“ There will be NO programmers in 5 years.” – EMostaque | Hacker News Reader

“ There will be NO programmers in 5 years.” – EMostaque

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2 pointsHoasi6 comments

> Mohammad Emad Mostaque is the founder and CEO of Stability AI

> Mostaque claimed he received his master's degree in mathematics and computer science from Oxford University in 2005 but had only received a bachelor's degree.

> In June, 2023, a news report citing more than 30 sources, [...] evealed Mostaque had misled investors and the public about his educational background

I'm sure he's a swell guy, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. This sounds like artificial copium made by and for the anti-AI-accelerationists.

Which is another way to say this is a slightly obscured ad for his company, and that's always trustworthy!

Probably a case of this:

>In the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, Bachelors of Arts are promoted to the degree of Master of Arts or Master in Arts (MA) on application after six or seven years' seniority as members of the university (including years as an undergraduate). It is an academic rank indicating seniority, and not an additional postgraduate qualification, and within the universities there are in fact no postgraduate degrees which result in the postnominals 'MA'.[1] No further examination or study is required for this promotion and it is equivalent to undergraduate degrees awarded by other universities.

If he upgraded the degree to an MA then what he said was technically true. TBH I'm not sure why anyone would care about the difference between a BA and a masters. In the UK it's only an additional year of study even for a 'real' masters in most instances.

Ha, that's exactly how it worked for the first ~250 years at Harvard...

'Five dollars and three years out of jail' was how they described getting a master's degree back then.

That wouldn't generally be considered to be a masters in any particular subject, though; I went to the University of Dublin (more commonly known as Trinity College Dublin) and am even, I suppose, eligible for the MA promotion (you have to apply, though; it's not automatic), but I never heard of anyone who'd done it claiming to have, well, a _proper_ masters.

> TBH I'm not sure why anyone would care about the difference between a BA and a masters. In the UK it's only an additional year of study even for a 'real' masters in most instances.

Yes, they probably shouldn't care about the difference, but the, er, technical truth is a pretty negative signal about the teller of technical truths. (As I say, I don't think it's really a technical truth; someone who'd done that could claim to have a masters, but not to have a masters in maths).

Yes. Apparently we're going to call them something else now.

I've been programming for about 45 years. This old chestnut pops up every 4-5 years. It's no more true now, than it was in 1979.

And I get this from the article:

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Obviously one of those programmers that we won't have in 5 years didn't do something he should have.

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