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taanegl ,

lisa_su-3

"I'm coming fo dat ass, Jensen"

Lisa Su, probably.

Cosmicomical , (edited )

Just because you're the CEO of a big company, it doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. In this case it's clear he doesn't. You may say "but the company makes a lot of money" and that's not a point in his favor either, as this is a clear example of survivor bias. Coding is going nowhere and the companies laying off people are just a proof CEOs don't know what they are doing.

For years there have been open source solutions ready for basically any purpose, and if that has not made coders useless, nothing will. Maybe they will change designation, but people that understand what's going on at a technical level will always be necessary.

There have been some situations in the past few years that made the situation less clear-cut, but that doesn't make coders optional.

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

"Time to pull the ladder up!"

curiousaur ,

That's how this statement and the state of the industry feels. The ai tools are empowering senior engineers to be as productive as a small team, so even my company laid off all the junior engineers.

So who's coming up behind the senior engineers? Is the ai they use going to take the reigns when they retire? Nope, the companies will be fucked.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Nope, the companies will be fucked.

"That's a future CEO's problem, not mine!" - Current CEO

zoltraak ,

After using co pilot and other AI code tools it's obvious to see the limitations of it, programming is a lot more than just writing "ok" code

SuperSpruce , (edited )

Good thing I'm majoring in computer engineering instead of computer science. I have a backdoor through electrical engineering.

AnxiousOtter ,

Good luck getting a job as an EE in north America without a masters degree.

Source: Also a CE, have looked at the EE job market. Bachelor's won't cut it.

SuperSpruce ,

Seems like there's a program at my university to get a master's degree a year after my Bachelor's. Sounds like I should go for it.

AnxiousOtter ,

If you want to work as an EE, ya probably.

Blackmist ,

I don't think he's seen the absolute fucking drivel that most developers have been given as software specs before now.

Most people don't even know what they want, let alone be able to describe it. I've often been given a mountain of stuff, only to go back and forth with the customer to figure out what problem they're actually trying to solve, and then do it in like 3 lines of code in a way that doesn't break everything else, or tie a maintenance albatross around my neck for the next ten years.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Yesterday, I had to deal with a client that literally contradicted himself 3 times in 20 minutes, about whether a specific Date field should be obligatory or not. My boss and a colleague who were nearby started laughing once the client went away, partly because I was visibly annoyed at the indecision.

rottingleaf ,

I think this is bullshit regarding LLMs, but making and using generative tools more and more high-level and understandable for users is a good thing.

Like various visual programming means, where you sketch something working via connected blocks (like PureData for sounds), or in Matlab I think one can use such constructors to generate code for specific controllers involved in the scheme, or like LabView.

Or like HyperCard.

Not that anybody should stop learning anything. There's a niche for every way to do things.

I just like that class of programs.

gazter ,

As someone who's had a bit of exposure to PLCs and ladder logic, and dabbled in some more 'programming' type languages, I would love to find some sort of 'language' that fits together like ladder logic, but for more computery type applications.

I like systems, not programs. Most of my software design is done by building a flowchart, then stumbling around trying to figure out how to write that into code. I feel it would be so much easier if I could just make the flowchart be the code.

I want a grown up Scratch.

rottingleaf ,

In some sense this is regressive, but I agree that ladder logic is more intuitive.

I hated drawing flowcharts in university, but at this point have learned that if you understand what you're doing, you can draw a flowchart. If you don't, you shouldn't have written that program.

So yeah.

I think the environment to program "Buran" used such a language (that is, they'd draw flowcharts instead of code).

OleoSaccharum ,

Nvidia is such a stupid fucking company. It's just slapping different designs onto TSMC chips. All our "chip companies" are like this. In the long run they are all going to get smoked. I won't tell you by whom. You shouldn't need a reminder.

ammonium ,

Designing a chip is something completely different from manufacturing them. Your statement is as true as saying TSMC is such a stupid company, all they are doing is using ASML machines.

And please tell me, I have no clue at all who you're talking about.

barsoap ,

The Chinese? I think their claim to fame is making processes stolen from TSMC work using pre-EUV lithography. Expensive AF because slow but they're making some incredibly small structures considering the tech they have available. Russians are definitely out of the picture they're in the like 90s when it comes to semiconductors and can't even do that at scale.

And honestly I have no idea where OP is even from, "All our chip companies". Certainly not the US not at all all US chip companies are fabless: IBM, Ti and Intel are IDMs. In Germany IDMs predominate, Bosch and Infineon though there's of course also some GlobalFoundries here, that's pure play, so will be the TSMC-Bosch-NXP-Infineon joint venture ESMC. Korea and Japan are also full of IDMs.

Maybe Britain? ARM is fabless, OTOH ARM is hardly British any more.

OleoSaccharum ,

Amazon is fabless for their chip design unit, there all little mini design units for shit like datacenters.

It's hilarious you're saying that because Intel labelled itself an investor in USA foundry projects you think they are exempt from this. Okay man, go work at the plants in Ohio and Arizona. Oh wait, they don't fucking exist bruh

barsoap ,

Intel, Ti and IBM all made chips before pure-play and fabless were even a thing, and are still doing so. Intel has 16 fabs in the US, Ti 8, IBM... oh, they sold their shit, I thought they still had some specialised stuff for their mainframes. Well, whatever.

Of all companies, the likes of Amazon and Google not fabbing their own chips should hardly be surprising. They're data centre operators, they don't even sell chips, if they set up fabs they'd have to start doing that, or compete with TSMC to not have idle capacity standing around costing tons of money. A fab is not like a canteen which you can expect to actually be in use all the time so there's going to be no need to compete in the restaurant business to make it work.

And that's only really looking at logic chips, e.g. Micron also has fabs at home in the US.

OleoSaccharum ,

None of those companies even make a blip on global chip production though. Are they for research or something? Why should I give a shit about a tiny technically existing fraction of production that will never expand?

Go look at where there has been actual foundry production for decades. None of the companies you mentioned even exist in foundry. Who cares if they have A facility or two? That's just part of figuring out what they're going to order from TSMC.

barsoap ,

Your goalposts, they are moving.

The US has the know-how to produce modern chips at scale, or at least not too far behind in strategic terms. You could bring all production home if that's what you wanted, it'd cost a lot of money but it's simply a policy issue. And Amazon wouldn't suddenly start to run fabs they'd hire capacity from Intel or whomever.

...you'd still be reliant on European EUV machines, though. Everyone is, if you intend to produce very modern chips at scale. But if your strategic interest is making sure that the DMV has workstations and the military guidance computers that's not necessary, pre-EUV processes are perfectly adequate.

OleoSaccharum ,

You are the one moving the goalposts with your boasts about how these companies make up LITERALLY an INFINITESIMAL portion of global chip production. Even if you cut out Samsung and TSMC they wouldn't be global players.

No, we can't just bring all production home lol. We've been saying we will for years. Where is the foundry in Ohio dude? Where is the Arizona foundry that's supposed to bolster TSMC production?

Lol yeah sure go ask ASML how their business is doing rn in light of the US chip war sanctions. European manufacturing is in as dire a state as the US now due to financialization and now the skyrocketing energy costs.

People said this about our military production too. "Oh, Russia messed up now, we're going to get serious and amp up our military production." 🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🗓️🗓️🗓️🗓️ (time loudly passing and nothing happening)

How many times is it going to take for people to learn it gets transmuted directly into stock buybacks lmao? We don't have the electrical grid to build up our manufacturing base in the modern world yet. The US is a giant casino for the elite of our empire full of slums.

barsoap ,

We don’t have the electrical grid to build up our manufacturing base in the modern world yet. The US is a giant casino for the elite of our empire full of slums.

You won't hear me disagree with that. But to say, and I quote you directly:

It’s just slapping different designs onto TSMC chips. All our “chip companies” are like this.

While Intel might very well take the tech crown (gate all around with backside power) from TSMC this year is wildly incorrect.

European manufacturing is in as dire a state as the US now due to financialization and now the skyrocketing energy costs.

"Skyrocketing", yeah. Gas looks similar.

And no European manufacturing is not in nearly as dire a state as in the US. For that to be the case we'd have to have as shoddy infrastructure and decades-long underinvestment and offshoring as the US has. The US has in fact a more advanced chip industry than the Europe: We're good at the basic science, we're good at bulk production of specialised stuff, one thing that we're not great at is top-tier CPUs and GPUs, chips that are their own products, what we produce is the usual "the thing that goes into a thing that goes into a thing you buy". Like, random example, pretty much every smartphone in the world uses a Bosch gyroscope and they produce those things in-house.

But that doesn't mean that the US is fucked, in the least: If need be it would be able to spring back to life quite quickly, Thing is, needs do not be, so if your worry is elite casinos maybe don't focus so much on chips and incorrect statements about US capacity there but said elite casino directly.

OleoSaccharum ,

Yeah the casino bit is the most important part for sure. In light of how financialized everything is, huge costs, massively inflated financial asset & real estate prices etc, labor costs, it's more likely for Detroit to spring back into being an industrial hub.

We focus all of our political energy on monopolizing the top of the value chain TSMC is a part of and we can't replace it with our own production bc it's so crucial for cutting costs down. They can't even expand the production for lower end chips (ROI isn't there) now so Russia and China are gonna scoop up orders from expansion in the many industries that use them (low end chips were like 20% of TSMC's revenue recently, iirc). Which will help them develop their higher end foundries which they definitely can make I mean Rosatom produces super high quality Xray mirrors and the Chinese govt won't balk at industrial investment or high tech training programs.

ASML's whole position in this convoluted supply chain means they only make those shipping container sized thingies with the rube goldberg machine of mirrors hooked up to a gallium plasma light thingy, and that ultimately limits the minimum nanometer size of the circuits made in the fabrication units they ship out. If I'm getting that right 🤪. This is really futuristic stuff I'm talking about now but the next-next gen fabrication units beyond Russia and China catching up could even be hooked up to a particle accelerator. That's pretty hard to export in the same way.

I just don't see how we can politically or financially solve these problems in the US or EU lol. We're kind of caught by the balls as workers no?

barsoap ,

We’re kind of caught by the balls as workers no?

You don't need to fab chips to have a job. Let the Taiwanese have their speciality you have yours what's wrong with that.

Also TSMC's company culture is excessively Confucian you probably wouldn't want to work there anyway. It's not just the company and culture that makes the company but also things like Taiwanese universities churning out masses of highly-skilled electrical engineers, basically the only reason TSMC even agreed to that European joint-venture is because Dresden's universities have been focussed on that exact field for decades, even before reunification. For a similar reason you couldn't just take Zeiss and move it out of Jena: They need the local university to funnel students into their workforce. There's no better place to study optics in the world than Jena.

Which actually brings me to another point: All these are labour aristocracy jobs, not just trained but highly educated, comparable to a doctor at a hospital. They have a lobby, they have a good bargaining position. Worrying about them won't do anything for the burger flipper at your local fast-food joint who tends to have neither. It also won't really do much for the injection moulding machine operator producing tea sieves (sorry I was just admiring one it has stainless steel mesh embedded in it, not easy to produce, made in Germany, not cheap but oh gods is that thing worth the extra three bucks (it was five)).

OleoSaccharum ,

sure, they're labor aristocracy jobs bc they're at the tip top of the global supply chain, but most people do not partake in that at all, or management etc, or legal/medical/whatever other high end shit, and 50% of the US is in crappy service work like mcdonalds literally.

no matter what industry you work in you can only be pessimistic here lmao unless you're like in finance or useless c suite shit

i'm not crying for the TSMC foundry or trying to work there. i hope the NATO+ intelligence services edge from high end chip production being under our control is unseated, it would be good for all of us

what's going on with TSMC is indicative of wider issues with all kinds of US industries I'm in solar and frankly I plan to gtfo in the long term to a more interesting area of development. I don't expect it to make my life easier per se but there are a lot of reasons.

barsoap ,

solar

Aaaaaa once upon a time Germany was world leader in solar. Then a conservative government came along and slashed subsidies in ways that noone could adopt to (mostly because suddenly, against everyone's expectations, and without tapering) and now the US of all places has more of a market share, though the bulk of course is Chinese -- who bought German tech for cheap at bankruptcy auctions.

All that is certainly annoying, OTOH you gotta admit that keeping walking after shotgunning your own feet several times in a row does mean that you have some rather solid feet.

OleoSaccharum ,

Solar here makes me so pissed since you know Texas could be a magnificent location but instead it's such a libertarian shithole
lmao

OleoSaccharum , (edited )

Oh also insurance prices and shit like that here are a nightmare. Legal is too obviously. That's why Nike could never just move all their production here even thought it would be trivial to teach people to make shoes. The convoluted global supply chain is the whole point

ammonium ,

None of those companies even make a blip on global chip production though

Neither does TSMC, high end chips is just a tiny part of the number of chips (albeit an important and lucrative part of the market).

TSMC is alone at the top is because it's so damn expensive and the market is not that big, there's basically no place for a competitor. Anyone trying to dethrone them has to have very deep pockets and a good reason not to simply buy from TSMC. The Chinese might be able to pull it off, they have the money and a good reason.

OleoSaccharum ,

Except what NVIDIA is doing can be done by numerous other chip design firms, TSMC cannot be replaced.

3volver ,

Don't tell me what to do. Going to spend more time learning to code from now on, thanks.

Luisp ,

Lmao do the opposite of whatever this guy says, he only wants his 2 trillion dollar stockmarket bubble not to burst

fidodo ,

As a developer building on top of LLMs, my advice is to learn programming architecture. There's a shit ton of work that needs to be done to get this unpredictable non deterministic tech to work safely and accurately. This is like saying get out of tech right before the Internet boom. The hardest part of programming isn't writing low level functions, it's architecting complex systems while keeping them robust, maintainable, and expandable. By the time an AI can do that, all office jobs are obsolete. AIs will be able to replace CEOs before they can replace system architects. Programmers won't go away, they'll just have less busywork to do and instead need to work at a higher level, but the complexity of those higher level requirements are about to explode and we will need LLMs to do the simpler tasks with our oversight to make sure it gets integrated correctly.

I also recommend still learning the fundamentals, just maybe not as deeply as you needed to. Knowing how things work under the hood still helps immensely with debugging and creating better more efficient architectures even at a high level.

I will say, I do know developers that specialized in algorithms who are feeling pretty lost right now, but they're perfectly capable of adapting their skills to the new paradigm, their issue is more of a personal issue of deciding what they want to do since they were passionate about algorithms.

gazter ,

In my comment elsewhere in the thread I talk about how, as a complete software noob, I like to design programs by making a flowchart first, and how I wish the flowchart itself was the code.

It sounds like what I'm doing might be (super basic) programming architecture? Where can I go to learn more about this?

fidodo ,

Look up visual programming languages. When you apply a visual metaphor to programming it really is basically just really detailed and complex flow charts.

gornius ,

It's just as crazy as saying "We don't need math, because every problem can be described using human language".

In other words, that might be true as long as your problem is not complex enough to be able to be understood using human language.

You want to solve a real problem? It's way more complex with so many moving parts you can't just take LLM to solve it, because that takes an actual understanding of a problem.

trolololol ,

Ha

If you ever write code for a living first thing you notice is that people can't explain what they need by using natural language ( which is what English, Mandarin etc is), even if they don't need to get into details.

baldingpudenda ,

Also, natural language can be vague and confusing. Look at legalese and law statutes.
"When it comes to the law, NOTHING is understood!" ‐- Dragline

Fandangalo ,

Maybe more apt for me would be, “We don’t need to teach math, because we have calculators.” Like…yeah, maybe a lot of people won’t need the vast amount of domain knowledge that exists in programming, but all this stuff originates from human knowledge. If it breaks, what do you do then?

I think someone else in the thread said good programming is about the architecture (maintainable, scalable, robust, secure). Many LLMs are legit black boxes, and it takes humans to understand what’s coming out, why, is it valid.

Even if we have a fancy calculator doing things, there still needs to be people who do math and can check. I’ve worked more with analytics than LLMs, and more times than I can count, the data was bad. You have to validate before everything else, otherwise garbage in, garbage out.

It’s sounds like a poignant quote, but it also feels superficial. Like, something a smart person would say to a crowd to make them say, “Ahh!” but also doesn’t hold water long.

Spiritreader ,

And because they are such black boxes, there's the sector of Explainable AI which attempts to provide transparency.

However, in order to understand data from explainable AI, you still need domain experts that have experience in interpreting what that data means and how to make changes.

It's almost as if any reasonably complex string of operations requires study. And that's what tech marketing forgets. As you said, it all has to come from somewhere.

csm10495 ,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

Funny enough we now have prompt engineering which is specifically for talking to ai.

howrar ,

I don't see how it would be possible to completely replace programmers. The reason we have programming languages instead of using natural language is that the latter has ambiguities. If you start having to describe your software's behaviour in natural language, then one of three things can happen:

  1. either this new natural programming language has to make assumptions about what you intend, and thus will only be capable of outputting a certain class of software (i.e. you can't actually create anything new),
  2. or you need to learn a new way of describing things unambiguously, and now you're back to programming but with a new language,
  3. or you spend forever going back and forth with the generator until it gives you the output you want, and this would take a lot longer to do than just having an experienced programmer write it.
model_tar_gz ,

But that’s not what the article is getting at.

Here’s an honest take. Let me preface this with some credential: I’m an AI Engineer with many years in field. I’m directly working on right now multiple projects that augment and automate code generation, documentation, completion and even system design/understanding. We’re not there yet. But the pace of progress in how fast we are improving our code-AI is astounding. Exponential growth in capability and accuracy and utility.

As an anecdotal example; a few years ago I decided I would try to learn Rust (programming language), because it seemed interesting and we had a practical use case for a performant, memory-efficient compiled language. It didn’t really work out for me, tbh. I just didn’t have the time to get very fluent with it enough to be effective.

Now I’m on a project which also uses Rust. But with ChatGPT and some other models I’ve deployed (Mixtral is really good!) I was basically writing correct, effective Rust code within a week—accepted and merged to main.

I’m actively using AI code models to write code to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI code models. See where this is going? That’s exponential growth.

I honestly don’t know if I’d recommend to my young kids programming as a career now even if it has been very lucrative for me and will take me to my retirement just fine. It excites me and scares me at the same time.

rolaulten ,

There is more to a program then writing logic. Good engineers are people who understand how to interpret problems and translate the inherent lack of logic in natural language into something that machines are able to understand (or vice versa).

The models out there right now can truly accelerate the speed of that translation - but translation will still be needed.

An anecdote for an anecdote. Part of my job is maintaining a set of EKS clusters where downtime is... undesirable (five nines...). I actively use chatgpt and copilot when adjusting the code that describes the clusters - however these tools are not able to understand and explain impacts of things like upgrading the control plane. For that you need a human who can interpret the needs/hopes/desires/etc of the stakeholders.

model_tar_gz ,

Yeah I get it 100%. But that’s what I’m saying. I’m already working on and with models that have entire codebase level fine-tuning and understanding. The company I work at is not the first pioneer in this space. Problem understanding and interpretation— all of what you said is true— there are causal models being developed (I am aware of one team in my company doing exactly that) to address that side of software engineering.

So. I don’t think we are really disagreeing here. Yes, clearly AI models aren’t eliminating humans from software today; but I also really don’t think that day is all that far away. And there will always be need for humans to build systems that serve humans; but the way we do it is going to change so fundamentally that “learn C, learn Rust, learn Python” will all be obsolete sentiments of a bygone era.

rolaulten ,

Let's be clear - current AI models are being used by poor leadership to remove bad developers (good ones don't tend to stick around). This however does place some pressure on the greater tech job market (but I'd argue no different then any other downturn we have all lived through).

That said, until the issues with being confidently incorrect are resolved (and I bet people a lot smarter then me are tackling the problem) it's nothing better then a suped up IDE. Now if you have a public resources you can point me to that can look at a meta repo full of dozens of tools and help me convert the python scripts that are wrappers of wrappers( and so on) into something sane I'm all ears.

I highly doubt we will ever get to the point where you don't need to understand how an algorithm works - and for that you need to understand core concepts like recursion and loops. As humans brains are designed for pattern recognition - that means writing a program to solve a sodoku puzzle.

ReplicaFox ,

And if you don't know how to code, how do you even know if it gave you the output you want until it fails in production?

Modern_medicine_isnt ,

It's not really about the coding, it's about the process of solving the problem. And ai is very far away from being able to do that. The language you learn to code in is probably not the one you will use much of you life. It will just get replaced by which ai you will use to code.

Dkarma ,

Yep. The best guy on my team isn't the best coder. He's the best at visualizing the complete solution and seeing pinch points in his head.

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