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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

AI has me super jealous of how quickly kids can learn things today. Back in the 90s banging you head against the wall trying to get the simplest things in Linux to work, and trying to learn programming from a book with minimal resources online. It was 'hard mode'. I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that.. though I would like to play some Quake deathmatch again on a populated server..

There are still lots of underground nooks and crannies of the internet today, arguably more than ever. It's what you make of it, and where you choose to spend your time.

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> I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that..

I would. Having the answer handed to you doesn't actually teach you much. It's the struggle to figure out the answer that makes it stick. The kids today who can just get easy answers from AI aren't going to have anywhere near the skills we do.

The problem is you struggle to hack together a sub optimal solution because you don't have the resources to figure out anything better. It didn't make me better, it was a waste of time. Remember experts exchange? Uhg..

Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains, and learn while asking questions to an AI that is available 24/7, and and has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things. Personally even as an experienced programmer I have learned so much in the last year, greatly accelerated by AI.

Kids are going to be better off for it, and with it will achieve incredible things.

> Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains

Today, you can quickly get a shallow, superficial understanding of the domain that might impress some people who know barely anything about the respective domain.

> and learn while asking questions to an AI that [...] has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things.

ROFL

You're threatened by AI, I get that.

I am rather threatened by people who fall for the AI hype. :-D

Yes, often when threatened we revert to a state of denial. Try to trivialize and disarm the threat in our mind.

>better

Bullshit. I've seen blind idiots kids pasting Solaris commands into Linux servers, without having any clue of what were they doing.

Kids are going to be really screwed when the AI output converges into more Markov-chains like bullshit as it's being self-feeding with it's own output, creating something like a big but pompous Megahal/Hailo clone.

If any, we the older Millenials are trained to do hard tasks with just the manuals sitting on a table. The rest will be clueless.

> Kids are going to be really screwed when the AI output converges into more Markov-chains like bullshit as it's being self-feeding with it's own output, creating something like a big but pompous Megahal/Hailo clone.

This isn't going to happen. The literature on model collapse suggests it occurs when your model is fed on majority synthetic data, which is not how anyone is training models. Even if they were, do you think they're going to ship something that performs noticeably worse than its predecessor?

You said it. Traning. But later, most of the input of data it's being inputted back from AI's output.

Because the end users will use far more the output data from AI than feeding it from remote sources far from the original.

Disasters will happen, just wait.

> do you think they're going to ship something that performs noticeably worse than its predecessor?

This happens all the time. Once the first gen devs are off, the releases tend to alternate. A decline from the existing version and then an improvement that mostly fixes what they made worse in the prior release. e.g. Windows XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10

The nature of AI though may make it more difficult to distinguish the failings immediately which could result in an irreversible inflection point.

AI's are not OSes. Once the source of training comes mostly from the AI itself instead of human curated sources, what will you get over time it's the same thing the Megahal/Hailo chatbots parroted a few decades ago.

> do you think they're going to ship something that performs noticeably worse than its predecessor?

Yes. Capitalist software vendors do that all the time. Google search has been getting continually worse over the decades. Windows is more bloated than ever. AI is going to be no different.

Hell, I'm old and had been meaning to learn React for years but never really stuck with it (I have things to do). With GPT it was pretty easy. I still read the docs, but I don't get stuck for hours on syntax minutiae and the like.

Dunno, I never saw the value of learning some esoteric piece of language/library/sysadmin trivia I'd use once or twice after spending hours poking at things trying to figure it out.

Hey, you can still play Q2DM at tastyspleen.net

Not as glamorous as before but there are still players every day. http://tastyspleen.net/quake/servers/list.cgi

I cried my eyes out when I was about 8 years old and finally got my Unix install connected to the Internet with only the man pages to help.

This is true. I am lucky to have learned as much as I have by this point. My Dad reminds me almost daily how lucky I am.

There is something to be said about doing things "the hard way" and I think AI is, in the short term, going to decrease the amount of medium-skilled software developers out there.

Just think: AI is being used to train doctors too.

I’m so glad I lived through hard mode. I have a kind of perseverance and resilience in the face of difficult learning challenges that my teenagers are hardly developing (despite my best efforts), and it has made my life so much richer.

I left Windows for Linux in 1999 and I do NOT miss how difficult everything was to get working, even with the reasonably user-friendly Red Hat (5? 6?). I even became the maintainer of a Linmodem driver by accident (it was abandoned, the author was uncontactable, and I needed the modem to dial).

I'll take present-day Ubuntu any day. I install it on my desktop, and it just works, GPU and all. I install it on my weird laptop with a touchscreen that swivels 360 degrees and can rotate to a portrait desktop, and it also just works.

yeah but it also meant that the job market may have been easier, lower barriers to entry

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