chubot
3 hours ago
I generally agree with this article in that PROGRAMMABILITY is the core of Unix, and it is why I've been working on https://www.oilshell.org/ for many years
However I think the counterpoint is maybe a programming analog of Doctorow's "Civil War on General Purpose Computing"
I believe the idea there was that we would all have iPads and iPhones, with content delivered to us, but we would not have the power to create our own content, or do arbitrary things with computers
I think some of that has come to pass, at least for some fairly large portions of the population
(though people are infinitely creative -- I found this story of people writing novels their phone with Google Docs, and selling them via WhatsApp, interesting and cool - https://theweek.com/culture-life/books/the-rise-of-the-whats... )
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The Unix/shell version of that is that valuable and non-trivial logic/knowledge will be hidden in cloud services, often behind a YAML interface.
And your job is now to LLM the YAML that approximates what you want to do
Not actually do any programming, which can lead to adjacent thoughts that the cloud/YAML owners didn't think of
In some cases there is no such YAML, or it's been trained out of the LLM, so you can't think that thought
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There's an economic sense to this, in some ways, but personally I don't want to live in that world :)
syndicatedjelly
2 hours ago
I see your concern, but don't think it's anything to be worried about. Is an electrician's job at risk because homeowners can purchasing wiring and outlets from a big box store and tap a new outlet in their home? Are mechanics worried about people who do oil changes at home?
There will always be a demand for skilled labor, but the definition of "skilled" is going to continue changing over time. That's a good sign, it means that the field is healthy and growing.
pjmlp
2 hours ago
Usually in many countries, insurances won't pay if something went bad by not being done by a professional electrician or mechanic.