I am not worried about the loss of skills per se. Over the centuries the average person has become less skilled at, for example, butchering animals. Is that bad for society? I don't know.
What I am worried about is us becoming dependent on tools that we as individuals neither own nor fully control, and gradually losing our ability to function without those tools. This, I think, is a huge societal risk.
Indeed. I think it's a much bigger issue for juniors, who haven't yet had a chance to build that systems design muscle.
When an LLM is making a bad design decision but the engineer doesn't have the experience to spot it AND the consequences don't become apparent until much later (which is often the case) -- it's kinda hard to learn.
I hear what you're saying but I'm not sure I buy it in the context of this thread (a response to someone who is 54 and has been coding since they were eight).
I am in a similar boat, having been coding full-time for fourty years. The way I use the current tools is that I own all architectural and design decisions but let Claude Code fill in the blanks. I reckon the quality of the output is about 90% of what it would have been had I done everything myself, but I get a lot more done (easily 3-5X).
Will I forget how to write a "for" loop just because I haven't been writing many of them by hand lately? Those skills are so deeply ingrained that I seriously doubt it. I can ride a bike after a multi-year break, or converse in a language I haven't regularly spoken for several decades. Or write using pen & paper even though I hardly ever do it. I don't see why coding would be any different.
I thought it would help illustrate what you're saying but, gosh, those Y axes aren't making things easy to interpret. For those willing to do the mental arithmetic, 1g of FAT is 9 kcal and 1g of CHO is 4 kcal. :)
> Not sure what problem everybody here is having with this.
For starters, it's extremely invasive (camera on to pay a bill - wtf?), has unclear privacy implications and questionable accessibility (to put it mildly).
> I've vibe-reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocols of more than a 100 Android apps
Impressive coverage, but how do you verify that the reverse engineering matches what the hardware expects? Do you find people who own those beds and get them to test stuff for you?
"[Learning] new sports" strikes me as an especially odd one. I can see how an AI tool could help to learn the theory or perhaps come up with better training or match-day/racing strategies, but it won't short-cut the work of developing the necessary physical skills, will it?
Just to make sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that today's open source models are on par with frontier closed models of two weeks ago? By what criteria?
Then why do you keep giving them your business? Have things gotten so bad where you live that there are no companies left who would treat you with respect?
That, plus the existence of chipsets used in those switches, such as Realtek RTL8372/RTL8373 and RTL9303. Feature rich yet dirt cheap.
I particularly like per-pert PoE power monitoring on the RTL837x. I hooked that up to my netdata to get a full history of how much each device in my rack is drawing. Don't need a fancy PDU or separate power bricks for each device -- everything is powered by the $60 switch.
(This is a home network and I'm not at all bothered about single points of failure or lack of redundancy/failover.)
I recently pulled OS2 fibre throughout my aparment and it was surprisingly inexpensive.
Four-fibre cable was about US$ 1.5/m (here in Switzerland, I am sure cheaper elsewhere).
I picked ONTi JT-S508CL-8S as the main 10G fibre switch (direct from Ali, for about 100 bucks).
For wired Ethernet and PoE, I have a couple of KeepLink KP-9000-9XHPML-X switches (I paid about 60 buck for each, they seem to cost around $85 now). I find that they work well and use them for 10/100/1000/2500 GbE switching and to power various devices (other switches, U7-Pro-XGS AP, Zigbee dongle, home automation server, rack fans etc).
The main splice box was about 60 bucks, 24 pigtails included.
From memory, 10G SFP+ fibre modules were about ten bucks apieces. (DAC cables are cheaper, 10G copper transceivers are more expensive.)
Plus various paraphenalia (wall face plates, keystone modules, more pigtails etc), all of which was pretty cheap.
Note that I was able to borrow a fusion splicer from a friend. Otherwise they seem to start at around 500 bucks; buying one would have been the single biggest expense.
I also run a 25G path from one point in my flat to my ISP. The cabling is exactly the same but 25G switching equipment and optics are considerably more expensive and less available than 10G.