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Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

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Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#31

Post by ssl-3 »

bdcravens wrote: post #10
aidos wrote: post #3

Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…

> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".

And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity.

Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year.

When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing.

In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes"

That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)

Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#32

Post by Dylan16807 »

gxs wrote: post #28
gxs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% A novice writing code by hand could also write spaghetti code If you've worked in enterprise software, you might have seen that even competent professionals can write spaghetti code At this point AI really is just garbage in garbage out

Haha it’s so comical how predictable downvotes are - which is a proxy for knowing what developers sensibilities are Wild to me that we see this even in what is a relatively more “sophisticated” forum

The downvotes are because you're just saying some devs are bad, you're not explaining how/why incorrect prompting is the only reason it's a mess. Or even the main reason.

Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#34

Post by ssl-3 »

m463 wrote: post #21
toasty228 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was simple because it was inefficient and archaic. Reducing pollution is not "nonsense"

Not criticizing function, criticizing elegance of the solution. Eventually with time elegance was achieved again. another analogy would be opening some computers to add memory/ssd/hd, as judged by ifixit

PC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though.

I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card.

Oh, so many fun evenings working out which devices could share IRQs and configuring software to work around the corner cases that developed. Serial mice, PS/2 mice, plus bus mice of several different varieties. XT, AT, and PS/2 keyboards. The veritable plethora of mutually-incompatible CD-ROM interfaces.

A clock card: A whole friggin' card with a clock chip and a battery, just to keep track of wall time. (And the software to make it work.)

I even remember SCSI, which was famously renowned for the number of goat sacrifices that were required to to make it work. (Except, I remember SCSI very fondly. CD burner, reader, 7-disc Nakamichi changer, flatbed scanner, DDS tape, and a few IBM Ultrastar 9ES hard drives all sharing the same bus? Sure, why not? It worked. But it took some care to get there.)

It's simple today. Want more storage? SATA is easy (and everyone will make fun of you, but USB 3 works great for a hard drive in a desktop rig). m.2 is compact, and only has a couple of variations. Video cards -- even multiples of them -- just slot right into motherboards and they don't even have jumbers to configure. Sound cards are forgotten. RAM comes in standard forms that only change once every decade or so. Input devices, basic NICs, and video capture stuff can just plug in with USB. The USB ports themselves can be multiplied using hubs.

It's pretty good today, isn't it? Am I missing something?

Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#35

Post by blargey »

aidos wrote: post #3

Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…

Picking over the theoretical maintainability of one-off tools and toys that were generated in minutes by what will soon be an outdated model, feels very...missing the forest for the trees, when it comes to speculating about the future impact of this stuff.

Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#36

Post by orbital-decay »

aidos wrote: post #3

Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…

That's the kind of thing I learned actual programming for, at the same age.

Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#37

Post by m463 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #34
m463 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not criticizing function, criticizing elegance of the solution. Eventually with time elegance was achieved again. another analogy would be opening some computers to add memory/ssd/hd, as judged by ifixit

PC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though. I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card. Oh, so many…

> Am I missing something?

lol. the original statement was that AI written code is a mess "under the hood"

And I tried to say - cars were "simple/fixable under the hood", then emissions made them a mess then some (specific) cars became simple/fixable again.

but my analogy wasn't clear, so I tried saying that computers went the same way.

started out with simple s-100 bus/pc with slots... but at some point they became no-user-servicable-parts-inside (per ifixit) but some have gotten servicable again.

in summary - I think AI can make a mess, but maybe AI can make clean/maintainable code someday.

maybe there will need to be an AIfixit.com to rate models.

Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#38

Post by ssl-3 »

m463 wrote: post #37
ssl-3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though. I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card. Oh, so many…

> Am I missing something? lol. the original statement was that AI written code is a mess "under the hood" And I tried to say - cars were "simple/fixable under the hood", then emissions made them a mess then some (specific) cars became simple/fixable again. but my analogy wasn't clear, so I tried saying that computers went the same way. started out with simple s-100 bus/pc with slots... but at some point they became n…

Ah.

Yeah, I wasn't quite picking up what you were putting down. :) And I'd apologize for writing about old computers, except I enjoy writing about old computers. I never had much experience with S-100, though; my days of hands-in computing started with PCs in the 80s and I missed the earlier eras.

Anyway, I think you're right: The bot will continue to improve. It will get simpler to operate, and it will also generate cleaner code.

But with a twist: That generated code won't become cleaner because it makes it cheaper/easier for humans to understand and work on. Instead, it will instead get cleaner because it makes it cheaper/easier for bots to understand and work on.

(Why use many token when few do trick?)

Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#39

Post by nozzlegear »

ssl-3 wrote: post #31
bdcravens wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".

And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity. Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year. When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that th…

> And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity.

Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.

Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

#40

Post by aselimov3 »

fsniper wrote: post #18
bdcravens wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".

AI writes faster, so the rate it incurs tech debt is proportionally higher. However it's ability to have large context kept on memory compared to humans is also a key component fighting against it. These are occasionally forgotten when code quality of AI for large code bases are discussed. So Yes I think humans also build spaghetti, but as they write slower they get to the same place a lot later. However humans can't…

It does somewhat depend on the application size. Seems to me that for regular software projects (that aren't enterprise SaaS) a good programmer will create better software than Claude. Maybe the dehumanizing way to say it is that humans have more efficient/improved retrieval. The amount of time I see repeat code for no reason, or code/context that has been obviously missed is absurd.
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