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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#381

Post by blibble »

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.

it is a very, very strange thing to witness

even if you can be a prompt engineer (or whatever it's called this week) today

well, with the feedback you're providing: you're training it to do that too

you are LITERALLY training the newly hired outsourced personnel to do your job

but this time you won't be able to get a job anywhere else, because your fellow class traitors are doing exactly the same thing at every other company in the world

Re: We mourn our craft

#382

Post by twelve40 »

I found my love for programming in high school, dreaming of helping the world with my beautiful craftsmanship, but now i really really need the fokken money. Both are true!

So if my corporate overlords will have me talk to the soul-less Claude robot all day long in a Severance-style setting, and fix its stupid bugs, but I get to keep my good salary, then I'll shed a small tear for my craft and get back to it. If not... well, then I'll be shedding a lot more tears ... i guess

Re: We mourn our craft

#383

Post by [deleted] »

dham wrote: post #193
wlindley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.

My car has driven me back and forth with no issues for 6 months now. But yes it's been a long time coming.

[deleted]

Re: We mourn our craft

#384

Post by throwawa14223 »

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…

But why would someone pay you for that?

Re: We mourn our craft

#385

Post by mirawelner »

These posts make me feel like I’m the worst llm prompter in existence.

I’m using a mix of Gemini, grok, and gpt to translate some matlab into c++. It is kinda okay at its job but not great? I am rapidly reading Accelerated C++ to get to the point where I can throw the llm out the window. If it was python or Julia I wouldn’t be using an LLM at all bc I know those languages. AI is barely better than me at C++ because I’m halfway through my first ever book on it. What LLMs are these people using?

The code I’m translating isn’t even that complex - it runs analysis on ecg/ppg data to implement this one dude’s new diagnosis algorithm. The hard part was coming up with the algorithm, the code is simple. And the shit the LLM pours out works kinda okay but not really? I have to do hours of fix work on its output. I’m doing all the hard design work myself.

I fucking WISH I could only work on biotech and research and send the code to an LLM. But I can’t because they suck so I gotta learn how computer memory works so my C++ doesn’t eat up all my pc’s memory. What magical LLMs are yall using??? Please send them my way! I want a free llm therapist and a programmer! What world do you live in?? Let me in!

Re: We mourn our craft

#386

Post by 0x696C6961 »

terminalbraid wrote: post #74
dgacmu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary. The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...

Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and we reach the true problem.

It's not an analogy.

Re: We mourn our craft

#387

Post by Xenoamorphous »

croes wrote: post #98
bnchrch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things. This new world makes me more effective at it. And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.

Wait 5 years and your skills are down

In 5 years coding skills will matter as much as being able to operate an elevator. (sadly)

Re: We mourn our craft

#388

Post by bytearray »

I understand the sentiment and I've been involved in software engineering in various roles for the last 25+ years. The thing that gives me hope is that never once in that time has the problem ever been that we didn't have more work to do.

It's not like all of a sudden I'm working 2-3 hours a day. I'm just getting a lot more done.

Re: We mourn our craft

#389

Post by eranation »

godelski wrote: post #320
eranation wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "build the right things" [vs] "build things right" I think this (frequent) comparison is incorrect. There are times when quality doesn't matter and times that it does. Without that context these discussions are meaningless . If I build my own table no one really gives a shit about the quality besides me and maybe my friends judging me. But if I sell it, well then people certainly care[0] and they have every right t…

Of course. I mean, my view is that it needs to be "build the right things right", vs "build things right and then discover if they are the right things". It's a stab at premature optimisation, focusing on code elegance more than delivering working software. Code simplicity, good design, scalability, are super important for maintainability, even in the age of AI (maybe even more so).

But considering that AI will more and more "build things right" by default, it's up to us humans to decide what are the "right things to build".

Once AI knows what are the "right things to build" better than humans, this is AGI in my book, and also the end of classical capitalism as we know it. Yes, there will still be room for "human generated" market, like we have today (photography didn't kill painting, but it made it a much less of a main employment option)

In a way, AI is the great equality maker, in the past the strongest men prevailed, then when muscles were not the main means to assert force, it was the intellect, now it's just sheer want. You want to do something, now you can, you have no excuses, you just need to believe it's possible, and do it.

As someone else said, agency is eating the world. For now.

Re: We mourn our craft

#390

Post by puchatek »

kaffekaka wrote: post #288
croes wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're on the precipice of something incredible. Total dependence on a service?

Yes this is the issue. We truly have something incredible now. Something that could benefit all of humanity. Unfortunately it comes at $200/month from Sam Altman & co.

If that was the final price, no strings attached and perfect, reliable privacy then I might consider it. Maybe not for the current iteration but for what will be on offer in a year or two.

But as it stands right now, the most useful LLMs are hosted by companies that are legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it. It's unacceptable.

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