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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29423 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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If we can get you to post quarterly reports on the state of the translation job market, that would be great. You're my personal barometer for when I should start taking AI seriously. My personal experience matches yours so far, and the idea that AI is some sort of a revolution in my field (software dev) is bizarre to me. So far it didn't deliver on anything more than a slightly better autocomplete. Some people use it as a replacement for Stack Overflow, which I still prefer to look up directly.

I've started retraining (returned to the university for a polsci degree), so hopefully I'll only be in the field for a few more years. (Partly preparation for if there's an unexpected leap in machine translation capacity that genuinely starts to eat into the job market, partly just that after ten years of freelancing and uncertainty a real job with a real salary and a real vacation has started to seem quite appealing).

Don't tell me I have to get someone to make a poli-sci AI so I can keep my barometer...

So far it didn't deliver on anything more than a slightly better autocomplete.

It is far better at that - for experienced developers doing something in area new to them

Some people use it as a replacement for Stack Overflow, which I still prefer to look up directly.

Often it is a superior replacement: you can get intern-quality work on any topic you want, very specific for your task. That sometimes is better than SO. And so far, on track of getting better and better.

I heard all that, tried it out for myself, and it just doesn't feel all that great to me. Maybe one day it will get better but it's just not all that useful in day to day tasks (which your own description kind of confirms).

you can get intern-quality work on any topic you want

That's terrible. I always seen internships essentially as charity work companies engage in to polish their PR, or, at best,extend their recruitment pool. You make it sound like the sale's pitch for Tesla's "full self driving (supervised)". It's awesome. Can take you anywhere. Almost no interventions... which results in you having to be ready to intervene at all times, or die driving into a truck.

Maybe one day it will get better, but I'd rather rely on Stefferi as my canary, than on the words of AI enthusiasts.

I wonder if we aren't observing some sort of split between students, hobbiests, web-devs and the like, and applications requiring genuine rigor. My own experience with AI generated code is largely summed up in this short here.

it's just not all that useful in day to day tasks

I guess it depends on how often you need to do stuff like "now I need to drop into badly written docs of a new setup and get simple program working".

I need it fairly often but I can imagine someone who needs it approximately never.

And I am quite surprised that it is useful even for that.

than on the words of AI enthusiasts

I am not an AI enthusiast

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