jurassicneil [any] @ jurassicneil @hexbear.net

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2

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18

Joined

5 yr. ago

All the best to you my friend. May you find joy and peace in whatever you do

Wow, thank you so much for this. You've given me a lot to think about. It's something I hadn't given much thought but now see how important it is. Collective labor power with respect to SWEs seems like a challenge but one I'm not averse to exploring. Appreciate your words truly.

When that happens I'm just stunned. Debugging queries is this guy's idea of a rewarding and stimulating challenge? Then wtf is wrong with me then lol. Good for him though lol.

Dude, this happens to me too with my boss. He'd assign me some project with a new tech/framework even he doesn't fully understand. That would be my main task while he is busy running multiple teams and doing stuff assigned to him. A bit later I find this guy playing with the framework he had assigned me and his level of proficiency with it is already beyond mine even though I was solely focused on that while he was juggling god knows how many things. I get that its a difference in years of experience but also, this dude was just playing around with the framework cuz he was curious. He didn't need to touch it at all, but he did it anyways. I would never think that way for computers. Other stuff yeah. Which brings me back to my original problem lol.

It sounds to me like maybe you've been gaslighted into thinking something is wrong with you for needing time for yourself.

Yeap, I don't buy into the gaslighting though. It's just that I have no better option right now, so doing this work is the only way for me. I thought if I actually was interested in the stuff I'm working on, maybe I'd be more efficient at it and save more time or even if I did have to work extra it wouldn't burn me out. That's why I asked about the social sciences in my post as I had more inclination towards that, but the way I see this going currently, I'm concerned.

I would say more social sciences than humanities.

What about social sciences? Are they also constrained to only being viable in academia?

My boss/who is also my mentor expects me to upskill and upskill fast. As such I can't forget about it when I get home. I need to put some extra time to handle the learning curve. I don't mind it too much just that I feel if this field resonated with me more, I wouldn't think of this as extra work but something I inherently enjoy doing. Which makes me feel that I'm missing out on having a fulfilling career/life in someway.

you could always start a company of your own and give me a job

I would if I could......one day. Seriously though, thank you for perspective.

I'm actually given a lot of autonomy at my job. It's the learning aspect that I'm sort of struggling with. I do learn but it's like I'm forcing myself to do so instead of finding something in it that piques my curiosity and leading with that. As such I don't feel like I'm gonna learn as well as I should if I was naturally a bit curios about it.

IMO work can only be so engaging, like I love CS but I only get to do the fun stuff at work sometimes

That's a good point.

Thank you for you words comrade. Appreciate them truly.

My current workplace is somewhat socially aligned and they do good work. Problem is me not finding the work itself that exciting.

My current workplace is somewhat socially aligned and they do good work. Problem is me not finding the work itself that exciting.

I'm okay with a paycut early in my career if it means I actually enjoy doing what I do. My concern is long term if I'll be able to have good growth opportunities or not. What do you think?

That's just a straw man, because there's no reason why you wouldn't be looking through your code. What LLM does is help you find areas of the code that are worth looking at.

It's not a strawman because classifying unperformant code is a different task than generating performant replacement code. LLM can only generate code via it's internal weights + input it doesn't guarantee that that code is compilable, performant, readable, understandable, self documenting or much of anything.

The performance gain here is coincidental simply because the generated code uses functions that call processor features directly rather than get optimized into processor features by a compiler. LLM classifiers are also statistically analyzing the AST for performance they aren't actually performing real static analysis of the AST or it's compiled version. It doesn't calculate a BigO or really know how to reason through this problem, it's just primed that when you write the for loop to sum, that's "slower" than using _mm_add_ps. It doesn't even know which cases of the for loop compile down to a _mm_add_ps instruction on which compilers and which optimization levels.

Lastly you injected this line of reasoning when you basically said "why would I do this boring stuff as a programmer when I can get the LLM to do it". It's nice that there's a tool that you can politely ask to parse your garbage and replace with other garbage that happens to use a function that's more performant. But not only is this not Software Engineering, but a performant dot product is a solved problem at EVERY level of abstraction. This programming equivalent of tech bros reinventing the train every 5 years.

The fact that this is needed is a problem in and of itself with how people are building this software. This is machine spirit communion with technojargon. Instead of learning how to vectorize algorithms you're feeding your garbage code through a LLM to produce garbage code with SIMD instructions in it. That is quite literally stunting your growth as a Software Engineer. You are choosing to ignore learning how things actually work because it's too hard to parse through the existing garbage. A SIMD dot product algo is literally a 2 week college junior homework assignment.

Understanding what good uses for it are and the limitations of the tech is far more productive than simply rejecting it entirely.

I quite literally pointed several limitations in the post you replied to and in this post from a Software Engineering perspective.

Hey so I read your comments and found them insightful. Me being a Software Engineer who just started his first job, what would be your advice for the right approach to grow and learn as a software engineer? Both in general and with respect to using LLMs while learning/coding.

Thank you so much!

Agreed somewhat. I'd rather not know all the BS that's happening. It's less about influencing and more about staying informed in case smth like the IDF getting cooked happens

that's the thing. idk what main sources and commentary are good