I agree that humans should continue to value various forms of literacy even in the face of AIs that can do everything better than us. I too will continue to dig deeper into tech literacy. There was a Terence Tao paper recently that mentioned we are in a shift similar to the end of heliocentrism. It made clear that Earth is not the center of the universe, but Earth is still deeply valuable and important for humans. Much the same way that AI may supersede our understanding and intellect and make the are limitations more apparent, but our human intellect is still important to humans. Plus, what are you going to do when the price of LLM tokens are through the roof or you get messages like "burn an extra 1,000,000 tokens for a better implementation!".
I have some amount of hope that local open models with sufficient quantization are the future as hardware becomes more powerful and models become more optimized. I don’t think we will be living in thin client land forever. Human expertise and intelligence will continue to be important and anyone who says otherwise is being disingenuous.
> people who choose to be child free are not complete human beings
Hmm, this seems pretty condescending, but hopefully it is just in jest.
With four kids I understand there is a unique set of skills and emotions that come along with it and I am personally grateful for, but there are also a lot skills and emotions you won't have and experience if you never go to war, never become a leader, never experience losing a parent when you are young, never win a gold medal in a team sport, never live in a different culture, never volunteer, etc. It seems short sighted to claim someone is an incomplete person if they can't experience one of those things, because likely no single person can.
There is a great tapestry of human experience and we can only experience most of it second or third hand (and probably not even that in most cases).
I think having kids connects you to humanity in a deeply personal way and connection to humanity is at the higher level than anecdotal example of various human experiences we’ll never experience first hand.
I think there are many ways to connect deeply to humanity and you are being dismissive of those other experiences. Yours is just another anecdote amongst the ones I presented. Would you dismiss your kids experiences if they decide not to have kids? I would not.
> And there is the problem. Then you start arguing about brace positions and function names and whether simple data classes should have docstrings on properties or not.
In my 15 years of experience I have not worked at a place like this. Those are distractions. Anytime something about style has been brought up, the solution was to just enforce a linter/pre-commit process/blacklist for certain functions, etc. It can easily be automated. When those tools don't exist for particular ecosystems we made our own.
I find languages like Haskell, ReScript/OCaml to work really well for CRUD applications because they push you to think about your data and types first. Then you think about the transformations you want to make on the data via functions. When looking at new code I usually look for the types first, specifically what is getting stored and read.
Similarly, that approach works really well in Clojure too, albeit with a lot less concern for types, but the "data and data structures first" principle is widespread in the ecosystem.
I've heard good things about Clojure, and it'ss different from what I am used to (bonus points because I like an intellectual challenge), so trying it out is definitely on my todo list.
Really the issue is about cultivating a culture of caring and willingness to learn. That generally threatens the powerful so it is always an uphill battle to protect said values.
Unfortunately the source doesn't matter when there so much. It is really hard to differentiate things when you are inundated. Did you try a Show HN here? It requires more luck than ever because of the same problem, but worth a try. I'll take an honest look if you do it (though hard to say if I am the target market).
I wonder how much cost savings there are in the long term when token prices go up, the average developer's ability to code has atrophied, and the company code bases have turned into illegible slop. I will continue to use LLMs cautiously while working hard to maintain my ability to code in my off time.
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