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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#651

Post by phatfish »

maplethorpe wrote: post #647
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…

Quality is better than quantity.

Re: We mourn our craft

#652

Post by testdelacc1 »

maplethorpe wrote: post #647
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…

We have more words than ever. Nice.

But all the words sound more like each other than ever. It’s not just blah, it’s blah.

And why should I bother reading what someone else “writes”? I can generate the same text myself for free.

Re: We mourn our craft

#653

Post by layer8 »

maplethorpe wrote: post #647
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…

I hope this is sarcasm. :)

Re: We mourn our craft

#654

Post by _aavaa_ »

paganel wrote: post #643
_aavaa_ wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For starters: Qwen, GLM, Kimi, Llama.

How they run their business is none of my business. I can download the weights right now and use them as I see fit under the open source license terms.

Google Maps was never a self contained binary you could download. But even now it remains free to use.

Re: We mourn our craft

#655

Post by nullbio »

remify wrote: post #590
leecommamichael wrote: post #153

> Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft. Your craft is not my craft. It's entirely possible that, as of now, writing JavaScript and Java frontends (what the author does) can largely be automated with LLMs. I don't know who the author is writing to, but I do not mistake the audience to be "programmers" in general... If you are making something that exists, or something that is very similar to something tha…

It's funnily enough quite the opposite front ends that have a focus on UX are pretty well protected from generative AI

Strangly, yeah. LLMs are absolute trash at generating good UX and UI.

Re: We mourn our craft

#656

Post by whofpp »

ricardobayes wrote: post #569
dazhbog wrote: post #430

I dont get the hype.. And I dont think we will reach peak AI coding performance any time soon. Yes, watching an LLM spit out lots of code is for sure mesmerizing. Small tasks usually work ok, code kinda compiles, so for some scenarios it can work out.. BUT anyone serious about software development can see how piece of CRAP the code is. LLMs are great tools overall, great to bounce ideas, great to get shit done. If yo…

Super weird comments on this thread, to the point I would think it's brigaded or some (most) comments are straight up AI generated. Hackernews definitely changed. The tone on AI changed since a few months ago, I guess also because many people here are working on AI. Almost any new startup is AI-adjacent now. It's no surprise, cca. 120 out of 150 YC startups are AI. So there is a big push on this forum to keep the hyp…

I was thinking the same thing as I scrolled through. Half the comments are some AI generated homage to AI. I’ve seen Anthropic pushing so much marketing BS on X/Twitter that wouldn’t surprise me if it extended to HN.

Re: We mourn our craft

#657

Post by yread »

Nextgrid wrote: post #137

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a…

Nevermind coding where is the llm for legal stuff? Why are all these programmers working on automating their job away instead of those bloodsucking lawyers who charge hundreds of eur per h.

Re: We mourn our craft

#658

Post by _aavaa_ »

icedchai wrote: post #468
_aavaa_ wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good by what standard? Compared to SOTA today? No they're not. But they are better than the SOTA in 2020, and likely 2023. We have a magical pseudo-thinking machine that we can run locally completely under our control, and instead the goal posts have moved to "but it's not as fast as the proprietary could".

My comparison was today's local AI to today's SOTA commercial AI. Both have improved, no argument. It's more cost effective for someone to pay $20 to $100 month for a Claude subscription compared to buying a 512 gig Mac Studio for $10K. We won't discuss the cost of the NVidia rig. I mess around with local AI all the time. It's a fun hobby, but the quality is still night and day.

The original pithy comment I was replying to was arguing that we’ll become dependent to a service run by another company. I don’t see that being true for two reasons:

1. You are not forced to use the AI in the first place.

2. If you want to use one, you can self host it one of the open models.

That at any moment in time the open models are not equivalent in capabilities to the SOTA paid models is beside the point.

Re: We mourn our craft

#659

Post by zajio1am »

koiueo wrote: post #349
zajio1am wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no requirement for compilers to be deterministic. The requirement is that a compiler produces something that is valid interpretation of the program according to the language specification, but unspecified details (like specific ordering of instructions in the resulting code) could in principle be chosen nondeterministically and be different in separate executions of the compiler.

We are not talking about deterministic instructions, we are talking about deterministic behavior. UB is actually a big deal, and is avoided for a reason. I couldn't in my life guess what CC would do in response to "implement login form". For all I know CC's response could depend on time of day or Anthropic's electricity bill last month more, than on the existing code in my app, and the specific wording I use.

I do not talk about UBs, compiler can be non-deterministic even for completely valid and well-specified source code.

Seems to me that people just confuse determinism with soundness.

Determinism is just whether the output of the tool (machine code) is determined by the input (source code), i.e., for one input always returns the same output.

Soundness means that output is always consistent with the semantics of the input. i.e. returned machine code always does what is specified by the source code.

Compilers can be non-deterministic (although usually are deterministic), but they are always sound (ignoring compiler bugs).

LLMs can be deterministic (although usually aren't), but they are not sound in general.

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