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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

571–580 of 604 posts

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So far, all of the work on AGI has been the result of brute forcing. We've tried to develop a structural understanding of how the human brain works, and we've failed. So we've fallen back to torturing circuits into reorienting themselves into compression algorithms for human knowledge. The mechanisms that these tortured circuits used for doing so, the structures they produced in N-dimensional space to embody that kn…

That's all very well and good from a theoretical, scientific perspective. But we're hooking these things up to real-world applications that often call for deterministic, structural understanding of their inner workings for safety reasons.

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Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#572

Humans seek work that provides satisfaction and meaning in their life. For every technological advancement, artisans are the first to be made obsolete. Sure we have landfills full of unworn textiles, the market says its good, but overall, we keep destroying what allows humans to seek meaning. Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity. We have outsourced art…

> Just stranded without dignity or purpose,

Perhaps dignity is seeking value that is scalable to entire humanity, hm? Isn't it dignified? If we cannot find value for fellow humans we can relax I guess?

> We have outsourced art to computers, so people who don't understand art

Ok, I am seeing a lot of bad faith arguments. Just because somebody doesn't have time to learn to craft and cruft of some very tedious discipline, doesn't really mean they don't understand it.

You don't need to throw rocks all day to get an understanding of physics. But people had to do it in the past, now we calculate, simulate and then just do one throw.

Also I am speaking as part time designer/artist. New AI tools are great, I could achieve similar results, but difficult bets were made, when i started. Now I just roll in images, some of them finetuned on my work, some are mix, some are completely nuanced. Many artists after initial sobbing(I was enthusiastic from getgo) started to learn and explore this tools.

People bring amazing things to life, that just were impossible with their limited resources (take a look, anime done with very small crew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWZOEFvczzA).

I much dislike the mindset of "they took our jobs".

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#573
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity. > It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you. No. The Republican National Convention cheered the idea of letting the poor and sick just die off in the streets. They cheered. Ron Paul asked "what are we supposed to do? Let our sick and poor just die cold in the streets?" and they cheered. Jobs are sacred i…

You're really passionate but you're strawmanning all over the place.

I wish I was straw-manning. It'd be great if my description was an overly pessimistic caricature of a major political party. Unfortunately, it's not. It wasn't some political cartoon of people cheering on the deaths of the poor and sick. It was real people. I could understand why someone reading my description would think "wow what a perverse view of people this misanthrope has" -- if that person had no exposure to U.S. politics; never watched interviews with these people; never actually listened to the things they're actually saying. Not straw men. Real people.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#574
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity. > It's not somebody else who decided that. It's you. No. The Republican National Convention cheered the idea of letting the poor and sick just die off in the streets. They cheered. Ron Paul asked "what are we supposed to do? Let our sick and poor just die cold in the streets?" and they cheered. Jobs are sacred i…

You are literally agreeing with me and yet phrase it as if we’re arguing about something? I’m confused.

I quoted you directly. You said that it's not "somebody else" who decided the unemployed deserve no dignity, but that it's MSFT_Edging decided that. Like, he's the only one who thinks that? It makes no sense. It's not something he imagined, nor is it his fault. So how does your comment that I quoted and responded to make even the tiniest modicum of sense?

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the thoughtful post. I hope that the current circumstances trigger a renewed interest in thinking about how we organise our society. It would be great if that could be done rationally, without taboos. I don't have high hopes though. The people in power want to stay in power, and any hint at socialistic or communistic ideas are quickly shot down. Communism as implemented by Soviet Russia was pretty bad a…

I suggest actually reading up on how past or existing Communist countries worked. The Soviet system eventually failed, yes, but not before great strides in a lot of areas. There is an incredible amount of nuance lost in how the west generally talks about these systems, some from general misunderstandings, some from Orientalism, some from downright nationalism. For example, the "soviet" system was a bottom up democrat…

>For example, people hate on Stalin a lot, but his 5-year plans were so wildly productive and successful

you mean productive as in Holodomor?

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've participated in programming olympiads and worked with people of varying skill and I would say that overall the correlation between competitive programming and software engineering in a business environment is probably like 0.2 or less.

> 0.2 or less I find that questionable. What does "software engineering in a business environment" require that a competent competitive programmer couldn't also learn?

Working with a team / pushing through bullshit of human dynamics

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#577
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying handcrafted artisan stuff is a luxury few can afford. I come from a poor family and I was always grateful for mass produced mediocre stuff that we could actually afford.

Sure but the same optimizations that bring the costs down, bring down the average laborers value. I'm not saying that things were sunshine and rainbows pre-industrialization, but there's some level of analysis to be done on the durability and value of a handcrafted piece of clothing, the care that goes into maintaining it, the value of a local economy, and the other side where you're forced to buy cheap items that de…

That’s a good point. What’s always been strange to me is why we as a community allow this. We should boycott the Walmarts and Devins of the world. Drive them out of business by voting with our dollars.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that AI has the potential to turn a professionalized industry into a self-help one. Like, if I can pay $30 a month to have an AI make me several new apps a day, why would I need an app store? It's like fast fashion for programs. Low quality but dirt cheap.

But thats OK! THis is exactly what I want. I dont want to describe some enterprise architure with DR and blah. No - I want the little utils that I just want to appear like little magic fairy dust... Little apps. This is how a new eco system grows.

But if building an app is as easy as voicing a requirement, and getting an updated version is as simple as asking for a change, then why should there be an ecosystem at all, rather than just bespoke on-the-fly apps for every single individual?

As a tangent, I've been thinking about this in regards to the edtech space. For now, the focus is on GenAI tools for quickly building courses, but if we have AI with the combined skills of a Subject Matter Expert, Instructional Designer and Tutor, why would we need to build courses at all, if instead it could just teach anyone anything on the fly, based on their specific background and interests, and adapting immediately to their reactions?

We've already been talking a lot about bubbles / echo chambers over the last decade, and I imagine that this will get a lot worse/better over the coming decade, depending on your perspective of the value of shared experiences.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#579
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point being? The horses were replaced alright, carriage drivers are thriving ever since.

Lmao what are you talking/coping about? What happened to carriage drivers is pretty well-documented. Maybe ask one of these AI chatbots, they will summarize it for you.

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Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#580
There have been many tools that were sold as developer replacements over the years. - Microsoft FrontPage - Adobe Dreamweaver - A litany of glorified WYSIWYG editors - WordPress - Wix - Power Apps/SharePoint ...and so on.

Business owners have been getting sexually aroused at the prospect of taking a developer's salary and putting it in their own pockets for decades. Each iteration of this wet dream has only locked businesses into "low code" systems that require even more, highly-specialized developers to operate. Right now, and probably for a while, Devon, et al. is on par with the drag-and-drop automagical app building snake oil stuff.

LLMs are useful to help developers be more productive, which does translate to lay-offs, but until someone creates an AI that can translate the absolute fevered gibberish that comes out of business people's heads into a profitable piece of software, this is just MS FrontPage v100.0.

Just like an entire industry sprang up around fixing WordPress websites that business owners thought they could do themselves, pretty soon we'll start seeing job postings for AI-Generated Spaghetti Unravellers.

I'm (half seriously) imagining a future were software engineers are mostly consultants that show up and talk with business folks, then talk with the local robot, and get the project to actually work. Bill $1k per hour.

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