221–230 of 897 posts
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The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.
Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.
I agree. Let's hope it will have much less impact on the 21th century.
You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.) The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that…
> (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.) I am not a professional programmer, and I tend to bounce between lots of different languages depending on the problem I'm trying to solve. If I had all of the syntax for a given language memorized, I ca…
Generally you spend 80% of the time wrangling abstractions, especially in mature project. The coding part is often a quick mental break where you just doing translation. Checking the syntax is often a quick action that no one mind.
I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embr…
No they don't. They need to actually learn how to use their brains first.
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Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern. The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinkin…
What do you think is going to happen when management is pushing on deadlines?
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A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.
When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements. Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good d…
To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded. It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and ex…
Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern. The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinkin…
You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly. So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you. Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to…
No, I think Google was just slow this time
Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead. The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work f…
Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.
Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.
If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.
Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely…
For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.
This might be a harsh thing to say, but I don't think the talent at Amazon is top notch because (from everything I've heard anyway) Amazon is such a nightmarishly dystopian place to work that, well, if you have a choice you probably avoid working there? I say that with the recognition that there are always diamonds in the rough, but I'm not sure this really comments on AI usage at a place that treats their employees…
Amazon pays really well. Amazon also has a number of interesting projects (e.g. a number of contributors to the rust compiler are employed by Amazon to work on rustc.) It also looks nice enough on a resume to give people a nice stepping stone towards even better opportunities.
maybe 10 years ago. HR is like a rabid dog, fighting for every dollar.