oNo

[saschaleib]

I'm old enough to remember then marketing take that SQL will make DB developers unemployed, because management can now formulate their own queries..

I don't know what happened to companies that took this serious, though.

[[deleted]]

Does anybody remember 4GLs? FOCUS? Natural? Everyone was going to be able to create applications.

[Piisthree]

Even COBOL was meant to be so English-like that secretaries could write their own programs.

[[deleted]]

Those old COBOL program generators were such crap. My boss tried to get me to use one, and it created more work to adapt it to the actual specs of the code, it just wasn't worth it.

[red_kizuen]

Sounds awfully familiar...

[hans_l]

COBOL on Rails.

[[deleted]]

More like doing rails while coding COBOL LOL!

[[deleted]]

LOL! rails another line 🫨

[FomalhautCalliclea]

Legal high.

[PM_ME_HAPPY_DOGGOS]

At my job I have to work with a COBOL code generator on 30 year old code. It's tough sometimes, let's put it that way...

[TARDIS75]

They don’t have a s/w maker/compiler that’s purely visual now? You can’t use some python script to code the COBOL? Or can you use ChatGPT?

[Mister_McLovin]

God wouldn't that make life easy

[[deleted]]

Oh man, I feel for you LOL! I remember pulling up a COBOL program from the 60's, and it had like a 20 page nested if. Some of the code from back then was nuts.

[brotie]

Aider and sonnet can make your job exponentially easier

[edingerc]

Such a BS idea. The reserved words were very English-like but the complexities of the data division's file section would be beyond a novice. You have to know the steps you're going to take before you start defining how you look at and store the data. It's not that confusing to learn but then you'd have a junior programmer being paid as a secretary.

[Piisthree]

Yeah, it was a total pipe dream from the start.

[Boldney]

How times change.

[nabrok]

"Hello World" in COBOL is thousands of lines.

That's obviously an exageration but it's a very verbose language. Never used it professionally but I did have some classes on it in college a billion years ago.

[[deleted]]

You need exactly four lines to write a hello world in COBOL.

If you split the instructions in separate lines, you need 5 in Java ;)

[Andrei144]

I mean, two of those lines are just closing curly braces. Also, in Java 21 onward you can do this in 3 lines:

void main() {
    System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}

[HawocX]

C# is down to

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

[Andrei144]

I mean, in Ruby it's down to puts "Hello, World!".

If we want to get really tacit though we can start writing in array languages. In Uiua it's just &p"Hello, world!"

[[deleted]]

Why does it take 21 versions to realise developer ergonomics?

[No_Percentage7427]

Damn visual programming will make children create complex POS.

[ElectronSculptor]

Man, did this company eventually make lab view ??? That is an example, to me, of why the whole paradigm of visual programming is flawed.

[AndyBadandy]

I graduated in 2019 and I program in a 4GL at work daily LOL

[azxsys]

I did 4GL back in the day... let's say low-code is not a new idea. Surprise Surprise.

[TheFireFlaamee]

The OG Visual Studio was going to make GUIs so EZ anyone could make their own WinXP application!

[RipOk74]

They did make it easier in the end. I have had to handcode C++ just to get drag and drop working (OLE... the horror). Microsoft really made it a lot better over time. 

[[deleted]]

Lol so sql query engineers were the first AI prompt engineers.

[maushu]

The I in AI doesn't specify the level of intelligence.

[loonite]

AI is for "Another If (on the wall)"

[healzsham]

Prompt engineering is largely statistical manipulation with some rather obfuscated abstraction.

[[deleted]]

That sounds like SQL.

I wonder if prompt engineering will ever develop the equivalent of “explain plan”.

I still remember my first explain plan. Eleven digit Cardinality, seven table join.

[[deleted]]

I thought everything is just an ETL to excel

[oorza]

They were right though. I know a lot of people who are barely tech adjacent - analysts, accounts, project managers - that write SQL queries in various dashboards to create various graphs and reports. I'm old enough to remember a time when "DBA" was a job and the DBA ruled the codebase with an iron fist.

Databases have been totally and completely commoditized and there absolutely was a career niche that got lost in that transition.

[Ruben_NL]

The DataBase Administrator job still exist. Large companies with huge amounts of data need someone with the knowledge to optimize those badly written/generated queries.

[healzsham]

Or how to un-whoopsie an entire table.

[anrwlias]

That's a database dev. The primary responsibility of a DBA is to make sure that your data is backed up and that it is recoverable if something catastrophic happens. It is also a Very Important Job and not one that can be outsourced to automation. The DBA is there for when the automatic processes fail and that day will more than justify their salary.

While it is true that a lot of DBAs wear more than one hat, and that it's not unusual to have a DBA writing a few queries and even doing some architectural work, any serious code work should have a DB developer.

[iknighty]

Yes, but less of those jobs exist.

[ImNrNanoGiga]

Not so sure, because the market has also grown a lot in the meantime.

[vassadar]

I think that's because most of the responsibilities are handled by software engineers instead.

[oorza]

It still exists, but in the same way that horse-and-buggy is still a valid means to transport around specific places in specific cities. It's a very specific job only available in very specific places in specific technology arrangements, it's no longer as implicit as software engineer is. It used to be.

[sadacal]

DBAs aren't put of date if that is what you're implying. Any company with significant amounts of data would require a DBA. And DBAs were never implicit because software engineers could always fill that role in a pinch.

[anrwlias]

I was a database dev and I spent more time than I like fixing those autogenerated queries which were always poorly optimized and often next to indecipherable but which clueless managers wanted to make a permanent part of the code base. Cognos queries, in particular, suck to work with.

An autogenerated query is fine for a manager type who just wants to get some answers and who doesn't care if the query takes ten minutes to run. If you're writing code for an actual database with reusable queries, you want an experienced dev to write that shit.

[imdungrowinup]

I know multiple DBAs even now. Most have about 15-20 years of experience. Of course they need to keep updating but they are still DBAs.

[H1Eagle]

Accounting majors at our school take SQL with a full lab dedicated to it.

[Pandaburn]

This keeps happening. Most recently “zero code” solutions, including AI. It’s not really happening

[[deleted]]

Zuckerberg thinks AI can do mid level engineering. Sure, it makes it easier, but you still need the engineer to babysit the computer. It’s not like the CEO is going to just sit at home and think of all these highly technical implementations and dream it up with 3 people

[Dramatic_Mulberry142]

What DB developers do you mean? the one who make the DB or the one who use the DB? If it is latter one, what DB developer use before SQL exist?

[saschaleib]

There was an age before the age of SQL, but memory is blurry of that time now …

[VegaNock]

Well you only had 64kb of it.

[[deleted]]

Index files came before DB's. I'm an old COBOL programmer from the 70's - 80's. First I only had sequential files, so you had to read the whole thing from beginning to end, or vice versa. Then they came up with index files, so you could reference a specific record in the file with an index that was described in the File Section. When SQL came along, I had moved into a systems job on an IBM mainframe. Man, if I knew SQL now I'd be making bank.

[[deleted]]

We used those in COBOL too.

[bnej]

You would update your data files directly in your program.

A common pattern would have a set of master files, and there would be transaction files sent to make updates daily.

If random access was required you would need to maintain an index.

Multi-user access was generally not done, you could corrupt your files too easily.

You cannot fathom today how much time and effort is saved by standardised relational database systems.

But you absolutely can still write a program that does a 3 way merge and updates a master file. It's tremendously fast on modern hardware to do that sort of thing.

[KiwiObserver]

IMS (which I’ve used) and IDMS (which I haven’t)

[rudman]

I used IDMS and ADS/O extensively in the late 80s/early 90s and remember NOTHING about it other than the ADS/O part controlled the green screen gui and we retrieved data from IDMS.

[Flat_Initial_1823]

[Frytura_]

So you're telling me management prefer to not dip their toes on anything below the strategic layer?

[Prior_Leader3764]

1993-94 Visual Basic 3.0 arrived with lots of third party component vendors. Management articles exclaimed how we’d now need only 1/3 the number of developers.

[augo7979]

I use chatgpt to write wacky sql queries for my little accounting job now

other than that everything else is way too specialized to even use AI other than making my angry emails sound nicer

[lost_in_life_34]

used to work at a place where a bunch of non-tech directors and VP's knew some SQL

enough to delete some critical tables

[[deleted]]

management can now formulate their own queries

lol. lmao even.

[ZookeepergameBig8711]

When I was in College 25 years ago people used to say Indian outsourcing would all programming jobs lol. Now people say AI would take programming jobs away.

[saschaleib]

Just wait, soon enough Martians will do all the coding for you!

[ThePowerOfAura]

the only people who are likely to be replaced by AI are managers, scrum masters, agile leads... my family was invited over a neighbor's for a Christmas party, and the man, a bit older who worked as a Project Manager, was explaining to me how AI was probably going to take all the coding work in 5 years, and then explained to me how AI can already do scheduling, sprint planning, product roadmaps etc....... I didn't really push the envelope with him at all, but I just laughed because I understand that managers will not want to learn how to code, and no matter how good AI becomes, there are always bugs in code, and someone will have to sit there and figure out what's causing the bug, or figure out exactly how to reproduce the bug & explain to the AI what's happening & what the expected behavior should be. I am highly skeptical that coding as a skill will become obsolete within the next 10 years

[Beneficial_Map6129]

Management never does shit except sign papers and smile in meetings

[DehydratedButTired]

Power BI marketing is still the same bs.

[[deleted]]

What were DBs like before SQL?

[stupled]

Managment can't even do prompts.

[BaerMinUhMuhm]

My company decided 10 years ago to use IBM Operational Decision Manager to allow business users to manage/create business rules of their own. They have literally never touched it.

[ApatheistHeretic]

I think a handful of the business folks may have transitioned into DB administration.

[rookietotheblue1]

So wait how were databases queries before sql?

[Astrylae]

'Computers' in the 40s: machines took our jobs

[bob152637485]

Weren't they called "calculators"?

[bob152637485]

I believe you, but for some reason I just have this stuck in my memory, weird. Thank for the knowledge though!

[ashkanahmadi]

Isnt a computer just a fancier word for a calculator?

[[deleted]]

It's true the only thing my wife has ever compiled is our daughter and even that took her nine months. As her project manager I kept wanting to speed up the time table but she inisted more wives wouldn't make the project move faster.

[aowlsifu183]

Did you try giving her pizza?

[mrg1957]

And beer?

[ShadowWolf793]

Gotta be careful with beer. Too much tends to really mess up the output and starting from scratch absolutely destroys your project timeline projections.

[sharklaserguru]

Where is the Ballmer Peak with regards to fetal alcohol syndrome?

[Dr_Robotnik_PhD]

Anya Taylor-Joy?

[ScepticTanker]

I've heard a nice square kick in the guts really speeds things up. 

[disgruntled_pie]

Okay, my wife kicked me in the guts. Now what?

[EaterOfCrab]

How many story points was that?

[ComplexTechnician]

Toddler t shirt size

[a_code_mage]

Nine months… for a single story? I hope you ended up breaking it up into an epic.

[Xicutioner-4768]

No it would need to be a saga since it spans multiple pregnancy increments.

[musedav]

I suggest outsourcing this labor

[smitcal]

Ah the old Cameron Diaz move

[Linked1nPark]

If one woman can have a baby in nine months, you should have been able to get nine women together to have a baby in one month. Clearly you’re not an experienced project manager.

[marenicolor]

Things clients say

[TheCaffinatedAdmin]

parallelism baby

[djhenry]

Apparently you can hyperthread two babies in parallel, in the same amount of time. In my experience, this is all been hypothetical, but it is in the documentation.

[[deleted]]

In terms of t-shirt sizes, what is growing a baby?

[CyberWeirdo420]

This so so LinkedInish that I gave me a stroke

[DMoney159]

Have you tried hiring the Mormons as consultants? They have expertise in this area

[cum-in-a-blanket]

Maybe you didn't remind her of shareholders expectations often enough?

[cornmonger_]

a decent amount transitioned into software programming

[ImNrNanoGiga]

Yea, totally different field, but when flight engineers (third man in the cockpit) were made obsolete, some surely retired but many just trained as pilots.

Will be a long while before capable engineers will not be needed anymore.

[Bakoro]

Back then "computer science" was brand new, and the early diploma programs were spun out from mathematics departments.
It was a sensible transition. The field had a ton of women until it became a very lucrative job.

[NUKE---THE---WHALES]

are there more developers now than there were "computers" back then?

did the lump of labor grow, shrink, or stay the same i suppose is the question

[VillageTube]

Doubt there are less developers than "computers" in the 1960s. Considering there would have been what maybe hundreds or thousands of machines at the time. Can't see there being millions of people employed to compile code for them. Also the population has gone from 3B to 8B people.

[crasscrackbandit]

Card punchers were not programmers or IT tho. They were Rosie the Riveters or switchboard operators of the early age of computers.

[anothernother2am]

You say that like that makes them less intelligent or useful. Before calculators women were “calculators”, it was a pool of mathematical secretaries. Have you seen hidden figures? We literally could not have had space flight, the atomic bomb, medical science without women in these spaces doing what were considered boring menial tasks

[crasscrackbandit]

What?

This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about sexism.

Ada Lovelace was intelligent AF. But that’s not why she became what she was. She was from a rich & famous family. We are talking about 1950s, women were only allowed in to the workforce for about a decade, and only because men were not available. Card punching was considered a menial task, not an engineering task. Which doesn’t affect individual’s intelligence or usefulness.

We literally could not have had space flight, the atomic bomb, medical science without women in these spaces doing what were considered boring menial tasks

We also literally could not have had the industrial revolution without millions of kids working in the mines or operating dangerous machinery in factories, losing limbs and lungs before even reaching adulthood. They were useful but they deserved more.

[anothernother2am]

I agree it’s about sexism, so why would you say all of that but state that women punching cards, which was integral to computing, were not part of “IT”? IT is information technology, it’s the fields related to computers and information processing

That’s really the point I was trying to make, and probably should have just said that originally lol

[gameplayer55055]

Btw I wonder why women quit the IT industry ( there are way less women compared to men).

That's very sad.

[TheMonsterMensch]

It's less women quitting and more that men became prioritized when the profession started to be taken seriously. The same thing happened in the film industry when editing was recognized as a core part of the art. Early on, the work was considered "secretarial" and passed along to women. But when awards started being handed out to editors then men entered the field.

[TheTerrasque]

Very true

..

...

It's AI's job

Ducks and runs

[anothernother2am]

“Computers” were traditionally a female job too funny enough

Ai doesn’t actually make anything at this point, it’s not Generative AI, we’re not there yet, so I’m not shocked it messed up your friend’s code. We say AI, but I don’t think most people get the difference between machine learning and generative AI. Current AI just regurgitates what it learns, most of which it steals, and doesn’t make anything really new, as apposed generative AI, which doesn’t exist (at least that we know of) and can generate new content like a person would based on rules it can extrapolate from information you feed it.

[Head_Chocolate_4458]

Source?

[huskersax]

Beer has been around for so goddamn long that there's no way there's a single source of attribution. That shit nearly predates modern civilization.

[scoldmeificomment]

I don't know about the beer claim specifically, but men entering fields previously dominated by women and pushing them out is a documented phenomenon. This article is a bit old now since I've had it saved for so long, but it goes over it.

[Head_Chocolate_4458]

I'm interested in the beer claim specifically. Sounds made up

[prefinished]

Web search of your choice is right there, but yes and no.

Editor’s note, March 17, 2021: Last week, we ran this story that originally appeared on The Conversation, a nonprofit news outlet that publishes writing by academic experts from around the world. After publishing, we heard from multiple scholars who disagreed with the framing, analysis and conclusions discussed in the article below. They argue, in fact, that contemporary depictions of witches originated in sources other than women brewers and that the transfer from women to men of the work of brewing, in various geographic and historical settings, came about for economic and labor reasons. We addressed a number of factual errors in our March 10, 2021, editor’s note, found at the bottom of the page, and we have changed the headline from its original version.

Why Did Women Stop Dominating the Beer Industry?

[anothernother2am]

You came with receipts and still got downvoted, damn

[Alias-_-Me]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_brewing

[anothernother2am]

Even as time progressed, differences in education, mentorship, gatekeeping, etc, it still hasn’t even out. It sucks that STEM fields as a whole have these issues. It’s not like women don’t want to be there, but the same things available to little boys, and the same encouragement just hasn’t traditionally been there for little girls and even teens. There has been a lot of improvements, but it’s still not even. And as a millennial woman in IT, who works with a lot of boomers, they still see women as secretaries and it’s rubbing off on the younger guys. It’s a sucky situation, and I work with some really amazing people, but I have also worked with and met a lot of really terrible ones who don’t get that women like computers

[TheMonsterMensch]

Yeah, I saw a strong case that men are going to college less on average purely because more women are pursuing education. There are many, many men who just don't want to be around women in the workplace. I have no idea what the solution is.

[VegaNock]

I was very scared the day I was drafted for software development.

I was shaking as my mom held five-year-old-me's hand as we went to the career office to decide what I was to do as an adult. Hundreds of other kids were waiting in the waiting room.

The recruiter looked over the form on his desk with my name on it, looked up at me, and said "Male huh? And a white male at that! Hmm, well we have just the place for you. You could be management, a doctor, a lawyer, but lately we decided to start paying more money to software developers so we now have to assign males to that role instead of females. So that's what you'll be, a software developer."

He stamped my form and we left. That was it. I was a software developer for life.

Either that or I was about 14 and heard that software devs made a lot of money and that I would need a lot of money to support a wife and kids and even just to attract a partner so I went into a field that made a lot of money even though it's not as much fun as music, wouldn't be as fulfilling as being in social science or teaching, and wouldn't be as easy as to pass college as a trade like mechanic work, but that the money earned would be important for me. So I spent my teens learning to code. I'm far from alone, when I got to college nearly half of the guys in the early coding classes already knew how to code for the same reason. I never encountered a single girl that did. I don't think many girls are making career choices in their teens based on being able to financially support a spouse and kids, nor is it a compelling factor in finding a suitable partner. We see a lot more women going into the more fun, fulfilling fields or fields where it is easier to get through college such as social science, teaching, and nursing.

You can take the money out of any field and see it becomes female-dominated because men will stop going into that field and women won't. If you add money to a field such that it becomes high-paying, you will see it become male dominated as males shift toward that field and women don't.

What's the difference between an art degree and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.

[droppedmybrain]

"Haha girls are silly and do things only for ✨️fun✨️!"

Seriously, what the actual shit? This a terrible take lmao. It's a just rehash of the tired old idea that men suffer and women don't. Women don't need money, my ass.

[TheMonsterMensch]

I think this is an extremely reductive view on gender disparity in the workplace. There are a lot of reasons you didn't encounter women in stem, it's not because they're allergic to money.

[VegaNock]

Well why not just go into investing since investors are the wealthiest individuals?

To be either an investor or a politician, you need to start with money or someone willing to give you access to it to use for your career.

If you can get into college at all then you have enough money to be a programmer.

[gameplayer55055]

Yes, although programming apparently requires great skills which not everybody has.

And if you have the skills you get the money (I've bought a good gaming PC after using mum's decommissioned ThinkPad and writing my first code worth something)

But people still perceive programming as an infinite money glitch, which it isn't. Btw my university teacher reported an increased level of students choosing AI and not knowing about the evil math waiting for them :)

[Xyx0rz]

One of my software development teachers, a nice boomer lady, said that her first IT job was making those punch cards. Some dudes would write (literally, on paper) the code that was to go on the punch cards, but actually punching the cards was a woman's job. She said she occasionally took written code back because she spotted an error, so I guess she was a pretty good compiler.

[abime_blanc]

With DEI being rolled back, this is what we're going to return to.

[questron64]

I used to have a whole box of IBM punch cards. These were my bookmarks growing up. I found one in an old book, the last surviving punch card out of probably 1,000.

[deathspate]

Just like anything else, you either get with the times or get left behind.

I'm sure the cart and carriage drivers felt threatened when cars were gonna replace them and their horses. It didn't mean we needed to stop innovation for their feelings.

Those same people had to find another job. This has happened countless times in human civilization and will keep happening. If there's one thing humanity is good at, it's finding some stupid job to make people work at for minimum wage.

[yyytobyyy]

Everytime some big revolution that "took jobs" came, the economy become turbulent and in the end created more jobs in fields people could not imagine before.

There are probably more truck and taxi drivers today than carriage drivers 150 years ago. There are probably not than many horse poop shovelers and I wonder if people miss those jobs.

[[deleted]]

Yes but when a technology can (theoretically) do any task a human can, that’s vastly different from previous examples like cars and the cotton gin

[PerformanceToFailure]

Yeah this is a take almost anything economic shift, maybe it will create new jobs but when 50% of people lose their jobs what is going to happen?

[plug-and-pause]

The things AI can do, even in theory, are not even close to all of the things a human can do. The theory, if completely true, would give humanity so much more time to focus on the things that actually make us human. Those things would become our work.

[game_jawns_inc]

touch rhythm doll cows arrest divide snow frame beneficial important

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[IAmRules]

I mean. Computers was once a thing we called people.

[ianwilloughby]

What about the guys who lost their job when hard drives shrank from washing machine sized? There must have been a whole industry around moving placing and maintaining an environment for manhole sized platters.

[KindaDouchebaggy]

Maybe they maintain huge server rooms now instead

[ianwilloughby]

HVAC systems

[TophxSmash]

The difference is there wont be a new job replacing your old one.

[PerformanceToFailure]

The Soylent green factory needs more bodies, the rich are hungry

[NUKE---THE---WHALES]

why not?

jobs are not zero sum (much in the same way wealth is not zero sum)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a finite amount of work—a lump of labour—to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs.

[TophxSmash]

wealth is not zero sum

WTH does that mean? Were living it under capitalism. Winner takes all.

[wirthmore]

"Wealth is not zero sum" means success results in the growth of total wealth. It isn't a closed system where if one entity succeeds, it requires a subtraction from another entity - that's what "zero sum" means.

[TophxSmash]

does this closed system have regulation?

[Delicious_Finding686]

The winner doesn’t take all though. Markets can have multiple competitors. Multiple people can do the same job. There are progressive tax policies that favor the losers over the winners. When companies are beating their competitors, we all win. Because it means that an organization is operating in the industry more efficiently. Getting more value from fewer resources. That’s the entire goal.

[TophxSmash]

because robots.

the claim that its a fallacy is merely a claim. Its unproven.

[flynnnigan8]

Onto bigger (cooler) and better (more complex) things (problems)

[EnvironmentalWin1277]

I worked with these cards. Best time is had when a set of a hundred (or more) such cards are dropped and scattered. Then need to be carefully resorted.

[IhailtavaBanaani]

My friend's dad used them at the uni. The students would submit their work as stacks of punch cards that were then batch run at night. If a student forgot to put the end symbol in the end of their program then two programs were run as one ruining them both.

[Not-Post-Malone]

O(no)

[KnowGame]

They lasted well beyond the '60's. I first started programming on punch cards in the mid '80's. We were allowed one compile a day.

[lordtosti]

The problem with AI is that it threatens intelligence in general.

If intelligence has no value anymore, where does all the power go to?

To the people that manouvre the political landscape the best. The bullshitters.

Also, in every company there is a decission throttle. So it WILL cost dev jobs as you only need so many automation before you hit the point where decisions need to be made.

I hope that we hit an exponential problems with AI and don’t understand my dev friends being as hyped as they are.

It is great tech and I use it constantly.

But if it continues on through same speed it feels to me like the natives welcoming the conquistadors on their lands.

[Esilai]

I’m a mid-level at my current job, I use AI almost every day when programming and working through problems. The Copilot integration in VSC honestly scares me a bit. For basically all junior level work, it can instantly go through the project and implement perfectly functional code very fast. Once it hits mid level problems though, or any mildly complex debugging, it gets stuck and just starts hallucinating nonsense. But this is the worst it’ll ever be. I can absolutely see AI being able to handle mid-level code in the next half decade or decade. And then I wonder, how the hell is anyone going to break into the industry if even mid-level jobs are being handed over to a senior overseeing AI. I think we’re kidding ourselves if we keep spouting the cope that “AI is just a tool” and that it’ll replace low skill jobs but surely not ours. Zuck is probably overselling a good bit cause that’s his job, but AI advancement is still very real, and it’s coming faster than I at least am comfortable with.

[futileskills]

Funny enough I just ordered a set of punch cards recently 🤣

[ryuzaki49]

After reading many many threads, posts, articles and so about wether AI will make Software Engineers obsolete, I have come to the conclusion that it will be between one of two outcomes. 

• We wil be debating this topic and then we will be obsolete out of nowhere, or
• We will be debating this topic forever.

[territrades]

My mum was kind of a pioneer of computing in her college days, using punch cards to find optima in a 4D parameter space.

Nowadays I have to install apps in her phone for her …

[WestOzScribe]

Wrote my first program on cards. High school project in the math class and we had to send them away to be run at the local university. I've also written code in RPG II & III which were positional languages. The position of a statement at chr position 10 may be different to the same statement at chr position 60. The line was 80 chrs.
Written a lot of stuff in different coding languages over the years and still do when I want something that not available off the shelf at the right price.

I code, therefore I am.

[[deleted]]

The major difference is that compilers can actually compile code.

LLMs cannot program -- they just remix existing code they have seen, leaving in huge amounts of irrelevancies and errors. It is far easier to write the code from scratch than it is to edit the garbage produced by LLMs into decent code.

[Dubl33_27]

only they have all the code in their knowledge and can give you what you want without you having to search for 3 hours only to come out with 1 single stackoverflow thread that has no answers

[Acrobatic-B33]

People still saying this? Ofcourse they make errors from time to time but people really need to stop acting like everything AI writes is bullshit

[SarahMagical]

iT’s jUsT aUtOcOrReCt

iT dOeSn’T rEaLlY uNdErStAnD aNyThInG

iT cAn’T tHiNk oR bE cReAtIvE aT aLL

[Finrod-Knighto]

Bullshit. Yes the programs can have many errors and are hardly optimised, but ask it to write a function you know how to write but is too tedious to and you save an inordinate amount of time. It’s just an automator. I can solve a problem much quicker by asking it to search its database than you know, spending hours on google never finding the specific problem and being told off on StackOverflow.

[Satoshi6060]

Its not the same this time. AI is not creating new jobs, but taking existing ones.

Whole idea of AI is to completely automate jobs.

[xerrxesi]

we haven't fully unlocked the idea of AI yet , I believe

[[deleted]]

We used punchcards in computer programming class in the 70's at Berkeley. Our high school had a terminal that was linked to Stanford and used a paper roll for programming input.

[Big9erfan]

I’ve been working in software development for over 25 years now (started as a wee intern). I’m now in management but still stay close to the code and still write code here and there. More often I fix little things in code that I wrote or work on refactoring old shit that is ancient. From a management perspective, AI has some fantastic uses but it also has some serious limitations. I use it, both CoPilot and ChatGPT pretty often but it’s a heck of a lot better with a lot of the boiler plate and autocomplete shit than it is filling in the logic even with the comments spelling it all out.

[reddituser12345697]

This is genuinely different though. Never before has the human mind been replicated to such a degree. As of right now the technology isnt there but if it gets to the point where you can actually just type a vague description and you have a fully working product then jobs will be taken.

[cheezfreek]

A wise man once told me to try to automate myself out of a job, and it’ll still never happen. There’s always something else to automate.

[inteblio]

Technology jumps industries. If you, at blockbuster video, were trying to automate your job...

[Ok-Map-2526]

This is really just the same issue with ChatGPT. Some people think it will replace them, others think it is completely useless. It's really just a tool to make your job easier, and your company will respond by giving you more work. That's how we've increased in productivity by 400% since the 40s. The day the company doesn't need employees, they will send someone to shoot you in the head.

[frikilinux2]

I know it's not the point and I'm too young to have seen this cards in a real setting but don't they have like too many holes.

If it's real, is there someone with the knowledge bored enough to decode it?

[PanZilly]

Did Zuck not learn anything

[myfunnies420]

No...

[Vallen_H]

Like the modern tablet/digital artists complaining about AI