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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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641–650 of 918 posts

Re: We mourn our craft

#641

Post by coldtea »

fragmede wrote: post #584
hnlmorg wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been building alternatives to MS Office, Adopt Creative Suite, and so on and so forth for literally decades and yet they’re still the de facto standard. Turns out it’s a lot harder to disrupt than it sounds.

It's really hard. But not impossible. Figma managed to. What's different this time around is AI assisted programming means that people can go in and fix bugs, and the interchange becomes the important part.

Figma didn't disrupt anything except Adobe, it's the same shitty business model and the same shitty corporate overloads.

Re: We mourn our craft

#642

Post by toddmorrow »

busterarm wrote: post #378
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 definitely have lost something. I got into computers because they're deterministic. Way less complicated than people. Now the determinism is gone and computers are gaining the worst qualities of people. My only sanctuary in life is slipping away from me. And I have to hear people tell me I'm wrong who aren't even sympathetic to how this affects me.

LLMs have irritated me with bad solutions but they've never hurt my feelings. I can't say that about a single person I know. They're better people than people lol

Re: We mourn our craft

#643

Post by paganel »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #614
paganel wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Use one of the open models that are also getting better and easier to run every year?

Which are those open ones? And how are they going to get their billions of dollars worth of investment back? Even Google Maps used to be virtually free until it wasn’t, at a fraction of the investment cost.

Re: We mourn our craft

#644

Post by 9rx »

margalabargala wrote: post #634
9rx wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a fundamental property of the universe. Whether or not it is useful is immaterial. Humans are unable to read minds. They can only make up words and use them as they intend. There is no other way.

Despite your insistence, I think you will find that the human consensus is that it useful. The human consensus is especially biased in this case, I will grant you that, but it seems few humans wish they were bears in the forest. Our ability to so effectively communicate in such a messy, imperfect environment is what has enabled us to be unlike all the other animals.

It might not sound like it should work on paper, but in the real world it does.

Re: We mourn our craft

#645

Post by layer8 »

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 over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before.

Maybe they made us feel magic, but actual magic is the opposite of what I want computers to be. The “magic” for me was that computers were completely scrutable and reason-able, and that you could leverage your reasoning abilities to create interesting things with them, because they were (after some learning effort) scrutable. True magic, on the other hand, is inscrutable, it’s a thing that escapes explanation, that can’t be reasoned about. LLMs are more like that latter magic, and that’s not what I seek in computers.

> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality.

I always preferred the Star-Trek-style ship computers that didn’t exhibit personality, that were just neutral and matter-of-fact. Computers with personality tend to be exhausting and annoying. Please let me turn it off. Computers with personality can be entertaining characters in a story, but that doesn’t mean I want them around me as the tools I have to use.

Re: We mourn our craft

#646

Post by apitman »

hnlmorg wrote: post #487
apitman wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of st…

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.

It depends on your threat model. Mine includes the compiler vendors abandoning the project and me needing to make my own implementation. Obviously unlikely, and someone else would likely step in for all the major languages, but I'm not convinced Go adds enough over C to give away that control.

As long as I have a stack of esp32s and a working C compiler, no one can take away my ability to make useful programs, including maintaining the compiler itself.

Re: We mourn our craft

#647

Post by maplethorpe »

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.

I agree!. One criticism I've heard is that half my colleagues don't write their own words anymore. They use ChatGPT to do it for them. Does this mean we've "lost" something? On the contrary! Those people probably would have spoken far fewer words into existence in the pre-AI era. But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none. How can anyone say that's something we've lost? That's something we've gained!

It's not only the golden era of code. It's the golden era of content.

Re: We mourn our craft

#648

Post by nullbio »

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 on the precipice of something very disgusting. A massive power imbalance where a single company or two swallows the Earth's economy, due to a lack of competition, distribution and right of access laws. The wildest part is that these greedy companies, one of them in particular, are continuously framed in a positive light. This same company that has partnered with Palantir. AI should be a public good, not something gatekept by greedy capitalists with an ego complex.

Re: We mourn our craft

#649

Post by pocksuppet »

sosomoxie wrote: post #54
Levitating wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> golden age of computing I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage. The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it. Our most popular desktop o…

Dystopian cyberpunk was always part of the fantasy. Yes, scale has enabled terrible things. There are more alternatives than ever though. People are still making C64 games today, cheap chips are everywhere. Documentation is abundant... When you layer in AI, it takes away labor costs, meaning that you don't need to make economically viable things, you can make fun things. I have at least a dozen projects going now tha…

They're possible, but they're not exactly relevant, and you couldn't do something like that on newer hardware. It's like playing a guitar from a museum because the world just forgot how to make guitars. Pretty dystopian.

Re: We mourn our craft

#650

Post by noisy_boy »

> Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.

Why will I miss it? I will be coding my small scripts and tools and hobby projects by hand because there is no deadline attached to them. Hell, I will also tag them as "bespoke hand-crafted free range artisanal" code. There will be a whole hipster category of code that is written as such. And people will enjoy it as they enjoy vinyl records now. Many things would have changed by then but my heart will still be a programmer's heart.

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