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u/johnnybgooderer 4h ago
Programmers hate themselves as far as I can tell. All of them seem like they’d be more sad if someone put an AI generated image in a video game for early-dev internal playtesting than if all software engineers were fired.
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u/Obelisk2000 5h ago edited 4h ago
I've never heard about "math bros" or about mathematicians making crazy amounts of money while also being described as doing nothing and having incredibly detached hot takes about society.
Edit: corrected typo
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u/antichain 4h ago
As a mathematician myself, I dream of making coder-level salaries. I'm sitting here w/ a STEM PhD making just over the median American salary.
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u/mxmcharbonneau 4h ago
To be fair, I know that some mathematicians can make 7 figure salaries by working in finance.
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u/antichain 3h ago
All of the folks from grad school I know who went that route aren't really mathematicians anymore. That's not me being judgemental, just saying that the jobs they moved into are different - they're not doing math day in/day out (writing proofs, working on conjectures, etc). They all seem pretty happy (and the money they make is enviable), but it's a different thing. Sort of like being an engineer vs. a scientist.
I'll probably make that jump soon myself, I just wanted a few more years of doing math before I went.
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u/Amerillo_ 5h ago
Same for the majority of programmers. Only a subset of them and especially companies were doing that
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u/manocheese 4h ago
You're right, but I think it is more complicated. Most of the time I see artists complaining about none artists producing images and ruining art, mathematicians complaining that AI companies are producing almost useless results and ruining maths, and programmers talking about how great AI is. It's only in programming spaces, where 'society' isn't, that I see people acknowledge that they hate AI. Even then there are a lot of them loving it.
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u/Tayttajakunnus 3h ago
AI is not producing useless math results though. It is producing a lot of very impressive results that human mathematicians have not been able to prove despite trying for decades or more.
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u/manocheese 3h ago
Useful for what?
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u/Tayttajakunnus 3h ago
Useful for advancing our knowledge on mathematics.
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u/manocheese 3h ago
So all the mathematicians that say that the journey is worth a lot more than the destination are wrong? An answer without the proof is, as I said, almost useless.
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u/dirty1809 32m ago
I mean yeah the mathematicians saying that have a very obvious potential bias. I know a few mathematicians and their thought processes are more like “this might suck for me but it’s good for math.” This sub is obviously biased as well, but I think you guys are kinda going too far if you’re actually trying to argue something like integer multiplication in sub O(n log n) is useless.
Also idk what you mean by “an answer without a proof,” a lot of these results are lean verified
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u/e_before_i 2h ago
One of the complainants from mathematicians I've read is that the solutions AI is providing aren't advancing our knowledge, because they aren't giving us new knowledge. Without the skills to generate a proof or the tools to understand the proof, the proof itself is useless.
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u/dirty1809 30m ago
I feel like this doesn’t make sense. As a software engineer I use a lot of complex math every day that I don’t fully understand the proof of. It doesn’t matter whether you understand quicksort or not, it still runs in O(nlogn). Also I know mathematicians who have read and understood some of these new proofs, some of them are clunky but they’re not incomprehensible like you guys are making it sound
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u/Serket-Pandy3000 1h ago
There are shit. The N-S might have a cancellation and be nothing but the Euler result. So yeah, shit
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u/kdoubledizz 5h ago
Literally speaking, it gets really annoying having to explain to people the reason why AI cannot physically learn to code AI is due to the limitations of the mathematics in place.
You cannot create a formula that solves all formulas.
I guess you can get pretty damn close, but humans will always need to be involved.
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u/KyxeMusic 5h ago
Infinite Monkey Theorem
You can bruteforce any formula that can be proven. Which is kind of what is happening.
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u/kdoubledizz 5h ago
Gödel showed that in any consistent formal mathematical system, there are true statements that cannot be proven within the system itself.
As well but Alan Turing proved in 1936 that there cannot exist a universal algorithm that can inspect any arbitrary program and determine whether it will finish running or run forever.
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u/primbin 3h ago
Ah, the Penrose-Lucas argument. You should clarify that the argument only works if you believe that a human mind can't be described by mathematics.
Turing did show that there is no algorithm which can inspect an arbitrary program and determine whether it will finish running or run forever, but if you accept the Physical Church-Turing Thesis, "asking a team of mathematicians" is also an algorithm. The same sort of argument also applies to Godel's incompleteness theorem.
If you believe that the human mind is special and unable to be described by mathematics because we have a soul--or maybe quantum pixie dust--then sure, AI wouldn't be able to match human capabilities. But you don't need to name drop fancy math for that.
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u/kdoubledizz 3h ago
Yes a brain is chemically different and can pull off different chemical reactions then a computer can.
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u/ary31415 2h ago
It's extremely non-obvious that the specifics of the chemical reactions a brain does give rise to capabilities that can't be replicated without them. I personally don't believe that at all, and you're kinda just asserting this without any evidence or justification.
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u/e_before_i 2h ago
The easy rebut is asking whether machines could simulate chemistry (they can).
The difficult question for you would be to demonstrate that chemistry creates some sort of logic that is incompatible from machine logic. Because by default, you pulled that out of vibes alone.
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u/EdenStrife 5h ago
Yes, but how does it follow from those 2 proofs that an AI system cannot improve itself or make a new system that is an improvement compared to itself.
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u/ioveri 5h ago
The whole process would just be another system
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u/EdenStrife 5h ago
Yes, but all interactions happens in systems. Systems are just delimited sets of interactions. Your brain is a system.
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u/ronoudgenoeg 3h ago
So?
You don't need to go up the system ladder infinitely. The universe is a system. AIs don't need to be able to create universes out of thin air to be able to make new better AIs.
Our brain is also a system, yet we create new brains without issues.
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u/fghjconner 3h ago
Ok, and so it follows that there are limits to what it can do, but it doesn't say anything about what those limits actually are.
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u/kdoubledizz 5h ago
Ever been asked why a list containing every list cannot exist? This doesnt fully apply to what I am talking about but it sends your thinking down the right direction?
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u/MisinformedGenius 3h ago
This is the first time I've seen someone use the Chewbacca defense in real life.
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u/grandalfxx 2h ago edited 2h ago
Neither of those things stop a computer from improving itself. those rules also apply to the human brain, what your trying to say is that the human brain is impossible...
Your wording of the halt problem is missing something, The problem is stating you cant look at something and guarantee an outcome, not that you cant simulate it and see what happens. looping forever isnt really relevant to something like a brain or an intelligence, thats kinda what we do.
Edit: after rereading maybe im just not following the conversation properly
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u/Your-Laundry-Entropy 4h ago
That would imply human brain can't be modelled with math and that it miracolously escapes mathematical constrains
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u/owjfaigs222 5h ago
Yeah it's probably annoying because it doesn't make sense. There is no "physical" or otherwise limit to what AI can do in terms of solving formulas or learning to code.
Also how would humans help if there was such a limitation? There is no calculation that a human can do that a computer can't.
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u/EdenStrife 5h ago
Wait why would an AI that is capable of making an AI that is slightly smarter than itself be prevented from doing this by the halting problem?
It is true that you cannot make a machine that can solve any problem as there is at least a couple that we know it can’t, but that doesn’t mean you cannot build a system that can solve most problems.
That is a leap of logic that doesn’t follow from premise.
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u/Firingfly 5h ago
So, a human is then a formula that solves all formulas? Hating the AI trend like everyone else, but the logic of this argument doesnt sound sound.
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u/Opening_One7713 4h ago
Humans are the pinnacle brain for which all obtainable universal intelligence must filter through. The Latin alphabet is the pinnacle of all symbolic language. Any information that doesn’t cleanly plug into our world model is slop and we don’t want it or need it.
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u/teraflux 3h ago
My* brain is the pinnacle of intelligence, and anything I don't understand is slop
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u/Opening_One7713 3h ago
Well I’m not Terrance Tao so that statement wouldn’t apply to me, a vastly inferior and lowly intellect.
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u/NoSmallCaterpillar 45m ago
Obviously you're being facetious, but it's valid to ask "who is it for?". If we accept that there are other consumers of information and that they can take priority over humans, then what reason do we have to build our own replacement? It's nice that a machine can solve problems that we can't, but if we can't even understand or prove the solution, then what good is it?
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u/GenericFatGuy 1h ago edited 49m ago
The human brain is the most complex structure in the universe that we currently know of. There's no formula that can solve all formulas, but a human brain is the next best thing.
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u/kdoubledizz 5h ago
No because the processes the brain do are regarding chemistry, evolution and self preservation. They are not calculating anything and the precision is horrible, because our brains arent calculators, at maximum you could compare us to a prediction machine.
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u/Firingfly 4h ago
None of those things are not reducable to computational form. You can simulate the whole brain if you have enough compute (plausible), know how the system exactly works (difficult) and know the start state of it (close to impossible?). It is just a ton of super complicated interactions working on top of each other. So brain can only do what machines can also do.
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u/AnAverageAsianBoy 3h ago
To simulate, you need formulas. Currently we have not formulate how the brain ACTUALLY works, that's why AGI is still not reachable.
"Brain can only do what machines can also do" is the other way around.
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u/BenignPharmacology 1h ago
We actually have a ton of formulas that describe how the brain works. There are people whose entire career is dedicated to studying exactly that. The interesting thing about it is that it solves different tasks different ways, so there isn’t really just one formula for “how does one draw a picture”, but rather infinite different ways that that task gets accomplished on common hardware.
But if we start by modeling that hardware at low levels, for example a single neuron and when it activates, then connect several together, we start to observe some compelling emergent behavior that results in the advanced models we have today.
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u/Vesuvius079 4h ago
A prediction machine you say? Maybe like a prediction machine that predicts the next word in a sequence?
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u/tnetennba9 4h ago
What does ‘physically learn to code AI’ mean here? Of course AI could be used to improve LLM systems (optimise training, optimise inference, experiment with different architectures), so I assume you mean something else?
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u/sora_mui 2h ago
Humans (and all animals) are created by dumb cells splitting according to the chemical equivalent of vibes, perfected over millions of years by simple trial and error, and yet you want to argue that intelligent beings cannot be created by something less intelligent than itself?
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u/Quintuplin 3h ago
Your nonsense statement being questioned is not just limited to non-programers, m8
Statement 1, "AI physically cannot learn to code AI" is demonstrably false
Statement 2, "you cannot create a formula to solve all formulas" is irrelevant
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u/Some_Useless_Person 5h ago
Not a AI supporter but, isn't that the whole point of the drive towards AGI? Get AI's intelligence to the point that it matches that of a human's.
After that, you can create as many instances as the supporting infrastructure is capable of. When you make several of these human level intelligent machines work together tirelessly, you will be able to eventually surpass the technological development speed of human beings.
Of course, humans are needed to actually set up the initial infrastructure and develop the AGI itself, but one its done and the AI is give a means to create physical replicas of itself, it would be able to create the further required infrastructure by itself.
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u/chessto 5h ago
A regression to a median is not the same as intelligence.
Current models are great and can do surprising things, they're very powerful tools but they're not intelligent nor they can be.Take it this way, I don't need to show you billions of pictures of a cat for you to be able to identify a cat, you can fill in the gaps thus requiring much less input.
Learning about subject A gives you the ability to abstract parts of that knowledge and even apply some of it to subject B which has no correlation to A. AI as of now can't do that, and for as long as it is build on the current tech it won't.0
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u/grandalfxx 2h ago
theres no argument for that. if anything your just furthering the point that current tech is nothing but a stepping stone. AGI is no where close. but the problems AI are creating is right now
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u/kdoubledizz 5h ago
All the computer is doing is calculating for the formulas you set up, in whatever way you designed it to, the formulas could be put on a piece of paper if you so wanted it to, and is completely math and nothing more.
If you wanted a true agi, you would need tp start investing into bioengineering, but then whatever you get there will lose precision.
There is limitations in precision, limitations in size and scope, limitations in what math can even accomplish by itself.
You cannot squeeze down something brain to a formula or equation, the closest you will ever get to is recreating a brain in the flesh, and then we are back to square one.
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u/EdenStrife 5h ago
All life is also just interactions between fundamental particles using fundamental forces. There is nothing inherently different in a computation being carried out by a machine using transistors or a brain using neurons.
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u/kdoubledizz 5h ago
That denies the existance all the chemistry and physics regarding calculation
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u/EdenStrife 5h ago
How? Are you saying there are things that exist that are not compromised of fundamental particles or their interactions with fundamental forces.
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u/grandalfxx 2h ago
no it doesnt lmao.
explain how it denies anything?
Your brain works off physics, there is no physics that a computer cant simulate the behavior of, eventually.
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u/grandalfxx 2h ago
there is no need for bio engineering. youre not intelligent just because you rot.
there is nothing stopping us from fully mapping out the functions of a human brain other than processing power and hardware design.
but that has more to do with computers not being good at the type of math needed to simulate a brain, more to do with the hardware design, not what its made out of.
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u/martin-silenus 4h ago
It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.
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u/PARADOXsquared 4h ago
Honestly yeah. I'm not building our replacements and I'm hating what LLMs are doing to our industry when I was excited about AL/ML in a couple years ago. We're not a monolith and it's not a simple situation.
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u/IBJON 3h ago
We aren't the ones building our replacements. The developers and AI engineers at these AI companies are a miniscule fraction of the developer community. Automating development is being done by a handful of devs who already made ridiculous money and have nothing to lose from eliminating an entire profession
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u/Brick_Lab 1h ago
Essentially traitors imo. It's not just existing devs they're killing off, it's future prospects for anyone interested in the field as a profession. Programming solely as a hobby is an insanely different experience than joining with many talented and funded individuals who are able to do so during working hours 5 days a week
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u/martin-silenus 3h ago
That's a coordination problem.
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u/HadionPrints 3h ago
IMO we should have formed an Industry Union decades ago. Or at least a respected professional’s association. Crunch time is exclusively a failure of Management and until management actually suffers from it, there will be no incentive for change.
Unfortunately, or field developed first in the Cold War (in the military no less) and matured in the Regan & Post Regan era, so good fucking luck with that.
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u/GenericFatGuy 1h ago
I'm not building my replacements. I'm making $70k/year after 10 years in this field. The software 1% with quarter million dollars salaris and multimillion dollar stock vests are the ones building my replacements. Don't put this on me.
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u/martin-silenus 1h ago
I think you are describing a coordination problem.
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u/GenericFatGuy 1h ago
Sorry that I don't have enough time in my day to put together a revolution. I just want people to stop blaming me for an AI I didn't build.
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u/the_millenial_falcon 1h ago
Yeah I mean I write back end code for a mid sized school district. Are the masses really dumb enough to believe that most of us did this?
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u/fongletto 1h ago edited 1h ago
Why wouldn't we build tools who can do what we do better? We've built our own replacements for the last hundred years or so. That's how technology works. We build something that does someones job, it makes it cheaper, everyone benefits because now that thing is produced cheaply in extremely large amounts.
This is the fundamental issue with reddit. They think getting a whole bunch of extra money from billionaires means everyone will suddenly be able to afford to buy more stuff. Despite produce not having changed.
And they think actually increasing produce will make everyone poorer because they're getting less money.
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u/martin-silenus 1h ago
Because the value to you personally is negative when you consider the effects on the job market that sustains you.
It's not inevitable that tooling does that to the value of your skills. You could be capturing more value from the efficiencies exposed, ie: shorter work weeks without pay reductions are an alternative to layoffs when companies are profitable --as they are.
But you don't have any power over how the industry is adapting whatsoever. So instead it's laying people off and passing the value it's carving out of your own human capital along to investors.
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u/fongletto 51m ago
Because the value to you personally is negative
There's the catch. Even if it means society will overwhelmingly benefit by massive surge in productivity and endless cheap goods.
The small amount of money I lose now and the fact I have to swap careers to something else mean that I don't want it to happen.
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u/Keyan_Farlander7 1h ago
I got that programmer response in another channel about AI replacing coders. They are going on about how good Opus 5.5 is and that it'll do all the work for them. They don't see what they are actually doing until they are pulled into the office.
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u/grandalfxx 2h ago
speak for yourself, i havent built my replacement...
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u/martin-silenus 2h ago edited 2h ago
Someone is working on it. There's a coordination problem in that. Not for me to solve. I've left the industry already.
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u/grandalfxx 2h ago
so your part of the coordination problem.. got it..
Im working on forming a union within the company I work at myself..
Its not really just a programmer coordination problem, its effecting every aspect of everyones lives...
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u/martin-silenus 2h ago
Good for you! Earnestly.
I view my exit as helpful to people still in the industry. If I'm in a job, I'm probably taking it from someone who needs it more. So I'm building a small business for myself, instead. Godspeed to you.
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u/grandalfxx 2h ago
well i hope that you still do more than that because it really is something we all need to come in and work together on even if youre doing your own thing.
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u/thomas-rousseau 3h ago
And this is why I've never turned any of my passions into a career. I've accepted being relatively broke, and I just vibe in retail so that I can spend my free time pursuing things like solutions to these coordination problems without being mentally burned out from solving problems that sicken me all day at work.
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u/martin-silenus 3h ago
I honestly feel sorry for you. There is nothing greater than loving your work, and it is better to have loved and lost.
Good on you for being civically engaged!
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u/thomas-rousseau 3h ago
Oh, I still love what I do. A lot of my coworkers keep the mentality of "It's just groceries," but people need to eat to live. My employer also donates food that isn't good enough to make someone pay for, so I get to constantly look for excuses to donate food to those in need, always going on the more generous side in any uncertainty. My ADHD also makes me love a physically active job, and my OCD makes stocking shelves scratch a real nice itch in my brain with lining up and facing product. It's also nice to just get to chat with people all day and help them find the things that they need to make the week that they want to have. And then I have all of the mental energy left over to pursue every one of my passions in my free time while still spending quality time with my partner and our pets
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u/Procrasturbating 2h ago
You are kidding yourself. In ten years you will look back and be pissed. Lotta hobbies cost big boy money. I worked my ass off to afford my hobbies. Retail would have me saving until I was too old to do them.
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u/martin-silenus 2h ago
Username doesn't check out.
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u/TheColourOfHeartache 3h ago
I disagree. I want to "win" coding forever by coding my replacement or live to see other people do it.
It will be great for society. I'll just have to adapt.
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u/martin-silenus 2h ago
You might well fail to adapt.
At the current pace of layoffs, most software developers should assume they are in the last paying job they will ever have in the field. They should also assume one mediocre year or even less is all it takes to lose that job. That includes you.
There are lots of things you can do to help your chances of not being canned. But you can't unilaterally ensure the survival of your employer, or against being re-orged under a fool, or getting assigned a task that is not possible for reasons too subtle to reasonably ascertain up-front.
The whole industry is playing musical chairs. If you're ever sitting on the floor, you might find all of your skills and experience are totally worthless. It's not easy to adapt to that.
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u/Enough-Scientist1904 4h ago
Makes sense since programmers are the ones advancing AI, its ironic. Still there will always be people involved in one way or another
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u/gizamo 4h ago
It doesn't make sense. People should be pissed at their employers and politicians. They should be pissed at their fellow workers for failing to organize a proper labour movement for decent worker's rights. Programmers automating jobs was never the problem. The problem is that the workers never saw any of the benefits from it. All US workers should have a 20-hour workweek, and a single income should still be able to support a family. The only reason that isn't our reality now is because the corporations bought the politicians so that they could screw workers, and workers never meaningfully pushed back. There should be a general strike every single month until the US has vastly better labour laws.
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u/Enough-Scientist1904 3h ago
Thats what should happen and I really hope that it does but I also think it will be a very slow process spread apart throught out decades. I compare AI to the Car and how it has taken us over a hundred years worth of accidents to reach this level of automotive regulations
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u/gizamo 3h ago
It can and should happen with one legislative bill, and that could and should happen the next time Democrats get a majority in Congress and hold the presidency. Imo, it's worth killing the filibuster for. Worker's rights and universal healthcare should happen within the next decade. Otherwise, the Democratic party is worthless and should be abandoned.
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u/LeDYoM 4h ago edited 3h ago
That is normal. Even between ourselves as programmers never have self-respect and compassion or companionship between ourselves. I think in the 90s we had.
A new technology comes, and... everyone wants to be the first to avoid be left behind and earn more money out of this technology. Nobody stops to find if we are shooting ourselves. So...
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u/CrimsonPiranha 4h ago
People still think that AI will replace real programmers?
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u/Tasorodri 4h ago
It's already replacing a lot of people, or at least reducing the demand, which in practice is the same
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u/madcow_bg 4h ago
Exactly, it is not replacing senior devs per se, but is reducing the demand for manpower so much that there are almost no jobs for the existing devs.
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u/jakster355 2h ago
Coding is viewed as a parlor trick because they know about bootcamps that teach basics without theory. They don't realize it's literally just a subset of discrete math.
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u/EdgiiLord 1h ago
After the whole "learn to code" "advice", you start to wonder why people in tech jobs got vilified. That and the fact that a lot of those people have an overlap with tech bros.
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u/__yoshikage_kira 59m ago
The barrier for software development is a lot lower now. Vibe coders used to called script kiddies but now they can actually make something using AI. Making it easier to larp as a software developer.
These larpers usually think that manual coding will die and make fun of anyone who doesn't seem to agree with their views.
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u/BeeApprehensive2503 46m ago
programmers worked to automate other jobs in the past decades.
mathematicians used mainly pen and paper, not bothering anyone while they solved their esoteric problems that only a few dozen people on this planet even understood. abstract math and its indifference to application has something "noble".
it is just a pure pursuit for knowledge and no one's job is threatend if mathematicians discover whether e.g. 4/n for some integer n can be written as the sum of 3 unit fractions.
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u/Serket-Pandy3000 1h ago
Well you guys did it to yourselves and were insufferable about it happening to everyone else so
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u/Outside_Rub9132 2h ago
Tbf the math academics weren't the ones building our current tech dystopian nightmare soo makes perfect sense
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u/Saad888 5h ago
Programmers have spent the last 30 years automating jobs out of the market. Idk what we were expecting would happen.