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

801–810 of 918 posts

Re: We mourn our craft

#801

Post by ruszki »

archagon wrote: post #500
Nextgrid wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't be prompting AI for the fun stuff (unless laying out boring boilerplate is what you consider "fun"). You'll still be writing the fun part - but you will be able to prompt beforehand to get all the boilerplate in place.

If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com ) Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.

Not just laziness of writing scripts, but also laziness of learning what your options are, like inside the framework you use, or what is available off the shelf.

And btw AI is also terrible with this, because they learned from the same code written by the people who make these mistakes all the time. I need to write detailed explanations for them all the time about how to use tools/frameworks/language features properly, because majority of examples in their learning data are simply a huge pile of technical debt. They could never created anything proper without a step by step rulebook, and examples written manually.

Re: We mourn our craft

#802

Post by daveguy »

bhadass wrote: post #793
daveguy wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i agree w/ the the complexity analysis point, but that theoretical understanding actually translates to real world deployment decisions in both subfields. knowing an algorithm is O() tells you surprisingly little about whether itll actually outperform alternatives on real hardware with real cache hierarchies, branch predictors, and memory access patterns. same thing with ML (just with the very different nature of GPU…

I think you missed the point. Proving something is optimal, is a much higher bar than just knowing how the hell the algorithm gets from inputs to outputs in a reasonable way. Even concurrent systems and algorithm bounds under input distributions have well established ways to evaluate them. There is literally no theoretical framework for how a neural network churns out answers from inputs, other than the most fundamental "matrix algebra". Big O, Theta, Omega, and asymptotic performance are all sound theoretical methods to evaluate algorithms. We don't have anything even that good for neural networks.

Re: We mourn our craft

#803

Post by dave_sid »

I think you need to lighten up and adapt the way programmers have adapted since the 50s. There’s been a lot of pomposity over the past ten years around “craft”, you’d think we’re all precious Renaissance artists pining for recognition over our heavenly crafted code rather than engineers. I’m in my late forties also I’m case that matters at all, I don’t think it does. If anything that gives me an advantage to spot and quickly filter out the 1/10 insanely bad suggestions that AI pukes out and know when it’s giving me decent code. Who knows where it will lead but stubbornly refusing to move won’t help. Please take this in a positive way also, rather than a dig. Be positive. Also think of all the job opportunities you will have rewriting all the crap code that gets punted out over the next 10 years. You’re going to be rich. Seriously tho, if you are in your forties you have the advantage of leveraging AI yourself but also knowing when it is bull shitting you.

Re: We mourn our craft

#804

Post by autoexec »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #768
manmal wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models you can run on your own (expensive) computer are just a year behind the SOTA. Linux exists. Why are you so pessimistic?

Typical HN comment. They’re so in the weeds of edge case 1% concerns they can’t see the golden age around them. Most people living through golden ages might not know it. Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages. Many in the Roman Empire were enslaved or impoverished. That doesn’t mean history doesn’t see these as golden ages, where golden age is defined loosely as a broad period of enhanc…

> Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages.

Yeah! Why weren't all those children with mangled limbs more optimistic about the future? Why weren't they singing the praises of the golden age around them? Do you think it would have resulted in a golden age for anyone except a very small few if the people hadn't spoken out against the abuses of the greedy industrialists and robber barons and united against them?

If you can't see what's wrong with what's happening in front of you today and you can't see ahead to what's coming at you in the future you're going to be cut very badly by those "edge cases". Instead of blinding ourselves to them, I'd recommend getting into those weeds now so that we can start pulling them up by their roots.

Re: We mourn our craft

#805

Post by jccc »

chickensong wrote: post #780
autoexec wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're definitely in a golden age of computing. Certainly not. Computers are still magic, but much of that magic is now controlled and being restricted by someone other than you. Today most people's only computer is a cell phone, which is heavily locked down and designed for media consumption and to collect and give away every scrap of their personal/private data. Most people's desktop computers aren't much better.…

What you're saying might be true, but it's also a choice to delegate responsibility to someone other than yourself. I'm not saying that the adversarial state of computing is ok, just that most people don't care, or don't like the alternatives. Even as someone concerned with the issues you mention, the shift happening now feels pretty magical to me. I can only imagine how non-technical people must feel.

Don’t understand != don’t care.

Re: We mourn our craft

#807

Post by maplethorpe »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #698
maplethorpe wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Are you for real? Quantity is not equal to Quality. I'll be sure to dump a pile of trash in your living room. There wasn't much there before, but now there is lots of stuff. Better right?

I'm finding it hard to reconcile HN's love of AI generated code with HN's dislike of AI generated content. Why is the code good but the content bad?

Re: We mourn our craft

#808

Post by mcdeltat »

chickensong wrote: post #780
autoexec wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're definitely in a golden age of computing. Certainly not. Computers are still magic, but much of that magic is now controlled and being restricted by someone other than you. Today most people's only computer is a cell phone, which is heavily locked down and designed for media consumption and to collect and give away every scrap of their personal/private data. Most people's desktop computers aren't much better.…

What you're saying might be true, but it's also a choice to delegate responsibility to someone other than yourself. I'm not saying that the adversarial state of computing is ok, just that most people don't care, or don't like the alternatives. Even as someone concerned with the issues you mention, the shift happening now feels pretty magical to me. I can only imagine how non-technical people must feel.

Sure it's technically always a choice, but because society exists, some options are dramatically more plausible than others.

For example, say phones become more and more locked down and invasive. Technically you can choose not to have a phone, but how are you meant to function in today's society without a phone? Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone. Technically you could make your own phone, I guess, but that's very difficult.

I don't think you can reasonably make the argument that because technically everyone can make their own choices, we should be ok with whatever status quo in society.

Re: We mourn our craft

#809

Post by biztos »

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…

Back in the 80s it felt like Eliza had a “personality.”

Re: We mourn our craft

#810

Post by sneak »

wtetzner wrote: post #604
archagon wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re writing that much boilerplate as part of your day to day work, I daresay you’re Doing Coding Wrong. (Virtue number one of programming: laziness. https://thethreevirtues.com ) Any drudgework you repeat two or three times should be encapsulated or scripted away, deterministically.

Funny how people complain about macros as an abstraction mechanism, but replacing them with an LLM is fine.

Macros are referenced, like a function call.

LLM output sort of “vendors in” smart macros (for lack of a better description) by saving the actual output of the LLM. In that sense, they serve different purposes.

Post reply on HN