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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#631

Post by toddmorrow »

HendrikHensen wrote: post #233
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…

Good for you. But there are already so, so many posts and threads celebrating all of this. Everyone is different. Some of us enjoy the activity of programming by hand. This thread is for those us, to mourn.

I have an llm riding shotgun and I still very much program by hand. it's not one extreme or the other. whatever I copy from the llm has to be redone line by line anyways. I understand all of my code because I touch every line of it

Re: We mourn our craft

#632

Post by margalabargala »

shimman wrote: post #617
hnlmorg wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got 8 year old Go code that still compiles fine on the latest Go compiler. Go has its warts but backwards compatibility isn’t one of them. The language is almost as durable as Perl.

8 years is not that long, if it can still compile in say 20 years then sure but 8 years in this industry isn't that long at all (unless you're into self flagellation by working on the web).

8 years is only "not that long" because we have gotten better at compatibility.

How many similar programs written in 1999 compiled without issue in 2007? The dependency and tooling environment is as robust as it's ever been.

Re: We mourn our craft

#633

Post by toddmorrow »

paganel wrote: post #609
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…

> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality The difference is that the computer only talks back to you as code because you’re paying its owners, with you not being part of the owners. I find it really baffling that people put up with this. What will you do when Alphabet or Altman will demand 10 times the money out of you fir the privilege of their compu…

i have preemptively switched to Deepseek. they'll never remove the free tier because that's how they stick it to Scam Altman and the like

Re: We mourn our craft

#634

Post by margalabargala »

9rx wrote: post #608
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...

Words are something made up to express whatever the speaker/author intends them to, so there is really no such thing as correct or incorrect there. A dictionary can hint at the probability of someone else understanding a word absent of other context, which makes for a useful tool, but that is something quite different to establishing correctness. As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impo…

Your first paragraph, while perhaps philosophically true to a solipsist, is not actually useful in the world we live in.

Re: We mourn our craft

#635

Post by toddmorrow »

_zagj wrote: post #238
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…

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationship…

Facebook is what killed that. Not AI

Re: We mourn our craft

#636

Post by coldtea »

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…

I started programming 40 years ago as well. The magic for me was never that "you could talk to your computer and it had a personality".

That was the layman version of computing, something shown to the masses in movies like War Games and popular media, one that we mocked.

I also lived through the FOSS peak. The current proprietary / black-box / energy lock in would be seen as the stuff of nightmares.

Re: We mourn our craft

#637

Post by pocksuppet »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #177
dgacmu wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? "What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?" That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).

I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook Thesaurus ( https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%2... ), and it returned: > Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates. --- Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would…

Do you know which technology implements that search? It seems LLM-like.

Re: We mourn our craft

#638

Post by coldtea »

davidhyde wrote: post #480
hnlmorg wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.…

My take on the difference between now and then is “effort”. All those things mentioned above are now effortless but the door to “effort” remains open as it always has been. Take the first point for example. Those little black boxes of AI can be significantly demystified by, for example, watching a bunch of videos ( https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html ) and spending at least 40 hours of hard cognitive effort learnin…

>Those little black boxes of AI can be significantly demystified by, for example, watching a bunch of videos (https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html) and spending at least 40 hours of hard cognitive effort learning about it yourself.

That's like saying you can understand humans by watching some physics or biology videos.

Re: We mourn our craft

#639

Post by margalabargala »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #177
dgacmu wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? "What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?" That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).

I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook Thesaurus ( https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%2... ), and it returned: > Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates. --- Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would…

So you weren't actually using the thesaurus as a reverse dictionary here. The thesaurus contains definitions, and the reverse dictionary was the search tool built into their website. It would work just as well against a dictionary as a thesaurus.

Importantly to the point being discussed, what you did does not work at all against an actual physical thesaurus book.

Re: We mourn our craft

#640

Post by iepathos »

If AI is good enough that juniors wielding it outproduce seniors, then the juniors are just... overhead. The company would cut them out and let AI report to a handful of senior architects who actually understand what's being built. You don't pay humans to be a slow proxy for a better tool.

If the tools get good enough to not need senior oversight, they're good enough to not need junior intermediaries either. The "juniors with jetpacks outpacing seniors" future is unrealistic and unstable—it either collapses into "AI + a few senior architects" or "AI isn't actually that reliable yet."

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