don’t even think is the case) and being jobless, not able to make a living.

The OP is not going to be jobless anytime soon if they have the skills that they say they do. Hell. Someone with less knowledge who just leans on a LLM isn’t as capable. HUMAN experience is valuable.

The OP may not become jobless, but would lose motivation to learn more (same as a recent post on HN about a designer demotivated due to their work now centred around midjourney).

As an analogy, people in robot (I use the term in a loose way for machines) assisted warehouse find the work far worse than one without robots, because the job becomes soulless and centred around the robots, making it much less fulfilling.

You've moved the goalpost multiple times. Are you concerned about the OP's ability to command top dollar for their current talents or that they have a job at all (you've expressed both), or the OP's feeling of fulfillment/motivation in what they do?

I go back to what I said before. If your fulfillment in life is centered around work, you need to re-evaluate. If the OP has no motivation to improve themselves for the sake of improving themselves, that's an OP problem that existed WAY before LLMs. Whether it's weightlifting, programing, or basketweaving, the OP needs to find some benchmarks for life that come from self motivation.

That being said, the OP will continue to be employed. Rather than miring in the existential crisis of "not being able to continue operating in the manner they do today", the OP needs to adapt and align their skills with this new tool. LLMs are tools.

People that post all this sky is falling nonsense about LLMs seem to be working in some alternate reality where all developers do is produce simple code in a vacuum without any external inputs, needing to maintain it, expand it, etc.

They don't have to be sentient. It doesn't need to be better at creating software than humans. It needs to be cheap and good enough. Most apps and websites are pretty similar, eg, blogs, storefronts. We have whitelabel apps and websites already, they're about to become a lot more customisable by a lot more people.

It's the same as IKEA, it's not as good quality as a handcrafted table from the 1800s. But it works well for most situations and most people.

The OP was describing their work on network code, not whitelabel websites. The work of making whitelabel websites was already hollowed out by firms in cheap markets (India, SE Asia).

A calculator didn't make mathematicians obsolete. It aided in the creation of more complex mathematicians.

Sure but it did make calculators and computers obsolete.

My mom was a computer in a bank. That was the name of her job.

Does your mom lament the fact that she is no longer a computer? Has she been jobless since?

Society evolves just at the available jobs do, due to technology.

you're right, those things aren't sentient. but, they sure aren't markov chains, either. dismissing them as bags of numbers without agency is extremely shortsighted.

Strawman. I didn't dismiss anything as a bag of numbers. I described the scope of understanding of these models and what it would still require for these outputs to be usable in the real world.

However, as far as agency, these language models have none.

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