Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023
What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.
Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.
LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.
I had an assembly class in college. I didn’t love of at all. Got my first job after graduating and it was writing space shuttle engine control software, which was in assembly. I was kind of surprised at how fast it became natural after dealing with it full time. Still, it felt luxurious when we upgraded the controller and could do the software in C.
The article makes a mention of the early part of the movie Her, where he’s writing a heartfelt, personal card that turns out to be his job, writing from one stranger to another. That reference was exactly on target: I think most of us thought outsourcing such a thing was a completely bizarre idea, and it is. It’s maybe even worse if you’re not even outsourcing to someone with emotions but to an AI.
One of the things I look for in employees is the ability to distill complex topics into the important elements and explain it to someone unfamiliar. Some people are just naturally good at it, and it’s a really important skill for moving up a leadership chain.
Title question first: yes, you absolutely can be too dumb to program.
But as others have mentioned, being bad at math isn’t necessarily a deal breaker, especially if you’re taking about the actual arithmetic part of math.
What turns out to be key to programming is breaking down a problem into steps and figuring out the logic to do what you want to do. The computer is going to do the actual arithmetic, but you’ll need to tell it what you want to do step by step.
That’s a fair point, but (1) Apple is still huge globally, with them and Samsung dwarfing everyone else and (2) Google doesn’t operate in China, and probably some other countries, so the total global market isn’t relevant either.
I’m not sure you get what I’m saying. 56% of smartphones are Apples. The next biggest is Samsung, with just 26%. Next is Motorola with just 4%. Add all the Android phones together and the number doesn’t come close to the number of Apple phones. So yeah, it makes sense that Google is going to give a bigger incentive to a company that is going to drive more traffic by far than any other.
Isn’t that partly because Apple is one big company, but “Android” isn’t? The number of Android phones rivals Apple, but they’re made be a bunch of different companies, with Samsung selling the most.
I believe many of those people got banned, too.
Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.
It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.