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

The Eternal Sloptember

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 389 posts

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#221

Post by tao_oat »

omnimus wrote: post #204
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, clothes would have remained very expensive if we kept doing fabric by hand. Even destitute people in the poorest countries can have clothes these days, the meaning of “who wears the pants in this house” has lost its original (一条裤子) scarcity meaning.

I think you are misrepresenting the luddites. They were not against technological progress. Many of them were the ones who invented the machines. What they were fighting for were labour rights and distribution of power. They were fighting against enshitification by some guy who stole their collective inventions and by force kicked them out. They were not against more clothes for everyone - quite the opposite. They we…

The Luddites-as-labour-movement view is not entirely wrong, but also misses a lot. They were also an elite group that fought to preserve their own status and the exclusion of women from the industry.

I thought this was a pretty good post about it: https://www.verysane.ai/p/against-the-luddites

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#222

Post by simianwords »

what wrote: post #71
simianwords wrote: post #32

People misunderstand how AI is used in coding in normal work environments. New feature requirement comes - maybe you need a new service or some new classes. You need to do some research first. You guide the AI with some prompts and give it some guidance on how to scenario-test it. It makes some classes, test methods. Maybe ~2000 lines and you do a quick verification, check if the overall idea looks okay. Ask it to fi…

Yes, just throw 2kloc over the wall for some feature. Your coworkers must love you.

I also review 2kloc using Claude and approve quickly. Claude is directionally right so this sort of works out.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#223

Post by simianwords »

frabcus wrote: post #220
rebuilder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could both be right.

Right the original article says "Do you think macOS will get better or worse in the next 2 years?" (rhetorically implying "worse"). That could easily be true and Apple "will use even more tokens and spend even more money".

Sure but what would be a bet that can disprove the author? If there’s nothing then the post is useless.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#224

Post by scrollaway »

torben-friis wrote: post #208
bruce511 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea. Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor. Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skil…

>Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor. And yet my working class grandparents didn't eat off the floor, they had great quality tables. Mine is made of disguised cardboard. This is a big part of the problem, there is zero trust that any potential improvement in cost or access will reach consumers. Companies don't…

The cost improvements reached you, you just don't see them in the table quality.

You see them in the fact that every single home you'll visit to buy or rent has a fully equipped kitchen including a fridge, oven, likely a microwave, dishwasher and even a washing machine (which alone has a huge economic impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gvsz_vc7B0)

You see it in the fact that your home is safer from fires than it ever has been. That hot water is a cheap passive thing you don't even think about, rather than something you have to plan for. That a TV is a nice add-on to it all, rather than a huge deal to get.

Your grandparents' table was more expensive because they had less things, and the massive wood table that they saved months for was what was kept and stood the test of time for you to see today. Because let's not forget, this is also what furnishing 100 years ago can look like:

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/furnishing-for-h...

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#225

Post by fluxusars »

I think the ai-as-an-exoskeleton analogy is quite apt: 1. It still requires your intent to move in the right direction rather than being fully autonomous, and 2. It's too big and bulky to use for delicate tasks.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#226

Post by borski »

mattlondon wrote: post #219

It's just a tool. Use it well or use it badly - just the same as any. If you are generating slop using the tool, we'll then that is your own problem. For me, the AI is essentially "faster hands" that can type what I am thinking way faster than I can do it. I tell it what I want, I give it the broad architecture and design patterns/types to use, and any specific test conditions, and let it write all of that usually by…

Precisely. It is faster than I am at the easy part of writing the code; but the decisions about what to write (at least at a high level) are still my own.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#227

Post by easyThrowaway »

bluegatty wrote: post #106
cafkafk wrote: post #74

I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is. Either you're a luddite or "ai pilled". In most cases, LLMs can get you 80-95% of the way, sometimes less, sometimes more. And heck, sometimes, it just gets you somewhere wrong. But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers in isolation running in a closet, and using that to say that LLMs do n…

Yes, exactly, it's 'us' not the AI, which is great. Why on earth would we ever remotely compare a 'tool' to 'a software engineer' ? The 'great delusion' is not that 'AI can't code' - because obviously it can, and very well. The problem is the 'anthropomorphism' and all this AGI nonsense. If we called it 'Stochastic Mechanisms' and did not 'personalize' our prompts, refer to them as 'chat' or give them 'personalities'…

Because the alternative would've been telling everyone "here's the Stochastic Machine. The more what you write looks like the sources we blatantly stol- I mean, trained from, the closer it gets to output working code". And we're not ready to admit we don't want to know how the sausage is made.

By anthropomorphizing it, we give it some sort of authorship, which clears our collective conscience from what's really happening.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#228

Post by simianwords »

xarope wrote: post #149
simianwords wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. This line of thought is exactly why people are still skeptical of LLM's. LLM's are directionally right and if their answer "fits" then I take it at face value. I wrote a blog detailing the computational difference between "generation" and "verification" and why it matters for LLM's: https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/the-generation-vs-verificat... As an example: I asked the LLM "synonym for "provides" that also me…

that's a very dangerous analogy, because you would be considered the domain expert and you are just asking for synonyms for something you already know but may not remember off-hand. now, what if you asked for the synonym for "provides" in a language that has gender differences (e.g. spanish/portuguese) as well as societal nuances (e.g. japanese) and it gives you "confers", how would you now know that's correct? ah, s…

You are pushing the limits of my framework and it’s a good thing.

The extent to which LLMs help is determined by how well acquainted you are with the domain. But it will always push you directionally in the right direction.

In your case, you used a language example and this is one where LLMs have natural strength in. I don’t need to be an expert in Spanish to trust it because I know that LLMs are specifically good at catching these problems.

But again there are limits and good to understand it.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#229

Post by archagon »

Ekaros wrote: post #202
swiftcoder wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programmers are rewriting and reinventing the same techniques more often than any other vocation I can think of And the answer to that is clearly a tool that makes rewriting/reinventing cheaper than actually packaging nice reusable libraries

And on other hand I really do not understand how basic project boilerplate templating wasn't already a fully solved issue. Surely it should have been doable...

I guess the nice thing about AI is it points to the things that we really need to figure out how to abstract instead of rewriting from scratch all the time.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#230

Post by hansmayer »

cafkafk wrote: post #74

I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is. Either you're a luddite or "ai pilled". In most cases, LLMs can get you 80-95% of the way, sometimes less, sometimes more. And heck, sometimes, it just gets you somewhere wrong. But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers in isolation running in a closet, and using that to say that LLMs do n…

> But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers

That's just those of us with longer memory holding the AI companies to the standards they declared themselves. Nobody forced Sam Altman to blab about a team of pocket PhDs, did they? I don't want the crap that does it correct 60℅ of the time - where is the god damn nation of PhDs in a datacemter already? Where is the AI doing all the SWE work "in 3-6 months"?

Post reply on HN