I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14.
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@liw I don't really think it was like that. Maybe way before that, when computers were still mostly analog, digital computers emerged together with prog languages, those made the older analog computers and their operators quite quickly obsolete. But after that there had been no strong claim by anything that would make programmers and developers obsolete (until now with AI, that is.) I'd say it was rather the opposite for long. Everyone was rather strongly encouraged to learn some coding skills, because that was supposed to be a necessity in most future jobs. Specially younger generations and educational programs leaned that way for long. I'd say from way before 2010, and till after covid, at least right up till the AI hype exploded couple of years ago with chatgpt passing some "high level knowledge" exams, formerly out of league for any computer programs.
@raulinbonn @liw I remember the adverts in the computer press saying that companies wouldn't need programmers to write applications - that was probably the late 80s/early 90s, whilst I was still at school.
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@raulinbonn @liw I remember the adverts in the computer press saying that companies wouldn't need programmers to write applications - that was probably the late 80s/early 90s, whilst I was still at school.
@raulinbonn @liw I also remember having to learn COBOL in the late 90s!
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@liw oh i'm not worried about us still being needed
i'm worried about the state the world will be left in when we come back after being fired
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@datarama @liw I feel the difference is about the power structures that keep pushing this "new paradigm". We're talking about some of the worst and the most powerful people on this planet, it ultimately doesn't matter if they make the world worse for everyone while doing it - they have an incentive to do so and they will profit from it.
This.
Companies are getting away with being more more rapacious, and their managers have become more lazy, ignorant, and reckless.
American business disregards legitimate issues unless it comes in the form of a court order.
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@liw I'm not going to lie; to me this time *feels* different.
I learned to program at about the same time you did, though I was younger then. And it might not *be* different; I might just be easier to worry now.
@datarama @liw I'm of three minds myself: maybe LLMs will take over (whether they're any better or not, the history of programming is full of such mistakes); maybe they'll fall by the wayside; maybe they'll become a useful tool, in effect the next step in the evolution of programming languages, but with skilled programmers still needed.
I'm also at the point where I can retire whenever I want, and perhaps that is just as well.
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@datarama @liw I'm of three minds myself: maybe LLMs will take over (whether they're any better or not, the history of programming is full of such mistakes); maybe they'll fall by the wayside; maybe they'll become a useful tool, in effect the next step in the evolution of programming languages, but with skilled programmers still needed.
I'm also at the point where I can retire whenever I want, and perhaps that is just as well.
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw All that advancement absolutely made obsolete my mad skills in 8086 assembler and CDC Compass. Yippee ki yay!
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@mbpaz @liw Most of your proofs are implied before the project - like not scribbling on things. For a lot of other stuff you then have a standard interface definition so that guides most of the rest of it.
Imagine a Linux driver of a given class. If there's a formal description of that interface then a formal methods based tool can verify you meet the formal methods, you meet the general rules for the kernel and you meet the language don't scribble rules.
and it's way cheaper than debugging!
@etchedpixels @liw
I spent a healthy time in a university dept surrounded by maths types whose version of "vi vs emacs" was "Coq vs Quickcheck" (aka theorem proving vs model checking) - but both meant, you know, studying things and writing arcane spells. Effort, time. The unthinkable. -
@datarama @liw Yeah, were I 20 years younger I'd be worried too.
(But I'm an unusual case--no kids, no mortgage, high savings rate. A dozen years ago I was concerned with the stability of my job, checked with my financial advisor, and discovered I'd have been OK even had I stopped working for keeps then. Would that everyone was in that position.)
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw
Same. And at our age we have the luxury that if this AI BS doesn't calm down in the next 3-5 years we can chuck it all in the sea and retire. -
@etchedpixels @liw Programmers who think they need LLM coding assistants really just need better languages and libraries.
@mason
So true. I saw this on here a couple of weeks ago.
@etchedpixels @liw -
I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
I started programming around 1974 (BASIC/Jean/Algol) and remained stubbornly not obsolete until I retired a couple of years ago.
These days I do occasional programming to scratch my own itches. I couldn't imagine using a stochastic parrot - it would spoil all the fun.
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@liw There were things that pulled stuff away from programmers though. Much of it at the time was hidden by the growth in demand.
Excel, BASIC, some expert systems, Hypercard, DBase and friends all enabled an army of not-really-programmer people to get real work done without having to become programming experts of any kind.None of them hallucinated or ate entire data centres for lunch. Their output was predictable if slow and they kept working over upgrades in general.
BASIC was around long before that. The others were designed and written by programmers.
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@liw The real sad thing is the tools that were heading towards making some programming obsolete or at least much easier - stuff that worked off formal proofs and graph theory all got thrown under the bus when shiny "AI" stuff came along.
I think the serious control systems people (FBW aircraft, industrial controls etc.) would disagree with you there.
I'd like to think the automotive people would be the same, but from what I've seen recently I fear not. ๐
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I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.
About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.
In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.
There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.
Now it's LLMs.
Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.
@liw It's fantastic that you have both the insight/wisdom of lived experience _and_ are in a secure enough position not to worry.
But the job market doesn't necessarily share your attitude and so those who have neither of these things are entirely justified in their concern.
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@datarama @liw Yeah, were I 20 years younger I'd be worried too.
(But I'm an unusual case--no kids, no mortgage, high savings rate. A dozen years ago I was concerned with the stability of my job, checked with my financial advisor, and discovered I'd have been OK even had I stopped working for keeps then. Would that everyone was in that position.)
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@datarama @liw I forgot to mention no car! I do have three cats, but they don't cost nearly as much as kids.
It will not surprise you that I am on the spectrum too. My late wife was probably borderline.
It was really freeing to me when I wised up and asked the financial advisor. (And was glad I already had one, courtesy of my credit union.) Heartily recommended if available. Fed him my current assets and amounts of the several pensions I had pending, highballed a guess of how much I'd want to spend per month, he plugged the numbers into a program that made reasonable assumptions about inflation and computed I'd be OK until at least age 90. Likely much longer now.
That leaves the problem of boredom/feeling useful--I enjoy my work and that I am helping people who deserve it. (I work at a university.) But I've developed enough other interests that I ought to be OK, and tested it some years back when I got burned out and took several years off working.
In any case I hope you find a comfortabler solution.
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undefined oblomov@sociale.network shared this topic
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@stefano a bullet you dodged. possibly two of them. but in typical stefano form, a professional
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@ccohanlon @yngmar Sciacca was surprisingly nice.
Anyway, if you happen to come off the way over to the eastern side and happen to pass by Catania, let me know. We can swap head colds.
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@rygorous as a straw anarchist I believe well defined behavior is inherently authoritarian and should also be abolished
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@alien089 Grande! Io ovviamente sarรฒ lรฌ entrambi i giorni
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https://blog.fabiomanganiello.com/reply/the-local-tech-neighbourhood
A corollary to the concept of small tech neighbourhood is the idea of local tech communities.
It's easy for folks like me, who have been self-hosting on computers in our closets since high school, to lose track with the common non-tech person.
It's easy for us to say "just self-host your Nextcloud, Matrix, XMPP, Mastodon, Searxng, Wallabag etc.", adding a "it's just a docker run command".
I've also seen "just run your f*cking website" articles get to the top of HackerNews.
But then I thought: imagine if it was, say, the bakery industry rather than the software industry to go through a process of #enshittification.
Imagine that buying your bread or croissant tomorrow requires a $100/month Bread+ subscription with plenty of upsells, an age verification process that requires you to send your passport or retina scan to the Big Bread consortium, a tracking system that measures exactly how much bread you eat at home, and that keeps selling your eating habits to whoever wants to purchase them - all while your bread quality gets progressively worse over time, and the oligopoly that holds it, after acquiring or putting out of business any credible competitors, starts experimenting also with selling expired products, wrapped in paper littered with ads that you have to spend at least 30 seconds reading before you can make your sandwich.
Of course people would be outraged.
But many, no matter how outraged they are, will just swallow the bitter pill and stick with the Bread+ subscription (perhaps because they don't care enough yet to trigger a change in their habits, perhaps because they have other priorities and battles to fight), hoping that the next change to the T&C won't make it even worse.
And some will instead start looking for alternatives.
Would it make sense for a professional baker who's been in the business for decades to tell those folks "just bake your own f*cking bread" - and then complain that not enough are moving out of the Bread+ walled garden?
Or perhaps would it make more sense for that baker to volunteer for a competitive price to sell their bread to its friends, family and local community?
We all know that running your own stuff on your own machines is the best way to avoid enshittification. Just like wisely selecting and mixing your wheat and butter to bake your bread and cakes is the best way to make those products the way you like them. But not everyone will do it, nor they are supposed to do it.
People live different lives, have different priorities and choose different battles. Any pragmatic human must at some point delegate some tasks - that's how modern societies were born. We don't judge those outside of our area of competencies for not being able or willing to perform a certain task, no matter how trivial that looks to us.
An average neighbourhood has someone good enough at baking that they can sell their products to their local community.
And nowadays perhaps it also has someone good enough with computers that they can probably run on an old laptop or unused VPS stuff like a small Matrix server, a GoToSocial instance, a Nextcloud instance or an Immich server.
And they could probably serve that to small local groups of 10-20 people for something like $10/month (and at low volumes those services usually don't even require much maintenance).
It can be $100/200 month that can abundantly cover the cost of a small VPS, let alone the cost of running a miniPC at home.
It'd be a bargain for the subscribers too - nowadays for $10/month you don't even get a Netflix subscription, let alone a complete cloud alternative with no trackers and no ads.
It can even be a reliable source of income for IT folks in areas that would otherwise not provide other viable employment solutions.
In a healthy society with a high level of immunity against enshittification, your local self-hoster should probably become the digital equivalent of your local baker or your local pub.
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@aeva see people like Tom Duff invented Duff's Device and then a bunch of neckbeards convened and asked themselves "is this something a C compiler would allow" and decided YES and that is how things worked back then
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Running Windows 98 on the iPAQ IA-2 Internet Appliance
Devices that were limited to only run a web browser were relatively common around 2000, as many people wanted to surf the Information Super Highway, but didnโt quite want to get a regular PC โ being in many ways the retro equivalent of a Chromebook. The Compaq iPAQ IA-2 from 2000 that [Dave Luna] got is no exception, with a Microsoft CE-based OS that is meant to be used with Microsoft Network (MSN) dial-up, which amusingly is still available today.
In order to get a more useful OS on it, like Windows 98, you have to jump through quite a few hoops, as [Dave] found out. Although there is an IDE connection on the mainboard, this cannot be booted from, likely due to BIOS limitations. This means that he had to chain boot via the 16 MB NAND Flash drive that the original OS booted from, which was done by writing MS-DOS to the Flash drive using another workaround as itโs not a standard IDE device either.
From this you can then boot Windows 98 from an IDE drive by pretending that itโs an ATAPI IDE device to dodge a limitation on IDE devices. The systemโs hardware isnโt really going to make it into a blazing fast retro computer. It only has a 266 MHz Geode GX1 CPU and supports up to 256 MB of SDRAM. The IA-2 is also limited to 800ร600, which required the use of an external monitor (as seen above) hooked up to the internal VGA port to set the proper resolution in the OS.
But at least it can run DOOM, so that bare minimum requirement can be ticked off.
