Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so?
How do they not connect? How do they connect?
Yup - how do they not connect in your opinion?
The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
71–80 of 177 posts
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#72What scares me about ChatGPT is less so that I’ll lose my job (though it’s possible), but more so that I’ll be using language models to work at higher and higher levels of abstraction doing mainly configuration tweaking. Some of the particular pain points expressed in the article should be removed with AI in the loop development, but it’s another step away from “real programming”, which is what attracted most of us t…
How much joy do we really get from day-to-day work if we are really honest? I am using ChatGPT to help me get things done (Node.js programming) for my startup. It's getting me closer to having this client project done so I will have more time for my own internal AI thing I am adding to the main service.
No one is stopping you from writing 6502 assembly code in your spare time. That's actually still a somewhat popular hobby.
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I already started using ChatGPT to solve problems because I can’t be arsed to read through ten vendors worth of documentation. It wrote me a fairly complete and accurate chunk of code the other day to solve a problem.
I have to admit that having it giving short summaries of framework docs and models felt like drugs in my veins.
what were some prompts you asked?
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I beams are both an individual abstraction and part of the greater abstraction. Your catalog of beams, bolts, brackets, weld patterns, rebar, piles, and concrete pour standards are all abstractions over extremely difficult subfields of materials engineering and structural engineering. They exist so that your engineer can focus on building the structure using parts and resources with known, standardised behavior under…
An abstraction is something that lets you hide complexity. An I-beam is exactly what you see, there nothing hidden.
There absolutely is a ton hidden. Your ASTM A992 structural steel W-beam (wide I beam) or S-beam (standard I-beam) is abstracting a ton of details with regards to:
- the construction process.
- material composition.
- thicknesses of the flange.
- width of the flange.
- depth/height.
- max length.
- shear strength.
- tensile strength.
- elongation (stretch/sag when approaching the point of failure).
- corrosion resistance.
- tolerances.
- cost per foot.
And the list only goes on.
A structural engineer can say "I have a specific structure in mind and need a beam that can withstand XYZ conditions" and pick out the matching beam from a table without considering any of the details as to how one would actually achieve those properties and withstand those conditions.
Alternatively an engineer can know their budget, what grade of steel, and what size of beam they want to use ahead of time and simply design a structure using those abstracted pieces in coordination with the architect.
Beams and other construction elements are the structural engineer's equivalent of a Hardware Abstraction Layer (coming from the perspective of an engineer who works close to the metal when I can). It lets the engineer abstract most of the minutiae regarding working with the hardware itself by giving the engineer a largely uniform interface for choosing how their product interacts with the world. Generally the abstraction holds but sometimes it's leaky and details show through. Likewise sometimes the abstraction is insufficient and the engineer has to do some custom work that breaks away from the established path to meet the constraints.
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#75Like many other commenters (of a certain age?), I too have this unsatisfied feeling about a particular kind of modern software development. The kind where you never really dig down and design anything, you just plumb a bunch of stuff together with best practices you find on stack overflow. Many commenters are attributing this problem to the modern high-level tools we now have access to. But I don't think this is the…
Yes. Whenever I work on a "serverless" app, I spend more time messing around with IAC tools like Terraform than I do writing actual application code. It's sad.
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#76What scares me about ChatGPT is less so that I’ll lose my job (though it’s possible), but more so that I’ll be using language models to work at higher and higher levels of abstraction doing mainly configuration tweaking. Some of the particular pain points expressed in the article should be removed with AI in the loop development, but it’s another step away from “real programming”, which is what attracted most of us t…
Its already like this. My first job in the 90s I wrote our own linked list classes, a logging framework and a persistence layer. Now it feels like I write css and yaml all day.
By the way, the HiSOFT that created DevPac 4 (assembler/debugger) for the ZX Spectrum is still around. According to their about page they now build websites?!? https://www.hisoft.co.uk/
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#77If you feel like "modern programming is boring configuration mess" then ask yourself - what have you done in order to have interesting job, projects, challenges, etc? I mean, if you decided at some point that $big_salary for throwing JSONs via REST from CRUD app is what you want to do until you pay your loans (e.g decade), then it's fine, but don't be shocked that you aren't doing bleeding edge R&D at some fancy plac…
Capability trap. Not everyone is capable of effectively working 2 jobs at once, and generally speaking no matter how big that $big_salary is you aren't going to have more money or time.
Also there are lots of way for a company to say they are doing interesting/meaningful things or whatever and effectively not be. And no matter how great the work you may be doing, you don't want to be doing it if it doesn't pay enough.
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#78If you feel like "modern programming is boring configuration mess" then ask yourself - what have you done in order to have interesting job, projects, challenges, etc? I mean, if you decided at some point that $big_salary for throwing JSONs via REST from CRUD app is what you want to do until you pay your loans (e.g decade), then it's fine, but don't be shocked that you aren't doing bleeding edge R&D at some fancy plac…
Capability trap. Not everyone is capable of effectively working 2 jobs at once, and generally speaking no matter how big that $big_salary is you aren't going to have more money or time. Also there are lots of way for a company to say they are doing interesting/meaningful things or whatever and effectively not be. And no matter how great the work you may be doing, you don't want to be doing it if it doesn't pay enough…
So the only way is to complain whole life?
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#79BERT is kind of old hat though isn't it in a way? I suspect if he builds this it will be overwhelmed by a similar system in a few months when GPT4 or LaMBDA 2 or whatever comes out, have that digest pirated novels directly and have some fix for identifying/preventing made-up information.
I wonder actually, how far could you get today with ChatGPT for recommendations, or with character.ai to actually just generate the entire customized book chapters for you while you watch.
Re: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
#80I don't think the industry was supposed to create this magic environment where everybody gets to be a hacker and have good, artistic fun programming. Unfortunately it seems like integrating with as many ready-made solutions as possible is a pragmatic business decision. It doesn't come free, obviously, since we give up a lot of control to vendors and sometimes judging about system performance is hard because of how ma…
3-4 day work weeks and a strong social safety net.
Let capitalism be capitalism and give people the energy and time to do things without having to justify every little thing to some pencil pusher to try and make anything happen at all.