I would have assumed that it was like 50%... I always assume everyone knows how to code or is code adjacent in some way. Remind me to go for a walk today...
I blame the pervasive messaging of "learn to code" and those "day in the life of a software engineer" videos. The number of CS graduates is like double what it was a few years ago. As we transition into a 'bust' cycle for tech with lots of layoffs suddenly you have a tricky situation where mid to senior engineers are looking for any kind of work they can get, while at the same time there is an ocean of junior talent looking to get their foot in the door.
Grew up surrounded by farms in rural Ontario. My parents did a great job of driving me to friends houses to socialize, but when there wasn't an organized play date I had two options: stay at home or go wander. I usually opted to stay at home and read or play video games but I did often just pick a direction and go walking. My parents made me take a hunting knife with me and only let me do this around the age of 12. While it is great to romanticize my wandering in the wilderness, it was typically pretty boring. As a result I played more video games as I got older.
My best friend lived in a sort of suburb (still very rural) but we'd spend all day biking around, meeting other kids, getting up to trouble, and making grand adventures to the store to buy mountain dew. This was all the way up until high school. After 14 I was too busy with school and sports in the academic year to do anything else, and in the summer I worked at a camp.
I talked to my mom about this recently and she said that 'kids can't just wander around anymore it's unsafe' and I'd argue that a child with a smart phone that constantly pings their location is a million times safer than whatever the hell we were doing.
I think the challenge is that parents are more anxious and video games and social media are way more convenient than anything outside the house, making a perfect storm. I don't remember leaving the house as much as a kid because there was that much to do outside, but rather we had exhausted all the activities at home. I feel like now you have unlimited options for entertainment at home so why bother, especially if your parents would rather you be at home anyways.
People raised on a diet of social democracy propaganda will kick and scream when you tell them people aren't equal and that decisions should be limited to exceptional individuals and not the mob. If you don't like the SpaceX structure don't invest. It's that easy. I'd rather give Elon the reins and see what happens. He managed to make electric cars viable and starlink is an incredible technical achievement. There's so much cool engineering to be done and only Elon seems to be capable of half of it. One person with a vision is more valuable than a million shareholders with a slight level of financial investment.
I’ve never heard of a non-proctored exam. Every exam I took in university was proctored. If you got caught (happened every once in a while and made everything very awkward) you failed the exam immediately, got kicked out, and had a department hearing. I have a vivid memory of two girls almost killing each other as a result of one such failed scheme during a CS Logic exam of all things.
I had the Naruto Chunnin Exam episodes where they write the written test on dvd as a kid and watched it all the time so it might have altered my philosophy but I’ve always viewed proctored tests as a mini game. The ability to gather information under stress, maintain composure, and evaluate the likelihood the person you were borrowing answers from knew what they were doing was always fun to me. Even on tests where I was going to get 90% guaranteed I liked seeing how much information I could parse from other people. I remember one exam I could make out another girls scantron and knew she was going to fail. She was the first person to hand in her answers and the proctor joked “wow that was quick, we’ll have to make the next one harder”.
When I was a proctor I loved trying to catch people cheating. Lots of wandering eyes but never a phone. I’d have thrown someone out so quick if the pulled out a phone and that’s before ChatGPT. I can’t imagine not having proctors. Honour systems sound great and all but not in an evaluation. Tribe mentality prevents most people from ratting on others (except for those with limited social status to lose from the jump), especially when you are 19.
I saw someone mention that having proctors “punished” students who followed the honour code which is insane. If you know what you are doing in an exam you’ll forget all about the proctors being there. The only people who will notice them are those trying to cheat…
> That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
This is true. I didn't really think about it from a kid/youth perspective. As an adult I think you can live a similar life style but kids definitely have been robbed of all of this. I'm past 25 and I average a house party a month still I would say. House party's are permission free though, if you want one then host one.
> And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
Video stores still exist. Depending how big of a town/city you will still bump into people you know if you are out and about.
>You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
Live how you want. If it's good others will follow your lead. I deleted all social media over five years ago and I have some friends who have at least tried to follow my lead. I read a ton, my friends do as well. I have a group of guys to play magic with every week where we take turns hosting.
If you have a vision of what you want the world to be the first step is to live that way yourself. Either others will follow or they won't, but you can't force people to do anything.
Reading is an independent activity by nature. I don't really see how other people not reading should affect you. There is nothing depressing about nature. It's natural that the majority of people would shift away from reading and gravitate towards easier forms of media consumption.
To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...
Wasn't it a few months ago that some engineer leaked that XAI was building 'Human Emulators'. This is either Meta's attempt at the same or just a blatant lie to make sure their engineers aren't slacking off. I've heard the workload has more than doubled for those who weren't laid off which is the only reason I think it might not be a employee monitoring system as I don't think anyone there can afford to not work hard.
Code Complete came out in '93 and even then they acknowledge most of the work around development wasn't actually programming but architecture, requirements, and design.
Sure you can let Claude have a field day and churn out whatever you want but the question is: a) Did you read the diffs and provide the necessary oversight to make sure it actually does what you want properly, b) Is the feature actually useful?
If you've worked on legacy systems you know there's so much garbage floating around that the bar isn't that high generally for code as long as it seems to work. If you read the code and documentation Claude makes thoroughly and aren't blindly accepting every commit there is not really a problem as long as you are responsible and can put your stamp of approval on it. If you are pushing garbage through it doesn't matter if a junior dev, yourself, or Claude wrote it, the problem isn't the code but your CI/CD process.
I think the problem is expectations. I know some devs at 'AI-native' organizations that have Claude do a lot for them. Which is fine, for a lot of boiler plate or standard requests they can now ship 2X code. The problem is the expectation is now that they ship 2X code. I think if you leave timelines relatively the same as pre-AI then having an agent generate, document, refactor, test, and evaluate code with you can lead to a better product.
Hybrid is the best in my opinion. I think 1-2 days in person a week is good as it lets you interact with your team, manager, and other employees in a natural way. Non-work related chit chat is pretty much impossible when working remote and it is the only thing that makes you feel like a 'team'. After that the other three days should be remote if you work in tech.
Work output shouldn't be any different at home vs. in office. I'm more productive at home and I'm am more inclined to play around after hours with ideas or solutions.
AI is a bit worrying from a developmental stand point. I learned how to code during my first two internships and it was stuff that Claude could probably one shot today. That being said, anyone whose worked with a terrible legacy system can probably attest that it is filled with garbage and an equivalent pass through documented by Claude is way better than some human developers work from ten years ago.
I think there will be an AI correction and OpenAI will be the center of it. I have no clue what their plan is, they seem to throw everything at the wall an nothing sticks. Gonna take MicroSlop down with them. Anthropic and Google will come out the other end in great shape though.
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel.
I always like the phrase, "follow the money", in situations like this. Are OpenAI or Microsoft close to AGI? Who knows... Is there a monetary incentive to making you believe they are close to AGI? Absolutely. Take in this was the first bullet point in Microsoft's blog post.
What I would give for my org to just buy an oxide rack and run everything license free on there. Shame the only people with access to our CIO are salesmen…
Well, when you have grant money for a project on X most supervisors will not let you do Y. Most students wouldn’t do research on Y if they weren’t going to be funded. I work in a lab where everyone else has to play ball by their grant proposals and you can sense a general lack of genuine curiosity. Which makes sense, they are not really different than a contract employee with a very specific deliverable that was designed before they even showed up. I can’t speak for other fields but especially in biomedical/compsci where your peers are making six figures working for graduate pay for 2 years (MSc) and then another 4-6 (PhD) doesn’t motivate you to engage outside of your exact degree requirements and your project. Add on that “curious” research doesn’t have a guaranteed path to publishing or to success and it suddenly becomes less appealing to gamble your future on such a thing. I would label my own research as “curious” in that I have support from professors at a few universities but on the whole we are facing challenges from academia at large. The only reason I can comfortably pursue something that has a genuine non-zero chance of failing into obscurity is that I am funded by an in-house university scholarship and I have a full time job.