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The Eternal Sloptember

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Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#271

Post by zdragnar »

Ekaros wrote: post #251
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…

I wonder what percentage of wooden furniture is truly hand-crafted in whole chain. That is felled with hand-made tools by hand. Transportation maybe can be ignored. Then hand sawed without power tools. All other tools after that being hand made from ground up. Like saws, planes, sand paper, glues(most likely at least some parts are glued together wood)... Most likely vanishingly small number.

Head out to Amish country, there's plenty to be found if you look for it. With that said, depending on the community, they may use tools powered by belt driven by or air compressed by non-electrical means. Each community decides where to draw the line of acceptable modern tech, so you'd need to ask how they build their products.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#273

Post by jaccola »

bluegatty wrote: post #52
nilirl wrote: post #38

I agree that I can write better code than an agent. But it can write working code much faster than I can. And in a lot of cases, unfortunately, faster beats better.

At a granular level, it's almost guaranteed that you cannot write better code than an agent. Agents now are writing extremely consistent, normalized canonical code, that usually compiles the first time. Right out of the 'textbook'. For what it's trying to do - it writes nearly perfect code. The only thing you could nominally disagree with are some of the conventions and idioms. It 'writes a perfect novel, in perfect…

It can’t even write a passable novel… if you know of a great LLM-authored novel I should read please point me to it and I’ll take your recommendation!

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#274

Post by tardedmeme »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #250
scrollaway wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The real problem is that today, you rarely can pay more to get better. If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered. Because that requires manufacturers ready to give up stealth corner cutting as the cornerstone of their earnings in favour of the hard and long task of developing an image of reliability. ------ Three cases I know enoug…

And when you do pay more, you're paying more to someone who has figured out how to make you think you are getting better quality, not to someone who is giving you better quality. This is the "market for lemons" effect.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#275

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

The article specifically calls out agents:

> the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history

I don’t use agents, myself. I use a simple chat interface, and a running dialogue, to build software at a function-building level. The resulting workflow is quite “chimerical,” and benefits greatly from my own experience and expertise. The LLM simply lubricates the process.

In my case, it seems to be working well. I would not want to go back.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#276

Post by zombot »

farhanhubble wrote: post #14

I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM. I'd love to see examples of issues that are so big that they warrant reverting to manual coding. My main issue has been the inconsistent quality across between model releases and the tendency to insert older APIs or documentation, especially with command line tools. I can understand if the model struggles with a million line monolithic codebase with a decade…

As long as you don't make stuff that others have to rely on, you can live as dangerously as you want.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#277

Post by sph »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #170
SCdF wrote: post #141

So currently there are people who are buying grey market peptides[1], marked "not for human consumption" and injecting themselves with them based on dubious anecdotes and vibes, to make their skin clearer, build muscle mass, and so on. Are they are all suddenly turning into zombies? No. Do they have any real idea what that is going to do to their body a few years down the line? Also no. Could it be catastrophic? Mayb…

I think smart developers will be building isolated modules, so if your AI generated module keeps failing, you can amputate it and make a fresh one.

The whole AI powered utopia is a bet on two possible outcomes:

- humans and companies somehow stop being greedy, selfish and cutting corners to optimize for revenue and time-to-market

- LLMs are the path to artificial superintelligences that will be able to deal with the exponential increase in tech debt from throwing AI slop at the wall (vibecoding) because no one has time to do things “the proper way”

The former is impossible. The latter is extremely unlikely and an existential threat to humanity.

The so called Luddites are the only ones to have even engaged at all with these concerns. Everybody else is just focused on the selfish game (see bet #1) of staying afloat in a rapidly changing ecosystem.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#278

Post by practal »

practal wrote: post #264

On Saturday I thought I had vibe coded myself into a mess. I had implemented a new block type in my structured editor for Practal Zero (or rather let Codex do it), and suddenly the syntax highlighting broke in the whole document. Asking Codex to fix it didn't work. I was contemplating to restart the whole project on a basis that I actually fully understand, but that would set me back so much when the first reasonable…

To add, what also often happens in these discussions is that Codex suggests a design that makes no real sense at all, or that it brings up two or three design alternatives, and recommends exactly the wrong one.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#279

Post by Earw0rm »

t-3 wrote: post #246
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…

> 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. False. Ikea is not representative of machine-made products, just their own brand of cheap and poorly-designed machine-made products which outsource assembly to the customer for novelty value. Machines are much more precise than humans and do tedious and complex work with…

Seems we've fallen straight back into false dichotomy land.

In that there are a dozen shades of grey between "fully-automated, no humans assembly line" and "person using only hand tools maintained by hand". Tools _are_ machines, are technology, they've just been around so long we forgot that industrially forged steel needs an industrial steel forge.

Probably the best quality product you'll get is from a person who cares, sourcing materials they care about, working with it using their expertise and discernment, and using the most effective tools to get the job done - most, but not all of which will be power or machine tools.

But the point is that the human needs to direct the machines - sometimes that's just a thinking task, and sometimes it's a bunch more physically hands-on.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#280

Post by pickleRick243 »

Agent harnesses have barely been available for a year, and reasonably reliable for only half, and there's already fatigue. I think this says less about whether LLM's will actually be able to program and more about how mentally exhausting AI-assisted programming can be, which involves a higher frequency of decision making and reading an astronomical amount of both code and prose if you actually want to stay on top of what the agent is doing to your codebase. This personal/psychological exhaustion and negative sentiment is now being inaccurately transferred into a pessimistic prognosis for the advancement of the technology itself.
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