Often I find it easier to just do it myself rather than list out a bunch of changes. I'll give the LLM a vague task, it does it and then I go through it. If it's completely off I give it new instructions, if it's almost right I just fix the details myself.

As in, copied it with a prompt in.

You can fight without unions. Tell the truth about LLMs: They are crutches for power users that do not really work but are used as excuses for firing people.

You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.

This addresses the union part. It is true that software engineers tend to be conflict averse and not very socially aware, so many of them follow the current industry opinion like lemmings.

If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.

This all assumes that such revolutions are built on resiliency and don't actually destroy the underpinning requirements of organized society. Its heavily skewed towards survivor bias.

Our greatest strength as a species is our ability to communicate knowledge, experience, and culture, and act as one large overarching organism when threats appear.

Take away communication, and the entire colony dies. No organization can occur, no signaling. There are two ways to take away communication, you prevent it from happening, or you saturate the channel to the Shannon Limit. The latter is enabled by AI.

Its like an ant hill or a bee hive where a chemical has been used to actively and continually destroy the pheromones the ants rely upon for signalling. What happens? The workers can't work, food can't be gathered, the hive dies. The organism is unable to react or adapt. Collapse syndrome.

Our society is not unlike the ant-hill or bee hive. We depend on a fine balance of factors doing productive work and in exchange for that work they get food, or more precisely money which they use to buy food. Economy runs because of the circulation of money from producer to factor to producer. When it sieves into fewer hands and stays there, distortions occur, these self-sustain and then eventually we are at the point where no production can occur because monetary properties are lost under fiat money printing. There is a narrow working range where outside the range on each side everything catastrophically fails. Hyper-inflation/Deflation

AI on the other hand eliminates capital formation of the individual. The time value of labor is driven to zero. There is a great need for competent workers for jobs, but no demand because no match can occur; communication is jammed. (ghost jobs/ghost candidates)

So you have failures on each end, which self-sustain towards socio-economic collapse. No money circulation going in means you can't borrow from the future through money printing. Debasement then becomes time limited and uncontrollable through debt traps, narrow working price range caused by consistent starvation of capital through wage suppression opens the door to food insecurity, which drives violence.

Resource extraction processes have destroyed the self-sustaining flows such that food in a collapse wouldn't even support half our current population, potentially even a quarter globally. 3 out of 4 people would die. (Malthus/Catton)

These things happen incredibly slowly and gradually, but there is a critical point we're about 5 years away from it if things remain unchanged, there is the potential that we have already passed this point too. Objective visibility has never been worse.

This point of no return where the dynamics are beyond any individual person, and after that point everyone involved in that system is dead but they just don't know it yet.

Mutually Assured Destruction would mean the environment becomes uninhabitable if chaos occurs and order is lost in such a breakdown.

We each have significant bias to not consider the unthinkable. A runaway positive feedback system eventually destroys itself, and like a dam that has broken with the waters rushing towards individuals; no individual can hold back those forces.

Didn’t Greg-from-marketing’s life just get a lot better at the same time?

I share your sentiment though - I'm a data engineer (8 years) turned product engineer (3 years) and it astounds me how little SQL "normal" programmers know. It honestly changed my opinion on ORMs - it's not like the SQL people would write exceeds the basic select/filter/count patterns that is the most that non-data people know.

Reasons: - I can compose queries, which in turn makes them easier to decompose - It's easier to spot errors - I avoid parsing SQL strings - It's easier to interact with the rest of the code, both functions and objects

If I need to make just a query I gladly write SQL

Is this true? It doesn't seem true to me.

Well, what we had before SQL[1] was QUEL, which is effectively the same as Alpha[2], except in "English". Given the previous assertion about what came before SQL, clearly not. I expect SQL garnered favour because it is tablational instead of relational, which is the quality that makes it easier to understand for those not heavy in the math.

[1] Originally known as SEQUEL, a fun word play on it claiming to be the QUEL successor.

[2] The godfather language created by Codd himself.

None of these had "semantic expressivity" as their strength.

> If SQL looked like, say, C#'s LINQ method syntax, would it really be harder to use?

Yes.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAM

Incorrect.

Encoding a program was considered secretarial work, not the act of programming itself. Over time, "encoding" was shortened to "coding."

This is why the industry term "coder" is a pejorative descriptor.

You can use AI to filter out the shovelware, so you never have to see it.

I still find great value in the TCM cable channel. Simply because if I tune in at a random time, it's likely to be showing an excellent old film I either never heard of or never got around to watching.

The service they are offering is curation, which has a lot of value in an age of infinite content flooding our attention constantly.

The reason to take all 400 though as every once in a while one photo is obviously better than another for some reason. You also want several angles because sometimes the light will be wrong at the moment, or someone will happen to be in the way of your shot...

And sometimes it is even combining elements from different photos: Alice had her eyes closed in this otherwise great shot, but in this other shot her eyes were open. A little touch-up and we've got the perfect photo.

Though, I'll grant that there's not really a way to argue this without showing videos

Demand is way down because while a $5000 lens on a nice camera is better than my phone lens, my phone is close enough for most purposes. Also my phone is free, in the days of film a single roll of film by the time you developed it costs significant money (I remember as a kid getting a camera for my birthday and then my parents wouldn't get me film for it - on hindsight I suspect every roll of film cost my dad half an hour of work and he was a well paid software developer). This cost meant that you couldn't afford to practice taking pictures, every single one had to be perfect. So if you wanted a nice picture of the family it was best to pay a professional who because of experience and equipment was likely to take a much better one than you could (and if something went wrong they would retake for free).

That's why sw devs salaries went up like crazy in our time and not in 1980.

But what new tech will we have, that will push the SW dev market demand up like internet connected PCs and smartphones did? All I see is stagnation in the near future, just maintaining or rewriting the existing shit that we have, not expanding into new markets.

So the job qualifications went from "understand lighting, composition, camera technology" to "be hot".

Some stuff does happen, of course, but most prophesied things do not happen.

All tools I mentioned before were useful for programming. They didn't got worse. Still not enough to keep them relevant over time.

I chose those tools as an example precisely because, for a while, they achieve widespread success. People made awesome things with them. Until they stopped doing it.

What brought their demise was their inherent limitations. Code by humans on plain text was slower, harder, but didn't had those inherent limits. Code by humans on plain text got better, those tools didn't.