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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

#441

Post by andrei_says_ »

easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

I have only experienced the exact opposite - AI tools being forced on employees left and right, and infinite starry eyed fake enthusiasm amongst a rising ocean of slop poisoning all communication and written human knowledge at scale.

I am yet to see issues caused by restrain.

> It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.

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

#442

Post by everdrive »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…

>Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place.

At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think parts of our culture still maintain this as a default value. "If more people can code, that's a _good_ thing!" Are we 100% sure that's true? Are there _no_ downsides? Even if it's a net positive, we should be able to have some discussion about the downsides as well.

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

#443

Post by sosodev »

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…

While that is part of the equation it's not at all that simple. If the average business owner wants a custom piece of software for their workflow how are they getting it now? For decades the answer would have been new hires, agencies, consultants, and freelancers. It didn't matter that most software boiled down to a simple CRUD backend and a flashy frontend. There was still a need for developers to create every piece of software.

Now AI makes it unbelievably easy to make those simple but bespoke software packages. The business owner can boot up Lovable and get something that is good enough. The non-software folk generally aren't scrutinizing the software they use. It doesn't matter if the backend is spaghetti code or if there are bugs here and there. If it works well enough then they're happy.

In my opinion that's the unfortunate truth of AI software development. It's dirt cheap, fast, and good enough for most people. Computer's couldn't write software before and now they can. Obviously that is real devaluation, right?

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

#444

Post by terminalbraid »

MrDarcy wrote: post #420
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because there's nothing "craftsman" about using AI to do stuff for you. Someone who uses AI to write their programs isn't the equivalent of a carpenter using a table saw, they are the equivalent of a carpenter who subcontracts the piece out to someone else. And we wouldn't show respect to the latter person either.

I’m a hacker and I’d show respect to that latter person if they did the subcontracting and reviewed their craft well.

But you wouldn't call them a craftsperson because they didn't do any craft other than "be a manager". Reviewing work is not on the same plane as actually creating something.

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

#445

Post by raincole »

GrantMoyer wrote: post #373
easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

I largely agree with this, but at the same time, I empathize with the FA's author. I think it's because LLMs feel categorically different from other technological leaps I've been exited about. The recent results in LLMs and diffusion models are undeniably, incredibly impressive, even if they're not to the point of being universally useful for real work. However they fill me with a feeling of supreme dissapointment, b…

> It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.

Yeah. This cruel joke even has a name: The Bitter Lesson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

But think about it: if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it?

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

#446

Post by fooqux »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #278
allturtles wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all this, except there is no plan B. What could plan B possibly be when white collar work collapses? You can go into a trade, but who will be hiring the tradespeople?

The companies who now have piles of cash because they eliminated a huge chunk of labor will spend far more on new projects, many of which will require tradesmen. Economic waves never hit one sector and stop. The waves continues across the entire economy. You can’t think “companies will get rid of huge amounts of labor” and then stop asking questions. You need to then ask “what will companies do with decreased labor c…

> Economic waves never hit one sector and stop.

Unless they do, or are severely weakened. Consider the net worth of the 1% over the last few decades. Even corrected for inflation, its growth is staggering. The wealth gap is widening, and that wealth came from somewhere.

So yes, when there is an economic boom, investment happens. However, the growth of that top %1 tells me that they've been taking more and more off the top. Sure, some near the bottom may win with the decreased labor costs and whatnot, but my point is less and less do every cycle.

Full disclosure: I'm not an economist. Hell, I probably have a highschool-level of econ knowledge at best, so this should probably be taken as a "common-sense" take on it, which I already know often fails spectacularly when economics is at play. So I'm more than open to be corrected here.

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

#447

Post by andai »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #384
quantummagic wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we need to create a culture that values craftmanship and dignifies work done by developers. Mostly I agree with you. But there's a large group of people who are way too contemptuous of craftsmen using AI. We need to push back against this arrogant attitude. Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw.

>Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw. Some tools are table saws, and some tools are subcontracting work out to lowest cost bidders to do a crap job. Which of the two is AI?

I've been programming for 20 years and GPT-4 (the one from early 2023) does it better than me.

I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice.

I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :)

For straightforward stuff, they can handle it.

For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situation you need an X!", because the long tail is, mostly, where they grew up.

--

To really drive the point home... it's easy to laugh at the AI clocks.[0] But I invite you, dear reader, to give it a try! Try making one of those clocks! Measure how long it takes you, how many bugs you write. And how well you'd do it if you only had one shot, and/or weren't allowed to look at the output! (Nor Google anything, for that matter...)

I have tried it, and it was a humbling experience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151

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

#448

Post by xrrocha »

gavmor wrote: post #166
0xFEE1DEAD wrote: post #155

I honestly don't get vibe coding. I've tried it multiple times, but even after spending 4 hours on a fresh project I don't feel like I know what the hell is going on anymore. At that point I'm just guessing what the next prompt is to make it work. I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would pro…

> I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would probably take longer than 4 hours). Peter Naur argues that programming is fundamentally an activity of theory building, not just program text production. The code itself is merely the artifact of the real work. You must not confuse the artifact (the…

This is one of the most insightful thoughts I've read about the role of LLM's in software development. So much so, indeed, its pertinence would remain pristine after removing all references to LLM's

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

#449

Post by dugidugout »

lxgr wrote: post #301
abraxas wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure, given the means, the Turkey could have written some convincing prose about their delicious fatty meal.

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

#450

Post by thuuuomas »

gradus_ad wrote: post #413

Maybe because I came into software not from an interest in software itself but from wanting to build things, I can't relate to the anti-LLM attitude. The danger in becoming a "crafter" rather than a "builder" is you lose the forest for the trees. You become more interested in the craft for the craft's sake than for its ability to get you from point A to point B in the best way. Not that there's anything wrong with cr…

Glad we agree that the “builder” without craft is just looking for the nearest exit.
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