I used to do that exact job 10 years ago (without AI, obviously). I figure that career would be very different now.
There was something exciting about sleuthing out how those old machines worked: we used a black box approach, sending in test samples, recording the output, and comparing against the digital algorithm’s output. Trial and error, slowly building a sense of what sort of filter or harmonics could bend a waveform one way or another.
I feel like some of this is going to be lost to prompting, the same way hand-tool woodworking has been lost to power tools.
It will be the future for sure, software as a tool for everyone.
While there is something lost in prompting, people will always seek out first-principles so they can understand what they are commanding and controlling, especially as old machines become new machines with new capabilities not even imaginable before due to the old software complexity wall.
It's exactly as you say: software as a tool for everyone and it's hard for programmers like me to accept that because I've spent so much time, read so many books, and work so hard perfecting my craft.
But smart programmers will realize the world doesn't care about any of that at all.
You’re ignoring Jevons paradox. Everyone, both people and companies, will be making exponentially more software with these tools. Software that both needs to get created, debugged and updated to realize the intention of it. That’s what our time will be spent on as programmers.
At the same time ability to write software is exploding we are watching large entities in the market consolidated and small businesses end up on the down side of the K shaped economy. Programmers demand and pay should go down as supply increases just like every other person in an economy.
Exactly! There isn't enough woodworking jobs for thousands of thousands of workers. Of course you have people handcrafting things and people demanding handcrafted things. Programming will be the same.
This doesn’t seem right to me. Carpentry still seems like a pretty solid line of work with a lot of jobs. I know at least one guy who moved from EE work to contracting because he could make a lot more money that way.
Given, a lot of it is framing houses and remodeling. And there are fewer jobs in hardwood furniture these days. But a lot of that is because US furniture manufacturing was moved to China 20 years ago, not because of power tools.
If anything, the advent of power tools in the 40s/50s made single family homes more affordable and increased construction demand.
Especially when the "content" is a blatant AI summary:
> Duffer’s advice highlights a conflict between technological advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he mentioned are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making images appear sharper or more colorful, but they alter the original look of the content. By asking fans to turn these features off, he is stressing the importance of preserving the director’s vision.
Sad, I wrote my first ever programs on Arduino, learned C++ through it, and did my first OSS contribution by creating the Arduino MIDI Library, ~16 years ago.
I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for Arduino. Thank you to the OSH community for making these boards open to all back then.
I gave my kids (5 and 2) two Volcas (Beats & Keys) to play with. The Keys is a bit too advanced (too easy to get no sound at all, or something that sounds horrible), but the Beats is a wonderful machine for kids, as it's virtually impossible to make it sound bad. Also great to teach them rhythm.
Except you hit limits when trying to share that URL. Eg: try pasting a URL longer than 4096 bytes in Signal or WhatsApp, and they don't render it as clickable.
There was something exciting about sleuthing out how those old machines worked: we used a black box approach, sending in test samples, recording the output, and comparing against the digital algorithm’s output. Trial and error, slowly building a sense of what sort of filter or harmonics could bend a waveform one way or another.
I feel like some of this is going to be lost to prompting, the same way hand-tool woodworking has been lost to power tools.