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Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

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Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#51

Post by yallpendantools »

> The introduction chronicled the evolution of swordsmanship and martial arts in general from pragmatic battlefield necessities to sports, historical curiosities, and hobbies.

Eh? Martial arts has always been a mix of utility and cultural artifact.

Greco-Roman wrestling flourished in a/alongside of military utility. Greeks and Romans had swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Boxing also traces its history all the way back to the Greeks.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese arts developed in a society with, also, swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Notably these cultures often included weapons training ("kobudo" in Japanese) in their curriculum but that did not phase out the empty-handed aspect of the art.

Catch wrestling developed among sailors who would not be strangers to guns and rifles.

BJJ developed, well, today.

There has always been a component of sportsmanship and self-improvement in martial arts. Carmack misreads this introduction, methinks.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#52

Post by tsylba »

My problem with AI is not that they aren't useful, John. Like everything else in life the question is what we shape ourselves to be as a culture, as a community, what is the path we want to take. It's not on the same scale than ditching assembly instruction for a C compiler.

I get why most people get with the flow of what competition taught us: if you can't fight them join them. Yet I think it's demoralising we're forced to live the life forced upon us by a few techbros without real collective intelligence about the use of our resources and goals for the future. Again, it always has been a bit like that but never at this scale.

We're souless automatons feeding a machine god.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#54

Post by enraged_camel »

HWR_14 wrote: post #44
enraged_camel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Is anyone actually seeing a shift towards improved structure rather than more code, faster? Yes. At work we recently finished a complete rewrite of the platform. The old codebase got abandoned and two new codebases got stood up. Previous stack was Phoenix LiveView and the new one is Phoenix API + Vue /w TypeScript. Zero code shared between the two. We took the opportunity to re-architect a lot of the core function…

> We finished the rewrite in two months. > racing towards a deadline imposed by external factors so we all ended up working a lot of hours. 2 months of 80 hour weeks is 4 months of regular weeks. Can you clarify how many hours your team was putting in? And how large was your team?

Probably averaging 70. 9 devs and 1 QA engineer.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#57

Post by yallpendantools »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #48

HN is loaded with out of touch Kung Fu masters. They were the loudest skeptics against AI. Still a lot here. It's human nature. If your identity is defined by your kung fu and a technology is about to obsolesce your kung fu, then all logic goes out the window as you go all out in protecting your identity. It's mostly for themselves. They have to lie to themselves and tell themselves that they still "matter".

I've been doing martial arts for more than 20 years, some in TMA, some in modern boxing/kickboxing. I have yet to meet an "out of touch Kung Fu master" in person. Nobody thinks they can clear the bar or win in a ruleset they haven't trained for. I mean I don't deny Frank Dux, George Dilman, and the DUST guy exist, nor do I support their claims. It's just that they are larger-than-life personalities to start with and I haven't met them in person.

Similarly, most of the programmers skeptical about AI---me included---don't really do so out of a threat to a domain we've mastered. The problem is, models, to this day, need supervision so they understand requirements, so they know where to properly look for prior art, so that they "understand" the existing architecture. That includes you, Claude. Our kung fu has been six months away from obsolescence since roundabouts 2022 and in 2026 they even rehired a bunch of out-of-touch kung fu masters.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#58

Post by JuniperMesos »

socalgal2 wrote: post #36
tclancy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a new theory as of this moment. Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying. Before you ston…

I see it as those who learn to use AI effectively are seeing massive benefits. Those that haven't seen those benefits are still skeptical. Someone who's seen the benfits, knows, with proof, the benefits exist. They're like Copernicus who realized the plants go around the sun, not the earth. The others are still like those who look up, see the planets go around the sky, and can't believe the earth is not at the center…

The story of the discovery of heliocentricism is a lot more complex than this; the people who didn't immediately accept heliocentric theories (including the ancient Greeks - look up Aristarchus) often had good, scientific reasons for doing so. Or just look up at the sky at night yourself and ask yourself how you, personally, would confirm it if someone told you that what you see in the sky is better explained by the Earth moving around the sun than the sun moving around the Earth.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#59

Post by boshalfoshal »

tkel wrote: post #29

Ironically, this post comes off as out of touch. The purpose of the various martial arts isn't just to win in a life-or-death brawl or murder people as efficiently as possible. Similarly, the point of programming isn't just to generate as much code as possible, or only to be more "productive".

Code in most organizations is a means to an end to produce an actual product.

The job of a SWE is to not produce the most sublime readable code with cute language bells and whistles that you can show off to your other programmer friends. Yes its fun to do and interesting, but the main value in writing code is to express your intent so you and other people that are working with you can actually build something of value.

Software has value to the people on your team reading it. The product that you create with your software has a far wider impact than just that. As such, there is for _sure_ optimization pressure on "professional software engineering" to be more productive and actually make the product better to use, faster, with more features users like. The user typically does not care that you used a new C++26 feature, as much as I enjoyed writing it for them.

If I can produce features for users faster and I can iterate on them faster, this is a boon to me. I can program by hand for fun all I want in my spare time, but if I want to produce value for someone else, it is economically infeasible for me to be a luddite, and I will simply be outcompeted. Previously you were outcompeted by smarter teams who out executed you (and who also worked more), and now you can be out executed by basically anyone using an LLM who actually understands that the end goal is making a product that is pleasant to use and actually has utility, not code that is pleasant to read.

You can be an "performative/artisanal programmer" just as you can do "performative/artisanal martial arts." Just know that there will not be a large market for it in the real world.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#60

Post by [deleted] »

socalgal2 wrote: post #33
doctorpangloss wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, there is a 100% test coverage requirement in both server and client, combined with AI-driven review rules that say all tests must be non-vacuous, look, your application works, right? so it doesn't really matter what you or i think, and this is why AI matters. but this, your "100% test coverage" - that is pure slop. just 20 years ago, all the most popular software shipped with NO tests. are you getting…

> just 20 years ago, all the most popular software shipped with NO tests not sure what you're point is here. It sounds similar to "we use to use blood letting and leeches and doctors didn't clean their hands and everything was fine so what are you getting at?" Good tests have real benefits. The fact that people shipped without them in the past in no way suggests they aren't needed or have no point.

[deleted]
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