Comment by franky47
3 days ago
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.
We will remain to be programmers but at a higher abstraction where code is just the glue to our means and imagination.
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I think you will like this talk https://youtu.be/XM_q5T7wTpQ?si=Nyb4lZEZjsjCCGBg
I wonder if we could then have released the *stressor in a few months then...
I’d love to see someone try.
Though using AI to build the devtools we used for signal analysis would have been helpful.