jmj

@archivescribe@mastodon.social @Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt this never works. Just like any of the successful renewal project, it’s a piecemeal, part by part replacement process. You don’t fix a city by building a magic new place and have everyone move to it. Amsterdam used to be a car saturated hellscape, now it’s a bike/tram paradise. In no way did they tear it all down and replace it. The only way forward is day by day improving something large or small.

@jan_leila@mspsocial.net @TindrasGrove@infosec.exchange @mhoye@cosocial.ca @grimalkina@mastodon.social I heard this anecdotally as the orders always should have the ultimate objective. It’s not “take that hill” it’s “take that hill to deny the enemy movement along that road” so that the folks in the field can make the right tactical decisions as the situation evolves.

@riffraff @aredridel Yes, Bob and Alice are different, they developed different sets of skills to produce science. However, I’m not sure there is an important distinction to be made between them, the results matter not necessarily the method. The text says Alice developed a skill to close read a paper. I’d argue Bob would only be successful if they correctly used Claude’s summaries to come to the same understanding of the paper. So Bob has the same “skill”, they just use different techniques. A generation or two ago you could have made the exact same argument if Alice used a calculator and Bob used computer code. It’s really had to tell which skills are fundamental and which are a transient artifacts of the tooling and techniques currently in vogue.

@art_histories@mastodon.social @warandpeas@mastodon.social 100% we had a lab that would take their leash away from a child or other incompetent human, and carry the end of it to a human it judged competent to lead it.

@Sonic2k@oldbytes.space @laund@wetdry.world @lina@vt.social They 100% did... Calculators replaced armies of bookkeepers. Desktop computers replaced huge typing pools. I never said the transition wouldn't be very painful to real people. History is full of people completely screwed over by change. But the change is not going away. On a personal note, don't quit. Make them fire you. Why would you give up a paycheck unless you don't need it. And are you really sure you cannot work with LLMs? Competent people are always valuable.

@titusDeGroan@hachyderm.io @laund@wetdry.world @Sonic2k@oldbytes.space @lina@vt.social totally agree on that score. There are many concerns around the implementation. Rent seeking, power costs, IP theft etc. These are all bad(tm), however the capabilities of these new tools are real, pretending they don’t work isn’t going to fix anything. We are going to have to figure out how the world works with them in the mix.

@laund@wetdry.world @Sonic2k@oldbytes.space @lina@vt.social I don’t like absolutes. It’s no more or less than how you should feel about dictionaries, spell checkers, calculators, or Mathematica in relation to spelling bees and math olympiads. In some cases we don’t use or allow the aids and in other cases they are. And those competitions have similar relationships to the real world as CTF competitions do to security work.

@laund@wetdry.world @Sonic2k@oldbytes.space @lina@vt.social I honestly don't care about them. It doesn't matter in exactly same sense that all those folks building terrible GeoCities websites don't matter. What matters is those folks that learned HTML and design sense on GeoCities. They became experts. They went on to build what we call the internet now. Fantastic websites that we ALL use. They developed the design guidelines and aesthetics that we now love. Anyone can use any tool to make crap. What matters is what experts can make that wasn't possible (or too expensive) before. And I am strongly against gatekeeping on how someone learns to become an expert.

@laund@wetdry.world @Sonic2k@oldbytes.space @lina@vt.social I never said "expertise is unnecessary". Expertise is always necessary. All that changes is what types of expertise. I was an expert 6502/Z80 assembly language programmer. Now that expertise is mostly useless. And actually, harmful for writing Rust code. The mental models I developed for CPU behavior is completely wrong for understanding Rust code on ARM/x86 multi-core processors. Because I learn assembly language level stuff, it does not make me a better or worse programmer compared to someone that only learned high level languages. Yes, we will perform differently in narrow cases (say compiler bugs, vs multi-core perf optimization) by for most code in most projects our expertise will be indistinguishable. I know when AI coding I spend more time reading code, analyzing test cases and spec writing. And a lot less time banging out lines of code and reading library/tool docs to yak shave them into working. I need to know different things, not better things or worse things, just different. Personally, I'm most interested in what the 12-year-olds are learning to do with these AI tools. In exactly the same way I learned what computers can do, with my BBC micro in the 80s The job is EXACTLY the same, press buttons until the pixels blink the way you want them.

@Sonic2k@oldbytes.space @lina@vt.social your looking at it the wrong way. Yes it’s killing one type of learning. But it’s teaching you how to CTF using AI, what are it strengths and weaknesses, what prompts are effective? What sub problems should the AI tackle, what should the human focus on. It’s no different than a carpenter switching from a hand plane to a powered belt sander. The skill set changes, the results are more or less the same. Someone that only learns to belt sand isn’t less of a carpenter. It gatekeeping to think otherwise. Yes the “elitist artists” will argue otherwise, but the difference is moot for the vast bulk of us working stiffs.

@perigrin @cstross but I think in the code case the subtle semantics of the words and combinations are less likely to be the important or desirable aspects, whereas in poetry it’s likely that those aspects are precisely the desired meaning.

@cstross hmmm, that might also explain why AI seems more effective for code. For the most part you want a reversion to the mean in code. Novel solutions are only needed at the cutting edge where you trying to make the computer do something that’s not been done before.