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Comment by mwill | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but I clicked around /g/, which I haven't done in probably more than a decade, and a thread caught my eye about learning to code. The replies were overwhelmingly of the position that it is useless, and you will be replaced by AI before you can get a job if you start learning now.

I think that's nonsense, and 4chan is bent towards pessimism but it's still surprising to me.

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/g/ is ridiculously overdramatic (and often offensive, though much less so than the political boards where the nazis fester), but regularly interesting. Agree that the pessimism here is misplaced, but not by much. The main change I see is not that AI will render coding or coders superfluous, but that it will massively shift the economics in favor of solo developers and small teams that don't have access to significant capital.

Yes and no. If you expressed interest in learning to program and were handed a book on x86 assembly language, most people would call that a waste of time. Even if you succeed at learning x86 as your first language, the knowledge will not be especially useful when employers are looking for fluency in modern C++ or Rust or whatever. It never hurts to have a solid grasp of the low-level fundamentals, of course, but it's not the name of the game. Not anymore.

The way I think of it is, all current programming languages are now assembly languages. Coding will not go away -- not by any means -- but the job will be utterly unrecognizable in ten to fifteen years.

And it's about fucking time.

I just picked up a new 13900k / RTX4090 box the other day at the local white-box builder. I was telling my partner how cool it was that it could do almost a trillion calculations per second on the CPU, and maybe 40x that on the graphics card. "How does that compare to the big mainframes from the late 60s?" she asked. "About ten million times faster. But I still program the same way those guys did, using almost the same language and tools. How weird is that?"

4chan has been in full doomer mode for years. It didn't used to be, from what I remember, though I was never an active denizen.

I'd love to understand the sociology behind the change in vibe that happened there.

Too much anime and weed

That describes a lot of communities. Most of which don't produce similar attitudes as a result.

I reckon that the format of the site caps how large of a community it could build, and its (well-earned) reputation for being the dregs of the internet has continuously selected and pushed new people meeting that description in (forcing others out). The result is distillation. As the internet gets bigger and bigger, 4chan gets worse and worse.

Combine with that the fact that anonymity combined with a relatively small community (relative to, say, Reddit) creates the perfect grounds for false consensus building, and a real echo chamber forms.

It’s been like that as long as I’ve known. It just used to be dooming over smartphones and Microsoft products

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