I highly respect Antirez, and as an Italian fellow programmer, for me, he's like a legend!
Although reading this article makes me quite sad; I consider myself an average, mediocre programmer, but I enjoy writing code since it's a way to build the mental model of a problem and to solve it iteratively.
I obviously use agents and all the new fancy tools, but if a great programmer like Antirez says that it's over, I think I'm not so faithful about my future as an engineer.
I'm a senior software engineer with 14 years of experience; I worked with small teams and enterprises, and I successfully contributed to the success of many products. Hire me if you want to onboard a passionate, team player, used to wearing many hats, colleague.
> You don't need a body, you need electrical signals your brain interprets as body.
As I was saying, your brain is literally part of your body. It's a living organ of your body that receives those inputs, as you say, from the rest of your body.
> And in principle you don't even need a brain, you could replace that with some matrix multiplication or transistors that do the same stuff.
I completely disagree here, and that's why guessing that a bunch of matrix multiplications are coscient and have self awareness of their own experience while running in a CPU seems quite hilarious to me.
> Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model.
Bro, I think we discarded this idea from Platone and Cartesio a while ago...
Your brain is your body.
Your mind is not detached from it, and you can't feel anything, and so have a subjective experience, without it.
Neither, your mind, or "soul" could survive to the physical death of your body.
> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
How can you have a subjective experience without a body?
That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self aware of what's happening.
How can you be self aware without feeling? And how do you feel, without a body?
> I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined
Yep, the same here, I'm a long pair programming enjoyer, but I'd like to raise that collaboration is usually meant with a human being in the context of pp, and prompting and agent to execute a task is nothing like that.
> but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
A four-day-a-week worker here.
I don't know what you exactly mean, but my personal experience is exactly the opposite. I worked for a startup as a founding engineer, just 4d/w (the CTO was crazily open-minded), and I was never so productive. Doesn't matter that the others were working 5 days, pushing more; it was my responsibility to keep up, and it worked pretty well.
Same now, working for a company with the same arrangement.
I'm a senior software engineer with 14 years of experience; I worked with small teams and enterprises, and I successfully contributed to the success of many products, Hire me if you want to onboard a passionate, team player, used to wear many hats, colleague.
> Does nobody else laugh that a company supposedly worth more than almost anything else at the moment, is basically hacking around a load of text files telling their trillion dollar wonder machine it absolutely must stop talking to customers about goblins, gremlins and ogres?
Honestly, when I was reading the article, I couldn't stop laughing.
This is quite hilarious!
I'm a senior software engineer with 14 years of experience; I worked with small teams and enterprises, and I successfully contributed to the success of many products,
Hire me if you want to onboard a passionate, team player, used to wear hmany hats, colleague.
But I'm starting to have an identity crisis: am I doing it wrong, and should I use an agent to write any line of code of the product I'm working on?
Have I become a dinosaur in the blink of an eye?
Should I just let it go and accept that the job I was used to not only changed (which is fine), but now requires just driving the output of a machine, with no creative process at all?
So you are telling me that quoting the time spent to build a single square yard of fabric in the pre-industrial society is a contextualized comment to the % of co2 emission for the fashion industry?
Although reading this article makes me quite sad; I consider myself an average, mediocre programmer, but I enjoy writing code since it's a way to build the mental model of a problem and to solve it iteratively.
I obviously use agents and all the new fancy tools, but if a great programmer like Antirez says that it's over, I think I'm not so faithful about my future as an engineer.