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Punch yourself in the face with reality

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Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#51

Post by bigmattystyles »

SoftTalker wrote: post #45
a_c wrote: post #30

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…

It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.

3 pages of reply or overly verbose code, often without abstractions - I read all the posters here and in other forums say that programming has shifted towards reviewing AI output rather than coding said output manually; I agree, however, I just don't buy that everyone is actually reviewing the code as intensely as one would expect - there is a tendency that arrived rather quickly to assume that the AI is correct and efficient. I guess the ultimate reviewer is another AI agent I guess.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#52

Post by NopIdoN »

Grombobulous wrote: post #33
NopIdoN wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store. dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me

Mistakes without a significant lesson or takeaway aren’t a useful avenue for growth. I think it’s possible that this concept that AI is an easy shortcut is a form of gatekeeping. We had the same reactions to StackOverflow and web search when those technologies came around. And there’s certainly partial truth to it. Maybe reading a full book really does make you more well-rounded than googling your answer, but sometim…

The more attention you give a thing, the more it changes you. Significance is up to you.

Maybe you never learn to check your own details. Maybe that's ok.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#53

Post by pixl97 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #28
inigyou wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe things are going bad suddenly in the near future. For instance, the projected weather cycle later this year is four times as powerful as a Super El Niño. The US is one week away from running out of gasoline (was 4 weeks away, 3 weeks ago). Are these not things that should be reported?

I don’t think it’s about what should or shouldn’t be reported. It’s about your relationship to those things. If you wake up on July 21 and there are no headlines saying “The US has run out of gasoline, no driving!”, will you breathe a sigh of relief and be happy things weren’t that bad after all? Or will you browse the headlines for other scary things that might happen in the near future?

>It’s about your relationship to those things.

The year 2000 problem is a good example of this. The year 2000 problem was not a problem. Not because it wasn't a problem, but because a shitload of people did a lot of work to make sure it wasn't a problem. If we didn't have news saying 'oh no, this is a problem' before Jan 1 2000, would it have been taken so seriously?

In February 2021 Texas was so incredibly close to losing the grid that it should strike terror into the hearts of anyone that lives there (see Practical Engineering episode on black starts). Simply put this would have been a massive humanitarian disaster in the 3rd largest state in the US of a size the US has not seen in the modern era. Thousands would have died from the extreme cold that was occuring. Thousands more from a lack of medicine. Fuel would have been trapped in the ground, and ran out quickly anyway. The loss of refining capabilities on the coast would have crippled the entire US. Because of the stupid design of the Texas grid it would have taken weeks or months to get everything back online.

The modern world has become very fragile due to long supply lines of necessary supplies. Covid did a good job of showing some of these weaknesses. I don't think the "did bad thing happen or not" is the way we should be looking at this. It's "How can we reduced the impact of bad things happening". And we're doing a terrible fucking job at it by consolidating companies and industries even further.

Maybe we should actually be worried about a billion+ death event in the near future because of our stupid decisions at a global scale. Maybe we should turn that fear into doing something into preventing it.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#54

Post by bryanrasmussen »

SoftTalker wrote: post #45
a_c wrote: post #30

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real…

It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.

>It's sort of its nature for some reason

I've known some people who can never stop talking. Maybe they are overly represented in the training set.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#55

Post by NopIdoN »

pixl97 wrote: post #47
NopIdoN wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store. dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me

And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences? The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done. Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just t…

yep

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#56

Post by alansaber »

ryandrake wrote: post #46
inigyou wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really? Most startups don't seem to solve anything for anyone, not really, but they do enough to get investor money, using pitch decks and logos and landing pages, and the founder gets paid from investor money while the product collapses, which seems like a success for the founders to me.

Many startups simply solve the following problem: Rich person has a massive amount of money, and wants to use some of that to chase risky returns. They don't really know what to do with it, so they become an LP and act as part of a risk sink for crazy ideas. In that way, the pitch decks, logos, landing pages, and breathless hype is, itself, the "problem" in the process of being solved.

You can gamify anything. The concept of VC is sound.

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#57

Post by alansaber »

inigyou wrote: post #26
andai wrote: post #7

>Figure out why you were put on this earth. Who is responsible for this mess? ;)

Nobody. We're just here. Mentally healthy human adults have ways to avoid thinking about the terrifying reality of infinite potential being restricted by a finite lifespan of decay, but not everyone is mentally healthy all the time.

Ah, so this is why oldschool runescape is still popular

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#58

Post by vitorfblima »

ryandrake wrote: post #41
inigyou wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.

It seems like an absolute dream for corporate execs who don't know anything about development, see a taped-together prototype built in a day, and think to themselves "Wow, we're 90% done... we could almost ship that!!"

Well, from my experience, if the AI dev is ill intended, he can just say nothing then the exec will go "we can ship now as it is!"

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#59

Post by [deleted] »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #51
SoftTalker wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.

3 pages of reply or overly verbose code, often without abstractions - I read all the posters here and in other forums say that programming has shifted towards reviewing AI output rather than coding said output manually; I agree, however, I just don't buy that everyone is actually reviewing the code as intensely as one would expect - there is a tendency that arrived rather quickly to assume that the AI is correct and…

[deleted]

Re: Punch yourself in the face with reality

#60

Post by dfee »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #40
inigyou wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.

This was true a while ago. Today we are replacing decades old sloppy production code with 100% verified better code through tests written by AI, code written by AI. This is not looking functional but drop in functional replacement with measurable improvements.

there are two camps: those who have spent the tokens to figure out how to wield AI, and those who haven't. unfortunately, it's not cheap to get to the former category… and i imagine it'd be difficult to lose access to that tooling and fall back to the second category.
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