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I think I need to go lie down

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Re: I think I need to go lie down

#401

Post by tsunamifury »

jayd16 wrote: post #312
tsunamifury wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it with engineers complain moan and drag their feet on implementations that are hard but worth it. Because really under the surface they just don’t like doing something new, even if it has clearly defined user and business value.

I suspect you're on the wrong side of town for a comment like this, haha. Almost always its just conflicting requests. Every ticket has a clearly defined user and business value to the person who wrote it.

I managed a 250 person engineering team at FANG. The number of times I had to explain to a jr or mid level engineer what our fundamental business was, was astounding. They would constantly argue tickets on a premise that was entirely self contained inside their code -- and be entirely oblivious to what the product was accomplishing outside in the real world with real users. Now this wasn't always the case, and frankly I ran into it much less there than I had at smaller companies. But it still happened a lot.

And these engineers would always boast the most about how they knew best about X or Y.

Maybe that was my fault as a leader -- but I couldn't fix the incurious.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#402

Post by agvxov »

mrguyorama wrote: post #364
rchaud wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating the front-end of a Bootstrap form with no backend logic isn't particularly impresssive, it's something that would be taught halfway through any bootcamp course. Source: me, a person who built BS sites for years until I finally got around to learning Flexbox and CSS Grid properly.

Hell, I can build that form WITH backend logic with like five minutes in django and I'm not even good with django! If it takes you a long time to build a form, you've done something very very wrong.

i dont think you grasp the scale difference between seconds and minutes correctly. and it will add up quite fast.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#403

Post by agvxov »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #234
JanneVee wrote: post #184

I feel old now. I'm fairly sure that we could do this almost as fast with VB or Delphi a couple of decades ago, but a little more deterministic results instead of having the tool inferring it from the label names. We had this and then we shoved everything in the browser and forgot that we could do this without using huge amount of compute of some generative AI model. Look at me I'm old yelling at clouds!

You couldn't have a conversation with Dreamweaver.

you could, it would be just a bit one sided.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#404

Post by KerrAvon »

danenania wrote: post #381
benatkin wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the examples by naysayers of what AI can’t do are often cherry-picked. The way has been shown with the web. Now many people who would have been paying a designer are using things similar to Wix. A lot of people don’t need top of the line custom work, and most custom work isn’t top of the line. I’ve seen AI frequently, but a bit unpredictably, hit the high notes. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitti…

You know, that’s a great point! Both the negative and positive outliers can be cherry-picked to misrepresent what working with AI is really like in practice. Some want to pretend it’s much further along than it actually is, while some want to pretend it’s all just a flash-in-the-pan. The truth lies, predictably, in between: it’s useful and it’s real, but it’s not consistent or reliable… yet.

is it a great point? the failure cases will recede as people figure out what to do with it, but right now the failures are extremely numerous.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#405

Post by MattRix »

95014_refugee wrote: post #328
MattRix wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about that example makes it clear?

Where do you think it got the game logic from? Recall that this is an LLM; it doesn't "think", it's just cutting and pasting "likely" scraps of things from its training set. At this point, the vast majority of those scraps were human-generated, so a) many of them work, and b) copying them in this fashion is plagiarism ("the offense of taking passages from another's compositions, and publishing them, either word for w…

It really doesn’t work by just cutting and pasting scraps, I think you might need to do a bit more research on how this stuff works.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#406

Post by pseudosavant »

davio wrote: post #346
withinboredom wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we spend a very small fraction of our time on building things that are unique to our business. I usually see this in places/cultures that value code-beautification projects rather than delivering value to the customer. Sometimes, they even want to do the latter, but actually do the former. If you work somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the devs constantly complain about technical debt that will never, ever…

I describe our work as an endless loop of taking data from the screen to the database and back again.

This reminds me of the introductory scene of the amazing game The Stanley Parable:

  Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was Employee #427.
  Employee #427's job was simple: he sat at his desk in Room 427 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard.
  Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk telling him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order.
  This is what Employee #427 did every day of every month of every year, and although others may have considered it soul rending,
  Stanley relished every moment that the orders came in, as though he had been made exactly for this job.
It was a sobering moment when I realized that accurately described most of my job too.

https://thestanleyparable.fandom.com/wiki/Dialogue#Introduct...

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#409

Post by lovasoa »

withinboredom wrote: post #397
lovasoa wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for the feedback ! I cannot replicate that on my computer with any browser, and all seems normal to google pagespeed insights as well: https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-sql-ophir-dev/4o7q6... Which browser/device are you using, and from where ?

Disable the cache in dev-tools, you can't miss it.

It would be great if someone could open a github issue with reproduction steps and maybe a screenshot: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/issues

The worst I'm able to get when manually disabling the cache and simulating a slow 3G connection is this: a blank page first, then text in the browser's font, then the text re-renders with the right font, then the icons load. The user should never see completely unstyled content.

The site uses "font-display: fallback" so this happens only on slow network connections. If the font loads fast enough, then the fallback never appears.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#410

Post by urbandw311er »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #392
nilslindemann wrote: post #378

I wonder if it makes sense to learn web development. When I am done in two years, how to find a job which is not already done by an AI? :-(

Its best to approach learning from a place of curiosity and never be 'done'. However, as an answer to your question: If you're looking for a skill to learn once in a short time and apply that for a decade; then web front-end coding is among the worst options.

Hi, coder/founder of 25 years here. I’m genuinely conflicted as to whether or not we will get to a point where front end web development loses its utility. It’s one thing to have an AI assist in coding some simple UX/UI. But an entirely different thing to stitch all those together into a fully working web application. Particularly when it’s a very complex app with multiple pages, client/server architecture, DB, etc.

Perhaps I’m just being shortsighted here. I can sort of see how AI tech would evolve to achieve this. You would need an AI assistant able to persist the entire context of your application across months/years in a stable way to act as your ongoing “web developer“. Will that be feasible?

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