i’d rather be reading Industrial Society and Its Future by good ol uncle Ted
To my students
61–70 of 221 posts
Re: To my students
#62You could write this from the perspective of a historical luddite [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite ] and the points would be identical.
This is a tired, weak, and pathetic argument. Opposition to technology is very reasonable if that technology is doing more harm than good. In the case of present-day LLMs, the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Why accept a decreasing quality of live instead of sensible regulation?
> the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial.
Examples of ridiculous and incorrect beliefs once held by majorities:
- Spontaneous generation
- "Miasma" causes disease
- Earth is at the centre of the universe
- The heart is the seat of thought and the brain is useless
- Cold weather causes colds
Don't trust "the vast majority" to get anything right, ever.
Re: To my students
#63Re: To my students
#64He's not wrong...
From an information theory perspective, LLMs are just regurgitating content from a loss-ily compressed training set.
It just turns out that like 95% of software we write is extremely repetitive rehashed shit globbed together. We just haven't found ways to abstract a lot of the redundant code well enough yet so here we are, stuck with the stupid robot.
That remaining 5% is stuff that's fully never been done before. If you ask an LLM to come up with a fully new sorting algorithm it's going to give you worthless garbage, maybe it'll get lucky if you burn a nuclear power plant worth of tokens in an infinite-keyboard-monkeys way.
All this is to say, if we want the field to actually progress we still need somebody with some knowledge about how a computer actually works.
Re: To my students
#65There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
Doesn't matter who reads it. The point is that you will probably never learn to do "high level system design" well if you do not have enough experience writing and refactoring code yourself. It's like you wanting to become the chef of a kitchen and giving instructions without having ever prepped food.
There is indeed something useful about trying to write elegant code. Not because others read it. But because that's how you learn about the engineering tradeoffs and abstraction that exist everywhere.
Re: To my students
#66"where intellectual property is not respected"
This suggests to me the underlying concern is "but I won't get paid for my craft!".
Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle?
Re: To my students
#67> Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. I've been struggling to figure out what "slower" would look like when working in industry. If everyone's working 2x faster, how do you slow down meaningfully without getting axed?
Slow can be fast.
As I got older and more experienced, I didn't produce code faster. I just produced the right code. If you don't have to try five different things, and debug them along the way, you can be a lot faster without "going fast".
Re: To my students
#68Re: To my students
#69There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutt…
The engineer who only does high level system design and never codes has existed for decades and is often the most useless and derided engineer in the org.
Re: To my students
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice…
Fads come and go in industry. This version of LLMs will come and go as well, as will the coding languages and paradigms we used before (and, presuming you want your code to actually run, still do with some decent frequency). Will LLMs in their current ergonomics have staying power? Perhaps. Nobody can predict the future. But I don’t think it’s a given in the least
Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad". I don't think you need to be Nostradamus to predict that we're never going back to manual coding. Sure, the systems will evolve and improve, but they're certainly not going anywhere.