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The Tower Keeps Rising

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Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#121

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

robocat wrote: post #104
HiPhish wrote: post #72

> But it’s not the biblical story. At Babel, the loss of common language stops construction whereas in AI-assisted engineering, construction can continue after shared understanding has already collapsed. The lack of an immediate failure is what makes it curious and a bit disorienting. The tower does not fall, and so we do not notice what was lost. It just keeps rising. I don't know whether the author thinks this is a…

> Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit Intelligence is learning to avoid using childish cliches, unless your intention was to mislead. Categorisation and understanding dependencies are hard enough problems already. At the supermarket or taxation (Nix v. Hedden) tomatoes are a vegetable.

Speaking of "categorisation and understanding dependencies" and "intelligence" and "fruit":

Interestingly, the Bible does not specify what kind of fruit was on the Tree of Knowledge. The association between the forbidden fruit and an apple was a derivative of later translations.

Imagine the consternation if the claim had become Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tomato. Then this incessant controversy regarding the tomato's status would take on a biblical dimension... though then perhaps the Mormon claim that the Garden of Eden is to be found in the New World would actually have some credibility. Indeed, answers to some questions are not a matter of intelligence at all. Sometimes it seems to me intelligence is more about knowing what questions to ask in the first place.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#122

Post by sokka_h2otribe »

pixl97 wrote: post #22
sixtyj wrote: post #5

> There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people c…

>Since Nov 30, 2022 BC everything has become… more complex. FTFY Increasing complexity is the story of mankind. It's the story of civilization. Someone from 20,000 BC would wander around the earth trying to find food, trying not to freeze, and trying not to get eaten. Someone from 5,000 BC would be trying to grow food, hoping it rains, and hoping disease didn't wipe out the village. The second one increases the compl…

For what it's worth, nomadism and agricultural systems are not necessarily more complex - that is, the complexity of a nomadic lifestyle can be quite high. Randomization, varied food sources, hybrid lifestyles, etc.

The hierarchy is certainly higher in agriculture societies it seems, but the complexity is up for some debate

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#123

Post by tibco »

munk-a wrote: post #111
pishpash wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's some idealistic nostalgia. Software is generally poorly built today, and it's evidently not big enough a problem to fix.

Large companies that can keep themselves alive with regulatory capture - absolutely. For smaller companies that need to compete the software quality and ongoing cost of maintaining that software is a real consideration. That isn't to say software is perfectly built, but it's usually pragmatically built to balance costs of development and correctness - well chosen abstractions let us push up both qualities at once.

I think every type of company has ways to workaround software quality. B2B can tend to define the bug as the feature or too low priority.. B2C can often decide backwards compatibility simply doesn't matter and just replace things with other things with only some actual feature overlap, etc.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#125

Post by robocat »

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #121
robocat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit Intelligence is learning to avoid using childish cliches, unless your intention was to mislead. Categorisation and understanding dependencies are hard enough problems already. At the supermarket or taxation (Nix v. Hedden) tomatoes are a vegetable.

Speaking of "categorisation and understanding dependencies" and "intelligence" and "fruit": Interestingly, the Bible does not specify what kind of fruit was on the Tree of Knowledge. The association between the forbidden fruit and an apple was a derivative of later translations. Imagine the consternation if the claim had become Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tomato. Then this incessant controversy regarding the to…

> knowing what questions to ask in the first place

That's my 2nd hardest skill when trying to use AI. 3rd hardest is better filtering.

I keep having flashbacks to learning how to use Google effectively.

I'm an arthiest, but I'm in a historically christian society so bible stuff comes up and I often delve in.

Whenever I do look into the bible, it amazes me just how extremely bullshitty vague the bible actually is. I don't understand why people argue about it, or pay attention to past arguments (many famous examples). If I wanted to argue about vague shit I'd be into philosophy or psychology or I could choose any of the many other branches of argument. Humans are not very logical. At least capitalism has a clearer scorecard.

Last nerdsniped look was about Angels due to Scott Alexander:

  (The Bible describes very clearly what angels look like. [snip] This is the highest-grade antimeme I feel comfortable using as an example; if you don’t see the fnords they can’t eat you.)
Edit: Which just meta-nerdsniped me finishing up on the beaut Hispanic word "Marianismo".

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#126

Post by radarsat1 »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #46
conartist6 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it? It has optimized what it was built to optimize: this is the token-selling industry. Take note that the people hawking the dream of a gold rush are not actually mining but selling shovels

Same issue happens in models trained by organizations who aren’t selling tokens. I believe it’s because being parsimonious is simply harder. Achieving the task at hand independently and declaring the job done is easier than building an abstraction and reconciling between every use case.

Agreed. I've noticed this happens without fail in any project driven primarily by "tickets" and "sprints". Finishing the immediate task ends up taking precedence over future concerns that cover a wider scope. On the other end of the spectrum it's easy to spend too much time at the beginning humming and hawing about the best, most future proof design, because you just know you're not going to be able to easily fix it later. As is often the case, the right approach is somewhere inbetween, which is partly why it's a hard process to automate. you're constantly making judgement calls.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#127

Post by segmondy »

tekacs wrote: post #6

I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…

Just a matter of time. Go download gpt2 or llama2 and be shocked at how bad they are compared to today. They were entirely "useless" yet we marveled at them. Go examine GPT3.5/gpt4 out which was all the rage and then marvel at how a qwen27b or gemma31b model mops the floor today. My point is that the models will eventually learn to have a great model of software system in their head, just a matter of time and proper RL.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#128

Post by segmondy »

ssivark wrote: post #27

The core thesis of this essay is reminiscent of the Lisp Curse [1] / Bipolar Lisp Programmer [2]. It's been a few years since I read these, but if I recall the argument there, it was that Lisp makes it so easy to build stuff and scratch exactly your own itch, that there's no real strong push for lisp programmers to come together and collaborate to build non-trivial and general purpose artifacts. And that is why the l…

Is it really the same argument? I think there's enough of people that will argue that there will be no need to come together to collaborate, just rally a bunch of agents and you can build whatever non-trivial stuff you can imagine.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#129

Post by The_Blade »

HiPhish wrote: post #72

> But it’s not the biblical story. At Babel, the loss of common language stops construction whereas in AI-assisted engineering, construction can continue after shared understanding has already collapsed. The lack of an immediate failure is what makes it curious and a bit disorienting. The tower does not fall, and so we do not notice what was lost. It just keeps rising. I don't know whether the author thinks this is a…

> I don't know whether the author thinks this is a good or a bad thing, but in my eyes it's clearly a bad thing.

I like that the author lets the image do the work, rather than preach at me even if I were to agree. History never repeats itself but it always rhymes.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#130

Post by segmondy »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #7

My comment is not directly responding to the essay, but it got me thinking about about how agentic programming is much more akin to management than it is to actual programming. Managers generally only have a high level idea of what ICs are working on and often don't have the time, bandwidth, and in some cases ability to understand everything the ICs they're supervising are doing. As more and more software gets writte…

We can say that about programmers, most ICs don't understand what's going on in the layers beneath were they work. Most have no idea what's going on with libraries, frameworks, remote APIs, it's all abstractions. Most people can't tell you how system calls are implemented or function. They don't have the time, bandwidth to understand it all, they just operate at their own layer to get the job done.
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