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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#301

Post by lxgr »

abraxas wrote: post #204
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

You sound exactly like that turkey from Nassim Taleb's books that came to the conclusion that the purpose of human beings is to make turkeys very happy with lots of food and breeding opportunities. And the turkey's thesis gets validated perfectly every day he wakes up to a delicious fatty meal. Until Thanksgiving.

Unlike the turkeys, they seem rather self aware about it.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#302

Post by carlosjobim »

fileeditview wrote: post #203
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over. The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse. edit…

Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for?

But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization.

There's exactly one good invoicing app I've found which is good for freelancers and small businesses. While the amount of potential customers are in the tens of millions. Why aren't there at least 10 good competitors?

My impression is that programmers consider it to be below their dignity to work on simple software which solves real problems and are great for their niche. Instead it has to be big and complicated, enterprise-scale. And if they can't get a job doing that, they will pretend to have a job doing that by spending their time making open source software for enterprise-scale problems.

Instead of earning a very good living by making boutique software for paying users.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#303

Post by bavell »

swatcoder wrote: post #167
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack…

Nailed it. It's a pendulum and we're swinging back to baseline. We just finished our last big swing (zirp, post COVID dev glut) and are now in full free fall.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#304

Post by layer8 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #237
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

> If your org is blindly data/metric driven Are there for profit companies (not non profits, research institutes etc…) that are not metric driven?

“Blindly” is the operative word here.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#305

Post by Blackthorn »

codeflo wrote: post #295
poszlem wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. People who haven't lived through the transition will likely come here to tell you how wrong you are, but you are 100% correct.

You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.

> and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.

That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements.

The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology.

Where is technology still fun? The places that don't have ads being vomited at you 24/7. At-home CNC (including 3d printing, to some extent) is still fun. Digital music is still fun.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#306

Post by constantcrying »

>I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles.

This is such a bizarre sentiment for any person interested in technology. AI is, without any doubt, the most fascinating and important technology I have seen developed in my lifetime. A decade ago the idea of a computer not only holding a reasonable conversation with a human, but being able to talk with a human on deep and complex subjects seemed far out of reach.

No doubt there are many deep running problems with it, any technology with such a radical breakthrough will have them. But none of that takes away from how monumental of an achievement it is.

Looking down at people for using it or being excited about it is such an extreme position. Also the insinuation that the only reason anybody uses it because they are forced into it, is completely bizarre.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#307

Post by phil21 »

Aurornis wrote: post #274
bgwalter wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being anti "AI" has nothing to do with being progressive. Historically, hackers have always rejected bloated tools, especially those that are not under their control and that spy on them and build dossiers like ChatGPT. Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. It is relatively new that some corporate owned "open" source developers use t…

> Hackers have historically derided any website generators or tools like ColdFusion[tm] or VisualStudio[tm] for that matter. A lot of hackers, including the black hat kind, DGAF about your ideological purity. They get things done with the tools that make it easy. The tools they’re familiar with. Some of the hacker circles I was most familiar with in my younger days primarily used Windows as their OS. They did a lot o…

> To me, hacker is about results

Same to me as well. A hacker would "hack out" some tool in a few crazy caffeine fueled nights that would be ridiculed by professional devs who had been working on the problem as a 6 man team for a year. Only the hacker's tool actually worked and saved 8000 man-hours of dev time. Code might be ugly, might use foundational tech everyone sneers at - but the job would be done. Maintaining it left up to the normies to figure out.

It implies deep-level expertise about a specific niche in the space they are hacking on. And it implies "getting shit done" - not making things full of design beauty.

Of course there are different types of hackers everywhere - but that was the "scene" to me back in the day. Teenage kids running circles around the greybeards clucking at the kids doing it wrong.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#308

Post by vrighter »

lxgr wrote: post #233
knollimar wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a buge difference between possible and likely. Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet

Knowing your system components’ various error rates and compensating for them has always been the job. This includes both the software itself and the engineers working on it. The only difference is that there is now a new high-throughput, high-error (at least for now) component editing the software.

what is (and I'm being generous with the base here) 0.95^10? A 10-step process with a 95% success rate on each.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#309

Post by phil21 »

Blackthorn wrote: post #305
codeflo wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were proven right three minutes after you posted this. Something happened, I'm not sure what and how. Hacking became reduced to "hacktivism", and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces.

> and technology stopped being the object of interest in those spaces. That happened because technology stopped being fun. When we were kids, seeing Penny communicating with Brain through her watch was neat and cool! Then when it happened in real life, it turned out that it was just a platform to inject you with more advertisements. The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of…

>The "something" that happened was ads. They poisoned all the fun and interest out of technology.

Disagree. Ads hurt, but not as much as technology being invaded by the regular masses who have no inherit interest in tech for the sake of tech. Ads came after this since they needed an audience first.

Once that line was crossed, it all became far less fun for those who were in it for the sheer joy, exploration, and escape from the mundane social expectations wider society has.

It may encompass both "hot takes" to simply say money ruined tech. Once future finance bros realized tech was easier than being an investment banker for the easy life - all hope was lost.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#310

Post by rho4 »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #221
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

This just happened to me this week. I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant. AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow. Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of chan…

Ouch, so painful to read.
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