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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#361

Post by samiv »

sosomoxie wrote: post #229
IhateAI wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm actually extremely good at programming. My point is I love computers and computing . You can use technology to achieve amazing things (even having fun). Now I can do much more of that than when I was limited to what I can personally code. In the end, it's what computers can do that's amazing, beautiful, terrifying... That thrill and to be on the bleeding edge is always what I was after.

The downside is that whatever you (Claude) can do so can anyone else too.

So you're welcome to make the 100000000th Copy of the same thing that nobody cares about anymore.

Re: We mourn our craft

#362

Post by samiv »

tines wrote: post #338
IhateAI wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Thank you. I don't understand how people don't see that this is the universe's most perfect gift to corporations, and what a disaster it is for labor. There won't be a middle class. Future generations will be intellectual invalids. Baffling to see people celebrating.

They are the useful idiots buying into the hype thinking they by some magic they get to keep their jobs and their incomes.

This things is going to erase careers and render skills sets and knowledge cultivated over decades worthless.

Anyone can promt the same fucking shit now and call it a day.

Re: We mourn our craft

#364

Post by pseudalopex »

arduanika wrote: post #197
boxedemp wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no true scotsman puts sugar in his porridge

Yes, that was the reference! Possibly too obscure. I can't tell whether I'm being downvoted by optimists who missed the joke, or by pessimists who got it.

Most sarcasm worsens discussion. And the comment guidelines say Don't be snarky.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: We mourn our craft

#365

Post by strange_quark »

tibbar wrote: post #343
strange_quark wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT 3.5 was almost 40 months ago, not 24. GPT 4.5 was supposed to be 5 but was not noticeably better than 4o. GPT 5 was a flop. Remember the hype around Gemini 3? What happened to that? Go back and read the blog posts from November when Opus 4.5 came out; even the biggest boosters weren't hyping it up as much as they are now. It's pretty obvious the change of pace is slowing down and there isn't a lot of evidence…

Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of reasoning models, though? 4.5 was slower and moderately better than 4o, o3 was dramatically stronger than 4o and GPT5 was basically a light iteration on that. What's happening now is training models for long-running tasks that use tools, taking hours at a time. The latest models like 4.6 and 5.3 are starting to make good on this. If you're not using models that are wi…

> Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of reasoning models, though?

o1 was something like 16-18 months ago. o3 was kinda better, and GPT 5 was considered a flop because it was basically just o3 again.

I’ve used all the latest models in tools like Claude code and codex, and I guess I’m just not seeing the improvement? I’m not even working on anything particularly technically complex, but I still have to constantly babysit these things.

Where are the long-running tasks? Cursor’s browser that didn’t even compile? Claude’s C compiler that had gcc as an oracle and still performs worse than gcc without any optimizations? Yeah I’m completely unimpressed at this point given the promises these people have been making for years now. I’m not surprised that given enough constraints they can kinda sorta dump out some code that resembles something else in their training data.

Re: We mourn our craft

#366

Post by kaffekaka »

jryio wrote: post #216

These comments are comical. How hard is it to understand that human beings are experiential creatures. Our experiences matter, to survival, to culture, and identity. I mourn the horse masters and stable boys of a century past because of their craft. Years of intuition and experience. Why do you watch a chess master play, or a live concert, or any form of human creation? Should we automate parts of our profession? Yes…

Very well put.

Two things are true at the same time, this makes people uneasy.

Re: We mourn our craft

#367

Post by paulhebert »

ahepp wrote: post #331
paulhebert wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s that simple. A couple of examples: Food: A lot of the processed foods that are easily available make us unhealthy and sick. Even vegetables are less nutritious than they were 50 years ago. Mass agriculture also has many environmental externalities. Consumer goods: It has become difficult to find things like reliable appliances. I bought a chest freezer. It broke after a year. The repairman said it…

It's true, they don't "make 'em like they used to". They make them in new, more efficient ways which have contributed to improving global trends in metrics such as literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, extreme poverty, and food supply. If you are arguing that standard of living today is lower than in the past, I think that is a very steep uphill battle to argue If your worries are about ecology and sustainabili…

Sure, it’s complicated.

I worry that humanity has a track record of diving head first into new technologies without worrying about externalities like the environment or job displacement.

I wish we were more thoughtful and focused more on minimizing the downsides of new technologies.

Instead it seems we’re headed full steam towards huge amounts of energy use and job displacement. And the main bonus is rich people get richer.

I’m not sure if having software be cheaper is beneficial. Is it good for malware to be easier to produce? I’d personally choose higher quality software over more software.

I’m not convinced cheaper mass produced clothing has been a net positive. Will AI be a positive? Time will tell. In the short term there are some obvious negatives.

Re: We mourn our craft

#368

Post by notnullorvoid »

eranation wrote: post #143
iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much. I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right". But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have…

> The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build"

What makes you think AI already isn't at the same level of quality or higher for "build the right things" as it is for "building things right"?

Re: We mourn our craft

#369

Post by ivanbalepin »

davnicwil wrote: post #344
stack_framer wrote: post #227

> wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wante…

Something I'm finding odd is this seemingly perpetually repeating claim that the latest thing that came out actually works, unlike the last thing that obviously didn't quite work. Then next month, of course, latest thing becomes last thing, and suddenly it's again obvious that actually it didn't quite work. It's like running on a treadmill towards a dangling carrot or something. It's simultaneously always here in fro…

that's a good take

> getting software that does what you want

so then we become PMs?

Re: We mourn our craft

#370

Post by bunderbunder »

linguae wrote: post #105
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s never been easier for you to make a competitor So what is stopping you other than yourself?

I’m not the OP, but my answer is that there’s a big difference between building products and building businesses. I’ve been programming since 1998 when I was in elementary school. I have the technical skills to write almost anything I want, from productivity applications to operating systems and compilers. The vast availability of free, open source software tools helps a lot, and despite this year’s RAM and SSD price…

Yes. I have seen the better product lose out to network effects far too many times to believe that a real mass market competitor can happen nowadays.

Look at how even the Posix ecosystem - once a vibrant cluster of a dozen different commercial and open source operating systems built around a shared open standard - has more or less collapsed into an ironclad monopoly because LXC became a killer app in every sense of the term. It’s even starting to encroach on the last standing non-POSIX operating system, Windows, which now needs the ability to run Linux in a tightly integrated virtual machine to be viable for many commercial uses.

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