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I Love the Computer

michaelenger.com

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Re: I Love the Computer

#91

Post by sdenton4 »

echelon wrote: post #18
Shellban wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that we recover from the damage being done now. As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.

> As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers. Choose one: - You spend 30 hours writing a program to manage data for your hobby. You write it on your personal computer. - You spend one hour generating a program to manage data for…

Of course, you can use Option B to write the program, and then run it on your own machine...

Re: I Love the Computer

#92

Post by throwup238 »

ivantop wrote: post #81
trhway wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

check the ping time between your nodes, whatever they are, in the same datacenter. I bet it will be at least 10-20ms. 15 years ago it was 0.1-0.2 ms.

still 150 micros here. why would this go up?

Software defined networking adding latency. 10ms within a datacenter is crazy though.

Re: I Love the Computer

#93

Post by overgard »

tptacek wrote: post #20

I think the author doesn't realize how gatekeepy this sentiment is; that they earned their love of "the computer", that it was formative to them, that they put all this uncomfortable effort into learning how to program, and thus (subtextually) they should have a say in how other people use "the computer".

You know what? Gate keeping can be a good thing. Some gates exist for a good reason. I think "are you actually interested in doing this?" is a very reasonable gate. I'm not saying all coding needs to be a passion project, obviously, but I think it's very hard to be good at a thing if you don't care about it. Software continues to get worse and worse, and software developers know less and less about the machines they're working with, and I don't think those things are unrelated.

Re: I Love the Computer

#94

Post by bigstrat2003 »

fasterik wrote: post #2

I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do. AI does more or less what it's marketed to do, sometimes badly. I still write code by hand. But LLMs have been a legitimately useful tool when I've wanted to dig into a new field like computer graphics, theoretical physics, or numerical analysis. Or even ju…

> I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do.

Well yeah, because it doesn't. AI is being claimed to be a magical genius intelligence which will solve everything forever, but in reality LLMs are still idiots you can't trust to not screw up without a tight leash. They can't even do the one thing they are supposed to be good at (programming) well, despite all the effort which has been focused on trying to make them good at it. They don't remotely do what they are marketed to do, not even close!

Re: I Love the Computer

#95

Post by matheusmoreira »

m463 wrote: post #73

Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential. then at some point, the balance started tipping. Things I specifically remember: - half life required you to register online to install your single-player game from CD - turbotax would only install on one computer. - software started rooting around on your system and uploading the findings - the iphone didn't let you install your own software - microsoft. enough…

At some point, we were the owners of the machine. More importantly, this was normal. We could do whatever we wanted, and the corporations just had to accept it. World changing technology. Limitless potential.

Now it's the opposite. The computers belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing us to use them, and only in ways that they profit off of. Computers, arguably humanity's most important invention, reduced to interactive television, a mere vehicle for corporate advertsing and surveillance capitalism.

It's truly disgusting. Makes me sad like nothing else.

Re: I Love the Computer

#96

Post by overgard »

tptacek wrote: post #58
kridsdale1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time fans of a thing are allowed to be upset when assholes come in a drastically change it, whether it be Star Wars, your sports team, or programming.

As long as we're clear that the sentiment here is analogous to people being protective of Star Wars, like you said, I'm good.

I think a better analogy should be: should you take a job writing a Star Wars movie if you're not a fan of Star Wars? (or sub in: Star Trek, or Dr. Who, or any other recent nerd property that's been kind of ruined by people who don't understand the source material screwing it up by thinking they know better than the fans). In that context at least, the proof is in the pudding: Star Wars is a mess because it's been written by people that mostly don't care about Star Wars, same with Star Trek. I think coding is kind of like that. People that don't care are going to make a mediocre-to-bad product.

Re: I Love the Computer

#97

Post by overgard »

echelon wrote: post #30
anon7725 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I choose A. I know that many others choose A as well. A wonderful service known as the web has connected people who choose A with others who choose A and of course with a great many who don’t need to make a choice and benefit from the work of others. I mourn a world in which few will choose A, because for many to choose B seems to lock us all, tragedy of the commons style, into a worse world.

[flagged]

> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.

It's just not though. Plagiarizing some shit it stole off github does not make it intelligent.

Edit: just because it's amusing, here's something I'm literally running into right now with Opus 4.8 on "Max" settings being dumb. I asked it to add some C++ code to an existing C++ project for Unreal Engine. It did half the work, then balked, because "it doesn't have a way to compile C++". I just had to tell it "yes, actually, you just need to run the fricking extremely-standard-already-generated-build-script." If I had a novel build system it'd be one thing, but it already knows I'm working on an Unreal Engine project and that the build is completely standard and it still couldn't piece together that it could just run the compiler.

I would not employ a C++ developer that could not figure out how to invoke the compiler.

Re: I Love the Computer

#98

Post by le-mark »

m463 wrote: post #73

Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential. then at some point, the balance started tipping. Things I specifically remember: - half life required you to register online to install your single-player game from CD - turbotax would only install on one computer. - software started rooting around on your system and uploading the findings - the iphone didn't let you install your own software - microsoft. enough…

> Computers used to have unlimited promise and potential.

Imo 90s sci-fi had a lot of this techno optimism, even if the settings were often dystopian. Cyberpunk was pretty wild and who knows a lot of that could still come to pass.

Re: I Love the Computer

#99

Post by calvinmorrison »

overgard wrote: post #93
tptacek wrote: post #20

I think the author doesn't realize how gatekeepy this sentiment is; that they earned their love of "the computer", that it was formative to them, that they put all this uncomfortable effort into learning how to program, and thus (subtextually) they should have a say in how other people use "the computer".

You know what? Gate keeping can be a good thing. Some gates exist for a good reason. I think "are you actually interested in doing this?" is a very reasonable gate. I'm not saying all coding needs to be a passion project, obviously, but I think it's very hard to be good at a thing if you don't care about it. Software continues to get worse and worse, and software developers know less and less about the machines they'…

You know what's a good gate? employement. Like great comedians of old who could make actually funny jokes, lets pull up the ladder like dave chappel and cut the kids out. I want a job and i want to stay employed in IT. I don't know what's coming but the best interest for myself is to reduce the amount of technical people and increase my rarity.

Re: I Love the Computer

#100

Post by moron4hire »

suyavuz wrote: post #37

I still like the computer itself. Breaking something, poking at it, fixing it, and then it suddenly works. The hard part now is liking the industry around it.

When I mentor new developers, I frequently caution them (with caveats about my experience being only one) against going to work for tech companied. My favorite jobs have all been at companies that were not selling software in some way, but needed a software developer or 5 on staff to do what they needed to do. Industrial manufacturing and adult education were my particular industries where I found this path and the only reason I'm not in them anymore is because I don't have the flexibility to move around anymore, so need to make the best of the DoD consulting shit sandwich I'm in now.
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