Posts by chozorho

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

God forbid companies do on-the-job training so that knowledge isn't lost...! No, that would make wayyy too much sense.

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Re: Abandoned GH last year, deleted everything including accounts

I've gotta ask: do you have side projects? And do you self-host the source code?

I have very mixed feelings about GitHub; I boycotted them for three years after M$ took over, but then I broke the boycott during the pandemic. Due to their sheer size and name recognition, GitHub offers the promise of relief from the loneliness/isolation that I felt, when I was struggling to find developers who would do code reviews and work with me collaboratively. (Granted, most people ignored my Pull Requests, but... where else am I to go, to meet open-source developers during a pandemic?)

Re: He would say that...

*Stephen

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Re: Ummm...

Actually, I am a software engineer under the age of 30, and I would happily learn COBOL. The problem, last I checked, is that they do not offer entry-level or training positions in COBOL. Back in 2022. the vast majority of jobs demanded at _least_ seven years of experience with "COBOL, CICS, JCL/PROC, VSAM, DB2, Easytrieve." Some of them demanded 10, 12, or even 20 years of experience! If you can tell me where these "training opportunities" were, I would greatly appreciate it. This is the one part of the article that I found very dubious.

As AI becomes more popular, concerns grow over its effect on mental health

Re: Easy to see

> LGBTQ+ are the current un-savable.

Can you elaborate...? According to Gallup, around 64% of Americans view same-sex relationships as morally acceptable. https://news.gallup.com/poll/692801/adultery-cloning-seen-immoral-behaviors.aspx

Unfortunately, a slim majority also say that changing one's gender is _not_ morally acceptable. But the point still stands: not all the groups in LGBTQ are treated the same. So, what did you mean by "unsavable?"

Nonetheless, I agree with the rest of your comment... society is not prepared (nor is it preparing!) for the changes that technology will cause.

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

Re: Krishna's stated plan to replace people with AI appears not to have had the desired impact.

I respectfully disagree. I want IBM to learn from their mistakes and do better in the future. Aren't they doing research in quantum computing? I'd rather see them succeed in this area than some other company that is sympathetic to a foreign adversay.

But I may be biased, since I once dreamed of working for them.

We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too

Re: Programming techniques are yet to be refined

> Sure, "elegant" programming is nice when you can do it, but it rarely* makes serious headway into the scaling of a problem in terms of computational and data demands.

Isn't this tautologically false? An elegant algorithm will have lower time complexity by definition... so why would it not "make headway" into the scaling of a problem?

Re: "Generative AI is"

> I confess to producing utter rubbish on occasion (or so my family, friends and work colleauges tell me).

Well, I sure hope you are willing to correct yourself. And I hope you don't make the kind of obscene mathematical errors that LLMs tend to make.

I, for one, try not to make confident claims unless I can back them up with facts, citations, and reasoning.

AI won't take our jobs and it might even save the middle class

"The article does not mention LLMs at all."

well, it does mention the "impact" of "GitHub's Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT." Do those not count as LLMs?

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Re: COBOL IS DEAD!

Are you sure there are that many COBOL development jobs that are entry-level? I've been looking for a long time and I cannot find them...

Google's DeepMind says its AI coding bot is 'competitive' with humans

Re: Why are they doing this?

This talking point has always bothered me. If we are "short of coders," then why is it that when I apply to dozens of companies for software engineering positions, the majority of them ignore me without even giving me an interview? You might counter this by assuming that I'm just personally incompetent, but even my current company has thousands of applicants (and far fewer openings!) and yet still complains that "it's a candidate's market." That's an inconsistency in my view.

I suspect that there is a bit of a generational divide here. Maybe things are easy if you have decades of experience, but things aren't nearly as easy for young developers trying to get entry-level jobs. For this reason, I believe it's becoming a saturated market. But if I'm missing something, then I'm open to hearing it. In fact, I finally made an account here just to join this discussion.