The closest I come to working with part-time, minimum-wage workers is working with student employees. Even then, they earn more and usually work more than five hours a week.
Most of the time, I end up putting in more work than I get out of it. Onboarding, reviewing, and mentoring all take significant time.
Even with the best students we had, paying around 400 euros a month, I would not say that I saved five hours a week.
And even when they reach the point of being truly productive, they are usually already finished with their studies. If we then hire them full-time, they cost significantly more.
There use to be a mythological creature on irc from south America (sorry forgot the specifics) who was both a 10x dev and a 10x mathematician. One day he showed a picture of his computer. It was a low end laptop with a tft monitor and an external keyboard because the screen and the keyboard didn't work. It explained everything, the machine was just good enough to write code, do math, read stack exchange and lurk irc with his ghosts.
The linked short story is barely 5 paragraphs long. You could have just read it instead of writing an insubstantial remark like this. It’s a fun anecdote about a famous programmer (Bill Atkinson).
Charitably I'm guessing it's supposed to be an allusion to the chart with cost per word? Which is measuring an input cost not an output value, so the criticism still doesn't quite make sense, but it's the best I can do...
So, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce not regular text, but patches which shortens code while still keeping the code working the same.
They can already do that. A few months ago I played around with the kaggle python golf competition. Got to top 50 without writing a line of code myself. Modern LLMs can take a piece of code and "golf" it. And modern harnesses (cc / codex / gemini cli) can take a task and run it in a loop if you can give them clear scores (i.e. code length) and test suites outside of their control (i.e. the solution is valid or not).
No idea why you'd want this in a normal job, but the capabilities are here.
Ug, this bill is all about preventing regulation of multinational corporations, it has nothing to do with the right for individuals to compute anything.
Yep, I'd like to think this was a bill to protect my right to run any software I want to on hardware that I own, but it's actually a bill to keep Montana localities (cities, counties) from regulating or restricting data centers (noise, power, etc) in the interests of their residents. It's a state preemption bill restricting local democracy for the benefit of big business and polluters.
"Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety."
They can absolutely be regulated, but you must prove actual harm instead of "I don't want any data centers near me because of (conspiracy theory I read on Facebook)."
That's 18k a year, or about equal or cheaper than "outsourcing", minus the tax and legal ramifications.
I agree it's wasteful, but from a long-form view of what spending looks like (or at least should/used to look like). Those who see 1.5k/month as "saving" money typically only care about next quarter.
As the old adage goes: a thousand dollars saved this month is 100 thousand spent next year.
We have a very successful company that has been running 30 years, with developers across 6 countries. We just make sure we hire developers who know that theyre here to do a job, on our terms, for which they will get paid, and its our way or the highway. If they dont like it, they dont have to stay. However, through doing this we have maintained a standard that our competitors fail at, partly because they spend their time tiptoeing around staff and their comforts and preferences.
I dont hunt 'AI skeptics'. I just provide a viewpoint based on professional experience. Not one that is 'AI is bad at coding because everyone on Twitter says so"
and you happened to have created an account in hackernews just 3 months ago after 30 years in business just to provide a viewpoint based on professional experience?
Yes, you're right I should have made an account 30 years ago, before this website existed, and gotten involved in all the discussions taking place about the use of ChatGPT and LLMs in the software development workplace
Have you ever hired anyone for their expertise, so they tell you how to do things, and not the other way around? Or do you only hire people who aren't experts?
I don't doubt you have a functioning business, but I also wouldn't be surprised if you get overtaken some day.
Most of our engineers are hired because of their experience. They don't really tell us how to do things. We already know how to do it. We just want people who can do it. LLMs will hopefully remove this bottleneck.
Wow, you are really projecting the image a wonderful person to work for.
I don't doubt you are successful, but the mentality and value hierarchy you seem to express here is something I never want to have anything to do with.
Indeed, it doesn't solve the problem that people will misinterpret data and spread misinformation to justify their bad feeling about AI with invalid arguments.
It is the lack of regulation that is the problem here. The power company is incentized to make higher profits year around by not preparing for a disaster.
The fact that PG&E, in a much more regulated and liberal California, also has power problems is interesting and valid, but Newsom's only been governor since 2019 (the Camp Fire was 2018), so you can't put that much blame on him, and there are decades of blame to go around.
All it takes is a simple tiny change to the user agreement and then OpenAI will start training on this user data and most people won't notice in time to switch their toggle off
With a subsidized cost of $200/month for OpenAI it would be cheaper to hirer a part-time minimum wage worker than it would be to contract with OpenAI.
And that is the rosiest estimate OpenAI has.
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