Viewing profile — doug_durham

No one knows the ramifications. They won't be known for many years. That's the way software has always worked. No one knew the ramifications of the internet.

I could not agree more. Thank you for stating this. Software Engineering is about building things. You don't do it for status, you do it for passion. There are a lot of unhappy ind…

Most popular fiction is formula entertainment like Tom Clancy novels. Tom Clancy novels are their own industry now. I have zero doubt that AI tools can generate countless variation…

What is the purpose of copyleft when there are tools that can generate equivalent code? Copyleft keeps software free by using copyright to protect the effort of human creators. If …

Code was always expensive. Entire industries of design tools cropped up simply to avoid writing the wrong code since it is so expensive. There are entire journals dedicated to this…

How can there be tons of evidence for a 3 year old technology? Everyone seems to think that all writers using AI are one shotting their content. A writer can carefully edit and rev…

The heuristics you are looking for are "editorial" and "curation". That's why there are things like newspapers and magazines. The world has always been awash in more low effort con…

That's not what the author is saying at all. You are presuming that AI is capable of generating original thoughts. The author's point is that original thought is what matters. If a…

It doesn't have perfect traction. It stumbles in the videos. This is consistent with other wheeled robots that have come out the last few years.

An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The…

I so don't have time to revisit books that I've already read. I'd probably be embarrassed by my earlier naiveté.

The whole resource argument against AI is quickly becoming obsolete. Time to move on to a new argument.

Can you provide reasons other than "he's wrong"? There is no other technology that compresses so my knowledge into such a small space. A 24 GB diffusion model can generate a good a…

Most of the discussions I've read about AI is as a tool. There is a narrative being created that its all about replacing humans. I've not seen that outside of a view influencers.

I don't think you can make the absolute statement that there is no audience or market for these tools. I enjoyed watching all of these videos. They are far from banal crap. They ar…

Handwriting is inherently ableist. A portion of the population is blessed with the inherent ability of fast, legible handwriting. A portion of the population is not. Typing is an e…

The same way that I verified all of the code that was written before AI. Just because you hand type the code doesn't mean that you don't have to test and verify. I can test much mo…

Sorry but you are just wrong. Perhaps if you are working on tiny problems in very small projects. Beyond that AI is simply many times faster regardless of how fast you type.

You seem to have a narrow definition of "build it". LLMs don't have agency. If I build software using an LLM I built it. Just like if I build a house out of lumber from a lumber mi…

The llm is the better community tool. The important change is that you don't have to settle with someone developing a monolithic tool that happens to do what you need it to do. Tha…

I don't agree that Anthropic's position is AI is all you need. My interpretation is that it's about developer acceleration. I've been following their messaging closely and it's not…

The point of cursive was make writing efficient with a quill pen. With a quill pen you run the risk of ink dropping off the tip if you lift it from the paper. Therefore cursive tri…

Unfixable errors? Why unfixable? Python is Turing complete. I can see difficult to fix, but not unfixable. LLMs lower the bar to refactoring code mistakes.

I don’t believe that “reasoning” is very useful in large code bases written by multiple developers. If you are trying to be axiomatic and prove to yourself that the code is correct…

I’m sure in certain domains this makes sense. However, English is a poor language for doing reasoning in. More and more I’m relying on the code itself as the documentation. One of …