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The peril of laziness lost

bcantrill.dtrace.org

31–40 of 148 posts

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#31

This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable. It is * exactly * the same as a person who spent years perfecting hand written HTML, just to face the wrath of React.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I recommend you go look at some of his talks on Youtube, his best five talks are probably all in my all time top-ten list!

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#32
post #5

As dumb as it is to loudly proclaim you wrote 200k loc last week with an LLM, I don’t think it’s much better to look at the code someone else wrote with an LLM and go “hah! Look at how stupid it is!” You’re making exactly the same error as the other guy, just in the opposite direction: you’re judging the profession of software engineering based on code output rather than value generation. Now, did Garry Tan actually…

> Now, did Garry Tan actually produce anything of value that week? I dunno, you’ll have to ask him. Let’s not be naive. Garry is not a nobody. He absolutely doesn’t care about how many lines of code are produced or deleted. He made that post as advertisement: he’s advertising AI because he’s the ceo of YC which profitability depends on AI. He’s just shipping ads.

"Follow the money" was always relevant, but especially when it comes to any kind of LLM news or investment-du-jour.

The cautionary/pessimist folks at least don't make money by taking the stance.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#33

This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable. It is * exactly * the same as a person who spent years perfecting hand written HTML, just to face the wrath of React.

Disregarding the fact that Bryan operates oxide a company that has multiple investors and customers (id say this proves valuable knowledge) the crazier fact is that people think html is useless knowledge. React USES html. Understanding html is core to understanding react. React does not in anyway devalue html in the same way that driving automatic devalues driving manual

Go to Facebook.com and right click view source and tell me html is not being devalued. No person who wants to write aesthetic html would write that stuff.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#34
post #9

LLMs not being lazy enough definitely feels true. But it's unclear to me if it a permanent issue, one that will be fixed in the next model upgrade or just one your agent framework/CICD framework takes care of. e.g. Right now when using agents after I'm "done" with the feature and I commit I usually prompt "Check for any bugs or refactorings we should do" I could see a CICD step that says "Look at the last N commits a…

It’s difficult to define a termination criterion for that. When you ask LLMs to find any X, they usually find something they claim qualifies as X.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#35
post #3

> Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less. Maybe this was true when Programming Perl was written, but I see the opposite much more often now. I'm a big fan of WET - Write Everything Twice (stolen from comments here), then the third time think about maybe creating a new abstraction.

Totally agree with this, the beauty of software is the right abstractions have untold impact, spanning many orders of magnitude. I'm talking about the major innovations, things like operating systems, RDBMS, cloud orchestration. But the majority of code in the world is not like that, it's just simple business logic that represents ideas and processes run by humans for human purposes which resist abstraction.

That doesn't people from trying though, platform creation is rife within big tech companies as a technical form of empire building and career-driven development. My rule of thumb in tech reviews is you can't have a platform til you have three proven use cases and shown that coupling them together is not a net negative due to the autonomy constraint a shared system imposes.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#36
post #21

German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (a high-ranking army officer in the Reichswehr/Wehrmacht era): “I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who i…

Where my fellow ninety-percenters at?

I think we put too much negative emphasis on people who aren’t as gifted intellectually.

In reality, the world works because of human automotons, honest people doing honest work; living their life in hopefully a comforting, complete and wholesome way, quietly contributing their piece to society.

There is no shame in this, yet we act as though there is.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#37
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where my fellow ninety-percenters at?

I think we put too much negative emphasis on people who aren’t as gifted intellectually. In reality, the world works because of human automotons, honest people doing honest work; living their life in hopefully a comforting, complete and wholesome way, quietly contributing their piece to society. There is no shame in this, yet we act as though there is.

The movie Perfect Days captures this perfectly.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#39

This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable. It is * exactly * the same as a person who spent years perfecting hand written HTML, just to face the wrath of React.

Your account name is so fitting

Now look up who he actually is.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disregarding the fact that Bryan operates oxide a company that has multiple investors and customers (id say this proves valuable knowledge) the crazier fact is that people think html is useless knowledge. React USES html. Understanding html is core to understanding react. React does not in anyway devalue html in the same way that driving automatic devalues driving manual

Go to Facebook.com and right click view source and tell me html is not being devalued. No person who wants to write aesthetic html would write that stuff.

Do the same to Google.com

When it matters it matters. Even in facebooks case they made react fit for their use case. You think the react devs didn’t understand html? Do you think quality frontends can be written without any understanding of html?

Like the article says we’ve moved an abstraction up. That does not make the html knowledge useless

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