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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#541

Post by ozozozd »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #424
AstroBen wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars being poured into the smartest minds in the world to push this thing forward I'm not so confident that it'll only be code monkeys for too long

> the smartest minds in the world Dunning–Kruger is everywhere in the AI grift. People who don't know a field trying to deploy some AI bot that solves the easy 10% of the problem so it looks good on the surface and assumes that just throwing money (which mostly just buys hardware) will solve it. They aren't "the smartest minds in the world". They are slick salesmen.

The other day someone referred to Claude Code as “the most complex terminal app” they’ve seen.

Meanwhile folks are rendering videos in the terminal.

Re: We mourn our craft

#542

Post by davidw »

Gud wrote: post #499
bdangubic wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use. is there anything you use that isn't? like laptop on which you work, software that you use to browse the internet, read the email... I've heard similar comment like yours before and I am not sure I understand it given everything else - why does this matter for LLMs and not the phone you use etc etc?

I’ve used FreeBSD since I was 15 years old - Linux before that. My computer was never controlled by any corporation, until now.

Yeah I've always run Linux on my computers for the past 30 years. I'm pretty used to being in control.

Re: We mourn our craft

#543

Post by davidw »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #412
davidw wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is where it's at for me. LLM's are cool and I can see them as progress, but I really dislike that they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use.

Use local OSS models then? They aren’t as good and you need beefy hardware (either Apple silicon or nvidia GPUs). But they are totally workable, and you avoid your dislikes directly.

"Not as good and costs a lot in hardware" still sounds like I'm at a disadvantage.

Re: We mourn our craft

#544

Post by AstroBen »

ozozozd wrote: post #540
AstroBen wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language Why are we uniquely capable of doing that, but an LLM isn't? In plan mode I've been seeing them ask for clarifications and gather further requirements Important business context can be provided to them, also

We are uniquely capable of doing that because we invented that :) It’s a self-serving definition, a job description. This isn’t an argument against LLMs capability. But the burden of proof is on the LLMs’ side.

True. That capability might be reserved for AGI. The current implementation does feel like a party trick and I don't enjoy working with it

Re: We mourn our craft

#545

Post by zzo38computer »

hnlmorg wrote: post #299
sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified. Instead what we have is: - AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason. - perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”.…

> The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified.

I agree, that it would be good. (It is one reason why I wanted to design a better computer, which would include full documentation about the hardware and the software (hopefully enough to make a compatible computer), as well as full source codes (which can help if some parts of the documentation are unclear, but also can be used to make your own modifications if needed).) (In some cases, we have some of this already, but not entirely. Not all hardware and software has the problems you list, although it is too common now. Making a better computer will not prevent such problematic things on other computers, and not entirely preventing such problems on the new computer design either, but it would help a bit, especially if it is actually designed good rather than badly.)

Re: We mourn our craft

#547

Post by zzo38computer »

apitman wrote: post #87
sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40 years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but practically none of the software written today will still be around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies. There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and sp…

> That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model.

Not all software now is SaaS, but unfortunately it is too common now.

> But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies.

Some people (including myself) prefer to write programs without too many dependencies, in order to avoid that problem. Other things also help, including some people write programs for older systems which can be emulated, or will use a more simpler portable C code, etc. There are things that can be done, to avoid too many dependencies.

There is uxn, which is a simple enough instruction set that people can probably implement it without too much difficulty. Although some programs might need some extensions, and some might use file names, etc, many programs will work, because it is designed in a simple way that it will work.

Re: We mourn our craft

#548

Post by hintymad »

blibble wrote: post #534
hintymad wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I realized was that a lot of our so-called "craft" is converged "know-how". Take the recent news that Anthropic used Claude Code to write a C compiler for example, writing compiler is hard (and fun) for us humans because we indeed need to spend years understanding deeply the compiler theory and learning every minute detail of implementation. That kind of learning is not easily transferrable. Most stude…

writing a C compiler is a 1st year undergrad project C was explicitly designed to make it simple to write a compiler

Which university offers compiler for freshmen? Can you provide a link to the course?

Re: We mourn our craft

#549

Post by Ronsenshi »

stoneforger wrote: post #528
Ronsenshi wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on who these humans you're comparing AI code to. I've seen and reviewed enough AI code in the last few months to have formed a solid impression that it's "ok" at best and relies heavily on who guides it - how well spec defined, what kind of rules are set, coding styles, architecture patterns.

The prompt user is basically selecting patterns from latent space. So you kind of need to know what you're looking for. When you don't know what you're looking for that's when the fun begins, but that's a problem for the next quarter.

It's true for more guided development approach. But the further you go into vibecode territory, the less you need to know.

Re: We mourn our craft

#550

Post by bdangubic »

davidw wrote: post #542
Gud wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used FreeBSD since I was 15 years old - Linux before that. My computer was never controlled by any corporation, until now.

Yeah I've always run Linux on my computers for the past 30 years. I'm pretty used to being in control.

what phone do you use?
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