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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#181

Post by simoncion »

Supermancho wrote: post #108
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Jesus christ. "The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentiall…

> That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either... Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened. How one might choose to characterize the reality, is irrele…

> It's already happened.

Agreed.

> Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument.

As you mentioned, it's not an abstract argument. It's statements of fact.

> A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open...

No, not at all.

1) If you honestly believe that major tech companies will permit both copyright- and license-washing of their most important proprietary code simply because someone ran it through an LLM, you're quite the fool. If someone "trained" an LLM on -say- both Windows 11 and ReactOS, and then used that to produce "ReactDoze" while being honest about how it was produced, Microsoft would permanently nail them to the wall.

2) The LLMs that were trained on the entirety of The Internet are very, very much not open. If "Open"AI and Anthropic were making available the input data, the programs and procedures used to process that data, and all the other software, input data, and procedures required to reproduce their work, then one could reasonably entertain the claim that the system produced was open.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#182

Post by moron4hire »

Thanemate wrote: post #84

Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in. We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone…

There is a lot more "yngmi" and "have fun being poor"-style attitude around here regarding LLM boosterism.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#183

Post by dspillett »

pfisherman wrote: post #131
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

> This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?

If it does go as far that way as many seem to expect (or, indeed, want), then most people will be able to do it, there will be a dearth of jobs and many people wanting them so it'll be a race to the bottom for all but the lucky few: development will become a minimum wage job or so close to that it'll make no odds. If I'm earning minimum wage it isn't going to be sat on my own doing someone else's prompting, I'll find a job that involves not sitting along in front of a screen and reclaim programming for hobby time (or just stop doing it at all, I have other hobbies to divide my time between). I dislike (effectively) being a remote worker already, but put up with it for the salary, if the salary goes because “AI” turns it into a race-to-the-bottom job then I'm off.

Conversely: if that doesn't happen then I can continue to do what I want, which is program and not instruct someone else (be it a person I manage or an artificial construct) to program. I'm happy to accept the aid of tools for automation and such, I've written a few of my own, but there is a line past which my interest will just vanish.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#184

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

Supermancho wrote: post #108
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied. Jesus christ. "The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentiall…

> That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either... Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened. How one might choose to characterize the reality, is irrele…

> Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened.

yes and lockpicks also exist. Promotting the ability to break into homes when people are talking about the housing crisis is a crazy, short sighted and frankly embarrasing position to take.

And mischaracterising the people in the open source community as belonging to that ideology is insulting.

> A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open

You are missusing the word open here, for accesible. Having an open house, and breaking into someone's home are not the same thing, even if the door ends up open either way.

> Granted, this is to the chagrin of subgroups that had been pushing different strategies.

Taking unethical shortcuts that ultimately lead to an even worse outcome is not a cause of chagrin, its a cause of deep and utter terror and embarrasment.

Wanting people to own their skills and tech stack and be informed, smart and engaged is a goal that "just ask the robot you dont control to break into a corporate codebase and copy it" is not even remotely close to helping get close to.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#185

Post by tasuki »

bicx wrote: post #21
cl0ckt0wer wrote: post #3

Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.

When they invented cars (and cars became popular and affordable), people did stop walking everywhere. Jogging wasn’t popularized until the 1970s, when we all realized we needed to be intentional with fitness in our car-based society.

> people did stop walking everywhere.

I didn't. Yesterday I walked 11 km for errands. Today I took a detour when walking to work, a more scenic route with less traffic.

For me walking is not much slower than using public transport (you need to get to it, then from it to the point of your destination), and not much slower than a car (stuck in traffic, finding parking, not to mention the road rage). I'd be faster on a bicycle but I'm not in a hurry and enjoy my walks.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#186

Post by zetanor »

>One upside of this looming economic and intellectual depression is that the media is beginning to recognise gate keepers are no longer the hand that feeds them.

In what world is "the media" not an integral, tightly-bound part of the ratchet mechanism that seeks to suppress all distinction?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#187

Post by qsera »

titzer wrote: post #59
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…

Trust me. All those people do it for the love of doing it, so I don't think they will outsource the jobs to some automation....

I have been coding long before internet and before there were huge demand for software devs..and I would be coding even after there is no demand for the same.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#188

Post by coldtea »

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

>Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company

What's valuable to a company is not necessarily what's valuable to the customers or even more so, to a civilization at large.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#189

Post by zozbot234 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #150
tpdly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fooling yourself. People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.

You're fooling yourself. It's very easy to get demonstrably working results in an afternoon that would take weeks at least without coding agents. Demonstrably working , as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use. I had a coding agent write an entire declarative GUI library for mpv userscripts, rendering all widgets with ASS subtitles, then proceeded to prove to my satisfaction that it does…

> Demonstrably working, as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use.

That's not how you prove that code works properly and isn't going to fail due to some obscure or unforessen corner case. You need actual proof that's driven by the code's overall structure. Humans do this at least informally when they code, AI's can't do that with any reliability, especially not for non-trivial projects (for reasons that are quite structural and hard to change) so most coding agents simply work their way iteratively to get their test results to pass. That's not a robust methodology.

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