I really doubt it's like a "solid junior developer". If it could do the work of a solid junior developer it would be making programming projects 10-100x faster because it can do things several times faster than a person can. Maybe it can write solid code for certain tasks but that's not the same thing as being a junior developer.
It can be 10-100x faster for some tasks already. I've had it build prototypes in minutes that would have taken me a few hours to cobble together, especially in domains and using libraries I don't have experience with.
That was not what was at issue in my comment. It referred to a sentence where the Parent was not talking about Stable Diffusion in particular, but about what he claimed was a general difference from the usual conditions since the industrial revolution. My comment merely referred to the fact that this is not generally true everywhere (in most specific cases, of course, it may very well be true). In this context, the real difference, however, with regard to Stable Diffusion is not the involuntary nature of the artists' "contributions", but the fact that the artists are not usually the developers of the AI software. In this respect, the Parent is right that for them all this comes from "the outside". It is just that I wanted to point out that this does not apply equally to all professional groups.
Some did, others did not. But those who did could still use the entire engineering corpus of knowledge they have studied towards their goal, even if they learned it from those who would not approve.
> You only see top programmers who started as kids and probably won some Olympiads and programming competitions, and this continued in their 20s and maybe kept their skill up till 30s but that's about it. What do they do after that?
I know in mathematics, winning the math olympiad makes someone far more likely to win the Fields medal, but I haven't heard of a similar correlation in programming (e.g. for the Turing award).
I don't see how being a young prodigy gives someone an advantage in most of the programming world.
Turing award recipient Tim Berners-Lee was working at a particle physics lab (CERN) when he invented the web.
So what exactly were all of those "computer science" labs and the computer/software/networking industry doing at the time?
(Nothing against HyperCard, Intermedia, Xanadu, or America Online - they are/were interesting and/or successful systems that seem to have had some good ideas and features. And some 30 years later IPv6 does seem to be finally taking off.)
GP said you can schedule game updates for the 1/3 of each day that you're not metered.
P incorrectly translated that to 'when you buy a game you have to wait a day to play it'.
So, as I already argued, these are not the same thing -- purchase & download of a game (impulse) vs regular patches (easily scheduled out of hours), and for a new game it's entirely up to you if you want to pull that down immediately (a modest percentage of 1TB).
The words might be, but the context and approach goes back to at the very least
to The Killing Star by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski published in 1995, who wrote:
We ask that you try just one more thought experiment. Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.
It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds.
Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body.
How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!"
What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.
There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.
There is no policeman.
There is no way out.
And the night never ends.
But of course, even Stephen Hawking was talking about this for decades. I find it bit of hilarious social commentary, that some Chinese author copied it and now people claim he invented it.
IMO Liu steelmaned the argument with respect to game theory, relativistic diplomacy / suspicion chains, tech explosion etc. He elevated it from commentary to hypothesis.
