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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

#81

Post by Razengan »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #31

Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rate…

> I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way.

Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle?

Does your ability to cook good food depend upon your ability to till soil and sow seeds?

I don't mean that in ass way but re: what other comments said:

> it feels like a rich getting richer scenario in all aspects of society

That's a problem with society, not technology.

Holding back technology won't fix society.

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

#82

Post by fragmede »

tkel wrote: post #63
boshalfoshal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 valu…

You're reducing programming to its utility in producing exchange value in the captitalist political economy. That's what "value" means in this context. That's exactly what I'm pointing out. Programming is more than that, if you can think beyond your current economic constraints. Your life's activity ought to be more than just a tool for producing capitalist exchange value. Does cooking food serve any purpose beyond m…

People are used to paying for food. They delight in paying more for highly rated Michelin starred food, even. Software is the opposite. People really really hate paying for software. It should all be free! The fact that making an additional copy of a piece of software is basically free vs creating an additional plate for dinner is very much not, has a lot to do with that. For sure. But it also means that I don't see a future where the "capitalist political economy" truely "values" aka pays seriously good money for a bespoke, handcrafted, no AI slop here, version of Photoshop to be run only once, and then you poop it out later.

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

#83

Post by evolve-maz »

It's interesting to see how over the span of just a few years a lot of people went from:

> Architecture astronauts are out of touch and shouldn't give any advice because they haven't written code in ages. Only the hands on engineers can shape it since the design evolves in step with writing the code.

To

> I focus on the architecture patterns and high level goals and let the LLM take care of the rest.

Similar commentary was shared about anyone not writing the code daily, not just the architects.

No gotchas, I just think it's something which calls for introspection.

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

#84

Post by fragmede »

helloplanets wrote: post #79
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #10

'Make sure you don't fall behind!!!' is my least favourite type of post about ai. There's resllt nothing to learn about ai. You're just typing and telling it what to do.

The system that solved Navier-Stokes certainly was not about OpenAI engineers just typing and telling it what to do.

The recent advancement in math with the Riemann Hypothesis by Jared Sumner was basically him saying "you can do it! keep going!", however.

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

#85

Post by fragmede »

orthogonal-wren wrote: post #56
mycocola wrote: post #55

His analogy might be accidentally appropriate given MMA-fighters propensity to develop CTE.

Common table expression?

> Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head injuries and hits to the head.

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

#86

Post by jimbob45 »

That’s great for martial artists where the new arts are objectively better and more robust against the wider array of attacks one must withstand today.

But software…? He’s declaring victory at virtually every level but the highest. Who honestly thinks JS should be cemented as permanent? X86/RISCV? CMake? It’s cool to abstract away the lower tiers when our tools are this powerful but it seems silly to leave this much performance, readability, and extensibility on the table forever.

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

#87

Post by fooker »

zem wrote: post #76
fooker wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying there's nothing to learn about programming, you're just telling a computer what to do. :) It's partly true, but where this logic gets stuck is software engineering, for both the cases. Just telling the AI what to do won't get you to good software, especially when you want to use dozens of agents working in parallel, when you have something correctness sensitive, when you want the AI to try and sol…

but the solution, ironically, is not learning more about ai, but learning more about good software engineering, so you can tell when the ai is not doing it

No, software engineering is fundamentally changed because of AI. No amount of digging our heads in the sand is going to undo that.

For example, the traditional best practice cycle of "small incremental change, code review, test, commit" is pretty much obsolete now. The way ten collaborating agents can make short work of a complex project is not something that fits in with our existing software engineering wisdom at all.

We are still trying to figure out the new science of software engineering. And the best way to get better now is to just figure out what works and what does not for your use case.

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

#88

Post by PostOnce »

John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this:

Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be?

It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite?

I remain a skeptic.

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

#89

Post by flyingshelf »

flyingshelf wrote: post #65
glimshe wrote: post #3

We are going from the era of manual, line-by-line mental model transcription to one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms. I love being able to quickly bring out the program that is already running in my head without having to worry about the grind of typing it into a format that the compiler understands. Dealing with API names. Syntax. Language quirks. Library go…

> AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers. AI-assisted coding isn't a thing. Why would anyone pay you to code when your competitor spends 1 minute spelling out a problem and doing the same thing for 59 more problems? As far as I'm concerned coding is dead as a profession, now we are Harness Managers.

You guys can downvote all you want. If you don't already realize this you'll realize soon enough.
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