Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 918 posts

Re: We mourn our craft

#681

Post by _aavaa_ »

paganel wrote: post #677
_aavaa_ wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m only familiar with Llama, but as far as I understood it’s in no way at the same level as Claude or Gemini, so in fact you’d still be a lot less productive compared to those using those products directly. That’s the thing, us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users, but I do agree that that has been changing as of late.

They are not the same level, but that may be fine. As for productivity, I don't take that as a given. Maybe in a few years we'll be at the point where AI is better than AI + human, but we aren't there yet. The other models may be faster are pumping out code, but if you're building in the wrong direction more code is more bad.

> us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users

But that's a false dichotomy. As a programmer I am very much a consumer of the language I use, the IDE, the compiler, and of most of my dependencies. (to say nothing of the OS and the hardware).

I, and I'd wager most people around here, haven't and are aren't individually building at all layers of that stack at once.

Re: We mourn our craft

#682

Post by daveguy »

bhadass wrote: post #555
hnlmorg wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked in the AI space and I understand how LLMs work as a principle. But we don’t know the magic contained within a model after it’s been trained. We understand how to design a model, and how models work at a theoretical level. But we cannot know how well it will be at inference until we test it. So much of AI research is just trial and error with different dials repeated tweaked until we get something desirabl…

but isn't this like a lot of other CS-related "gradient descent"? when someone invents a new scheduling algorithm or a new concurrent data structure, it's usually based on hunches and empirical results (benchmarks) too. nobody sits down and mathematically proves their new linux scheduler is optimal before shipping it. they test it against representative workloads and see if there is uplift. we understand transformer…

No. Algorithm analysis is much more sophisticated and well defined than that. Most algorithms are deterministic, and it is relatively straightforward to identify complexity, O(). Even nondeterministic algorithms we can evaluate asymptotic performance under different categories of input. We know a lot about how an algorithm will perform under a wide variety of input distributions regardless of determinism. In the case of schedulers, and other critical concurrency algorithms, performance is well known before release. There is a whole subfield of computer science dedicated to it. You don't have to "prove optimality" to know a lot about how an algorithm will perform. What's missing in neural networks is the why and how any inputs will propagate, through the network during inference. It is a black box of understandability. Under a great deal of study, but still very poorly understood.

Re: We mourn our craft

#683

Post by ratrace »

> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

How many 6-month periods do we have to go through before we can all admit that this isn't actually the case?

Re: We mourn our craft

#684

Post by margalabargala »

9rx wrote: post #644
margalabargala wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Okay, let's give it a try.

asdjklfh asdjhgflkj bveahrvjkhgv hjagsdfhj hgertjhga ads fhdfjmjhkr

Nope, that's incorrect english.

Turns out that because we've defined "words" as a thing that means a thing, now there are rules around "language" and "words". So while you're welcome to invent whatever combination of sounds you prefer to mean what you like, those sounds can be "correct" or "incorrect" as soon as other people become involved, because now you've entered into a social construct that extends beyond yourself.

So again your conclusion is technically correct, in a navel-gazing "the universe is what I perceive" sort of way, but counterproductive to use as a building block for communication.

Re: We mourn our craft

#685

Post by AndrewKemendo »

coldtea wrote: post #638
davidhyde wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it’s not

Nobody has built a human so we don’t know how they work

We know exactly how LLM technology works

Re: We mourn our craft

#686

Post by nine_k »

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 invention of Mr Jacquard ushered in a sartorial golden age, when complex fabrics are easy to produce cheaply, at the expense of a few hours spent on punching a deck of cards. But the craft of making tapestries by hand definitely went into demise. This is the situation which the post is mourning.

Frankly, I have my doubts about the utter efficiency of LLMs writing code unattended; it will take quite some time before whatever comes after the current crop learns to do that efficiently and reliably. (Check out how many years went between first image generation demos and today's SOTA.) But the vector is obvious: humans would have to speak a higher-level language to computers, and hand-coding Typescript is going to be as niche in 10 years as today is hand-coding assembly.

This adds some kinds of fun, but also removes some other kinds of fun. There's a reason why people often pick something like PICO-8 to write games for fun, rather than something like Unreal Engine. So software development becomes harder because the developer has to work on more and more complex things, faster, and with fewer chances to study the moving parts to a comfortable depth.

Re: We mourn our craft

#687

Post by nine_k »

ratrace wrote: post #683

> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. How many 6-month periods do we have to go through before we can all admit that this isn't actually the case?

Not that many, as the new crop of junior devs grows up not writing and barely reading code.

Re: We mourn our craft

#688

Post by AllegedAlec »

AstroBen wrote: post #43
AllegedAlec wrote: post #4

While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...

I'm very confident in saying the majority of developers didn't get into it saying "we'll automate your job away"

POSIWID

Re: We mourn our craft

#689

Post by 9rx »

margalabargala wrote: post #684
9rx wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Okay, let's give it a try. asdjklfh asdjhgflkj bveahrvjkhgv hjagsdfhj hgertjhga ads fhdfjmjhkr Nope, that's incorrect english. Turns out that because we've defined "words" as a thing that means a thing, now there are rules around "language" and "words". So while you're welcome to invent whatever combination of sounds you prefer to mean what you like, those sounds can be "correct" or "incorrect" as soon as other peopl…

> Nope, that's incorrect english

There is no correct or incorrect here, but I will say it looks perfectly fine to me — naturally, as anything goes. I don't understand it. Is that what you are trying to communicate? There are many words I don't understand; even ones used commonly enough to be found in the dictionary. That is nothing new.

Here's the magic: I don't need to understand. Nobody is born with the understanding. Where communication is desired, we use other devices to express lack of understanding and keep trying to convey intent until a shared understanding is reached. I don't yet understand what that means, but assuming you are here in good faith, I eventually will as you continue to work to communicate your intent behind it.

I know computer people who spend their days writing in programming languages that never talk back struggle with this concept, but one's difficulties in understanding the world around them doesn't define that world.

> there are rules around "language" and "words".

If you are trying to suggest that there is some kind of purity test, it is widely recognized that what is often called Friesian is the closest thing to English as it used to be spoken. What you are writing looks nothing like it. If there are English rules, why don't you follow them? The answer, of course, is that the only "rules" are the ones you decide to make up in the moment. Hence why English today is different from English yesterday and is very different from English centuries ago.

Re: We mourn our craft

#690

Post by vaylian »

9rx wrote: post #603
massysett wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.

> Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. There was another way: Make one up. That is what the people you read from/talked to did before relaying it to you.

If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. Otherwise the word will not hold its own meaning. For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.
Post reply on HN