Yet another Hacker News

15 points shnock 2 hours ago 18 comments

Specifically, what are the most useful, concrete skills to learn as an individual to take economic advantage of the advances in LLMs, agents and associated new technological capabilities?

What is accessible to learn just from the internet and experimentation, without a degree program, assuming a preexisting moderately technical background? The clearer and more specific (eg. “Learn how-to x with y”) the better.

Thank you!

indiehackers1 1 hour ago | parent

Get a 7B model running locally before you touch any API.

A quantized 7B is around 4.7GB and runs on a 16GB laptop with no GPU, via llama.cpp. The cost saving is not the point. The point is that you can run the same input seven times in an hour and watch what actually changes. Once you have seen your own quantization and sampling settings move the output, API models stop being magic and become a config you can reason about.

Second skill nobody lists: writing loops that fail loudly. Long generations die silently - the stream just stops and your code sits there waiting. I spent days convinced my model was bad before I added a watchdog and per-run logs. The model was fine. My plumbing was not.

Both are weekend-sized, no degree needed. And the people making money off this right now are not the ones with the cleverest prompts, they are the ones who can tell a model failure from a pipeline failure.

uaas 1 hour ago | parent

AI reply.

bittu_much 37 minutes ago | parent

https://www.slopmanifesto.com

cedws 1 hour ago | parent

There is none, that’s kind of the objective of this stuff, to raise the skill floor, make everyone fungible so companies can drive down salaries. If you want to secure your career, make friends with powerful people, learn how to kiss ass. Or do good deeds and pray for reincarnation to be a child of a rich family.

If you think I’m wrong, you only need to ask yourself why the most ruthless capitalists are investing trillions of dollars into AI. It’s not because they want to deliver a better product.

jimbob45 1 hour ago | parent

I’ve reviewed some rough PRs recently. There’s a massive chasm between those who understand what their AI spit out and those who had no idea C++ even had that feature.

cedws 1 hour ago | parent

Sure, but what does it matter? You can try explaining that to management but you’ll just be painting a target on your back and shortlisting yourself for the next round of layoffs.

The point of my comment is that it’s basically over for skilled technical workers, besides maybe a tiny minority of companies that both respect deep knowledge AND can continue to defend their revenue. Companies don’t want skilled workers, they never have, they’re costly and a risk. They want unskilled workers that they can replace at a moments notice. AI is their dream come true.

Even the ones with niche skills are at risk, as soon as word gets out there’ll be a swarm of hungry, recently unemployed people coming for their jobs.

ulrikrasmussen 19 minutes ago | parent

I think this is overly cynical and a bit of a doomer take. Not saying there isn't a bit of truth to it, but there are still many companies who have a critical and more healthy approach to AI.

wseqyrku 1 hour ago | parent

> What is accessible to learn just from the internet and experimentation, without a degree program

Since you do have a moderate technical background you can start studying PhD material right now from your desk which is widely accessible all over the web, however the time you need to spend on it is not very different. I think everyday for ten years is a good time span to invest for any one subject unless you have several fields of interest (you named three) multiply that by a few years of just skimming through the material for each so you have a mediocre understanding to solve "learn how to x with y" for x and y. Hope this helps.

mso3i 1 hour ago | parent

Search for AI certification paths from BigTech. All of them (Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc) and their biggest customers are desperate for people. They call it "frontier" certified operator/engineer/manager/analyst/cybersec etc.

bushwart 1 hour ago | parent

I recommend learning how to identify and avoid honey traps.

adrianwaj 1 hour ago | parent

Like, because once you have these sought-after skills, you are going to become a target, right, so someone can then extract and manipulate you, and in return you keep the good life going?

.... until one day it all comes crashing down - well almost.

short scene: https://future-secured.com/41754

OgsyedIE 4 minutes ago | parent

Isn't this like CS undergrads learning cyber security today, where a moderate level of skill is attainable but there's no point on account of the tidal wave of expert-level threats imminently arriving?

hypfer 1 hour ago | parent

The best AI skill to learn is learning people management, actually.

To successfully steer AI, you need essentially the same stuff you'd need if you were to steer humans in a management role. Meaning communication, introspection, remote introspection, emotional intelligence and all that kind of stuff.

Reading when someone is bullshitting you. Reading when someone is insecure and overcompensates that. Reading the actual problems people struggle with and not the ones they claim they do nor their suggested solutions.

Verbalizing what you need someone to do in a way that actually enables them to do it. Knowing what you want to do to a level where that is possible

samrus 50 minutes ago | parent

This is so true. The things needed to reign in the slop are all leadership, management skills

jaynetics 2 minutes ago | parent

Not all of them. Architecture, testing strategies, general tech knowledge are still needed for larger stuff, and I think will be needed for a considerable time.

Also my leadership skills on the emotional side are really going to waste with AI. It doesn't need motivation, it doesn't need convincing, it isn't insecure in a way that can be dealt with other than symptomatically etc.

The leadership skills that apply are communicating requirements and structuring tasks, but these are only a subset of leadership, and they are also not sufficient on their own.

heysabique 20 minutes ago | parent

anything i cant explain i rewrite by hand once

galaxyLogic 11 minutes ago | parent

I think it's not so much about learning AI, it's learning to USE AI to create and run a company.

And that you can probabaly do the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, pracTtice.

The thing about AI is AI should know everything so you don't need to learn anything, except how to use AI effectively to accomplish business goals.

Imagine the 2000s, should you study internet tech like Cisco's routers? Not a bad idea, but who made money? Cisco? Not so much relatively speaking. It was Google and Amazon who learned how to use the new web-tech to do something people and companies needed.

OgsyedIE 7 minutes ago | parent

I think the answer to the title is "psychologically preparing for short timelines" and that you can get a good explainer from googling that exact phrase, but there's a different answer to the body of the post.

To the question in the body of the post, take a look at Jeremy Utley's 11ish minute YouTube video "How Stanford teaches AI". It's a couple years old but he figured out the correct attitude and communicated it way before anybody else. Watch it in full without distractions and immediately apply the lesson to the various questions in the OP post.