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I miss thinking hard

jernesto.com

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Re: I miss thinking hard

#461

Post by williamcotton »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #275
pinkgolem wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the opposite.. What you get right now is mass replicated software, just another copy of sap/office/Spotify/whatever That software is not made individually for you, you get a copy like millions of other people and there is nearly no market anymore for individual software. Llms might change that, we have a bunch of internal apps now for small annoying things.. They all have there quirks, but are only acce…

The question is whether that's a good thing or not; software adages like "Not Invented Here" aren't going to go away. For personal tools / experiments it's probably fine, just like hacking together something in your spare time, but it can become a risk if you, others, or a business start to depend on it (just like spare time hacked tools). I'd argue that in most cases it's better to do some research and find out if a…

> it can become a risk if you, others, or a business start to depend on it (just like spare time hacked tools).

So that Excel spreadsheet that manages the entire sales funnel?

Re: I miss thinking hard

#462

Post by the_af »

The article is interesting. I don't know how I feel about it, though I'm both a user of AI (no choice anymore in the current job environment) and vaguely alarmed by it; I'm in the camp of those who fear for the future of our profession, and I know the counterarguments but I'm not convinced.

A couple of thoughts.

First, I think the hardness of the problems most of us solve is overrated. There is a lot of friction, tuning things, configuring things right, reading logs, etc. But are the problems most of us are solving really that hard? I don't think so, except for those few doing groundbreaking work or sending rockets to space.

Second, even thinking about easier problems is good training for the mind. There's that analogy that the brain is a "muscle", and I think it's accurate. If we always take the easy way out for the easier problems, we don't exercise our brains, and then when harder problems come up what will we do?

(And please, no replies of the kind "when portable calculators were invented...").

Re: I miss thinking hard

#463

Post by nottorp »

anavat wrote: post #154
keyle wrote: post #63

I don't get it. I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review. If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same. But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!" Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving! We went from auto completing keywords, t…

It is simple. Continuing your metaphor, I have a choice of getting exactly where I want on a camel in 3 days, or getting to a random location somewhere on the other side of the desert on a helicopter in few hours. And being a reasonable person I, just like the author, choose the helicopter. That's it, that's the whole problem.

Helicopters are deterministic though :)

Re: I miss thinking hard

#464

Post by williamcotton »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #126
CamperBob2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene.

> Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene. This is a non sequitur. Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference. Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the same concerns quoted: The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not a…

Photography’s rapid commercialisation [21] meant that many painters – or prospective painters – were tempted to take up photography instead of, or in addition to, their painting careers. Most of these new photographers produced portraits. As these were far cheaper and easier to produce than painted portraits, portraits ceased to be the privilege of the well-off and, in a sense, became democratised [22].

Some commentators dismissed this trend towards photography as simply a beneficial weeding out of second-raters. For example, the writer Louis Figuier commented that photography did art a service by putting mediocre artists out of business, for their only goal was exact imitation. Similarly, Baudelaire described photography as the “refuge of failed painters with too little talent”. In his view, art was derived from imagination, judgment and feeling but photography was mere reproduction which cheapened the products of the beautiful [23].

https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html#:~:te...

Re: I miss thinking hard

#465

Post by duskdozer »

LoganDark wrote: post #164

Every time I try to use LLMs for coding, I completely lose touch with what it's doing, it does everything wrong and it can't seem to correct itself no matter how many times I explain. It's so frustrating just trying to get it to do the right thing. I've resigned to mostly using it for "tip-of-my-tongue" style queries, i.e. "where do I look in the docs". Especially for Apple platforms where almost nothing is documente…

There's clearly a gap in how or for what LLM-enthusiasts and I would use LLMs. When I've tried it, I've found it just as frustrating as you describe, and it takes away the elements of programming that make it tolerable for me to do. I don't even think I have especially high standards - I can be pretty lazy for anything outside of work.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#467

Post by jonahrd »

Dear author, I suggest trying out a job in a niche part of the field like firmware/embedded. Bonus if it's a company with a bunch of legacy devices to maintain. AI just hasn't quite grokked it there yet and thinking still reigns supreme :)

Re: I miss thinking hard

#468

Post by Nevermark »

i have often pondered if the (sometimes facetiously, sometimes seriously) postulated AI utopia scenario of humans who don’t need to work but can devote their time to art and recreational pursuits, might be a hellscape for many industrious people.

This essay captures that.

Even the pure artist, for whom utility may not seem to matter, manufactures meaning not just from creative exploration directly, but also from the difficulty (which can take many forms) involved in doing something genuinely new, and what they learn from that.

What happens to that when we even have “new” on tap.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#469

Post by tmtvl »

keyle wrote: post #201
rvz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're all Linus Torvalds now. We review, we merge, we send back. And if you had no idea what you were doing before, you'll still have no idea what you're doing today. You just fat-finger less typos today than ever before. Except Linus understands the code that is being reviewed / merged in since he already built the kernel and git by hand. You only see him vibe-coding toys but not vibe-coding in the kernel. Today,…

If you can't rebuke code today. You can't rebuke code tomorrow.

By induction that means either nobody can rebuke code or someone who can rebuke code can do that from the day they're born.

Re: I miss thinking hard

#470

Post by alexpotato »

I'm a DevOps/SRE and I've spent the past couple weeks trying to vibecode as much of what I do as possible.

In some ways, it's magical. e.g. I whipped up a web based tool for analyzing performance statistics of a blockchain. Claude was able to do everything from building the gui, optimizing the queries, adding new indices to the database etc. I broke it down into small prompts so that I kept it on track and it didn't veer off course. 90% of this I could have done myself but Claude took hours where it would have taken me days or even weeks.

Then yesterday I wanted to do a quick audit of our infra using Ansible. I first thought: let's try Claude again. I gave it lots of hints on where our inventory is, which ports matter etc but it still was grinding away for several minutes. I eventually Ctrl-C'ed and used a couple one liners that I wrote myself in a few minutes. In other words, I was faster that the machine in this case.

After the above, it makes sense to me that people may have conflicting feelings about productivity. e.g. sometimes it's amazing, sometimes it does the wrong thing.

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