401–410 of 427 posts
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But now I don't know what you think it means. Who do you think "you" and "we" are in this quote?
Go read Corinthians? I'm just pointing out it was quoted halfway through to make it sound like Paul just wrote "we dumb" in a letter.
So yeah, there's a base unit of meaning which is well beyond one or two verses (something I wish the church would learn).
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 is getting good at picking those as well. Frontier models can be fed a vague problem, analyze the code base, and pick out an architectural solution that makes sense.
We're going from a world that needs specialized "software engineers" to speak the language of the machine into one where ordinary people need only sit down and think, "what exactly would solve my problem here?", spell it out in ordinary procedural language, and get a software solution that employs best practices without the intervention of professional computer-touchers.
Tim Bryce was right 20 years ago. Abolish programmers, bring back systems analysts!
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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…
The nice thing about religious faith is that most minds can hold only one at a time. I may believe in an oddly resurrected deity who took the shape of a man , but I don't have room for anything crazier. "We are fools for Christ's sake." 1 Corinthians 4:10
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I'm one of (if not the) original architecture astronaut, so you may not want to listen to me, but you're sliding from "architecture astronauts are bad" (true) to "architecture doesn't matter" (false). Arguably, architecture is the only thing that ever mattered. Below the level of architecture you're dealing either with algorithms or API calls. Algorithms can be validated by tests and API calls can be validated by tes…
I agree architecture is important. But I think the best way to design a good architecture is to have a high level plan, and then feel it out by coding parts of it (usually near component edges / interfaces) in the actual domain with real use cases. That exploration helped me see whether general "best practices" are applicable in this frame, and let me justify if not. That was also prevailing opinion pre LLM: > Only t…
But I don't think you expect an architect to have written all the code, right? I don't even think you expect an architect to have read all the code.
The whole point of being a good architect is understanding the abstractions so that we can focus on the overall system without necessarily knowing all the details. I don't need to know the FFT math behind JPEG to integrate an image library.
So there's no real change in opinion. Architects were never expected write or even understand every line of code.
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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…
> 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. Why do you characterize people you disagree with as…
Carmack has cheerfully admitted to being wrong in the past, for example admitting that the Saturn port of Doom should have used the Saturn's hardware primitives for a smoother experience rather than a faithful replication of the PC's BSP renderer which made it slow. When brilliant guys like him are wrong, they often are in profound ways.
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…
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Products in most organizations are an end to making profit. The job value of an SWE is to maximize that profit. It doesn't matter if the product is better to use, faster, with more features users like - that's an early 20th century model of value production. What matters is how much money the company can extract from its customers, and how little it can pay its employees. Use dark patterns, increase lock-in, and swit…
> The Luddites were not opposed to machines. In the sense they were not opposed to all machines as a concept. They were definitely against machines they thought reduced their labor value: "They wrecked specific types of machinery that posed a threat to the particular industrial interests in each region. In the Midlands, these were the "wide" knitting frames used to make cheap and inferior lace articles.[22] In the No…
Otherwise it would be like claiming that an industrial union is opposed to people working in factories by pointing to a strike action and concluding they members just want to stand around outside the factory instead of work.
Recall that my comment is in response to "it is economically infeasible for me to be a luddite".
If that means something like "infeasible for me to oppose bad labor practices" then collective action is the typical response to bad labor practices.
If that means something like "infeasible for me to destroy the employer's use of AI" then I think that's mistaking what Luddites did as being the Luddite goal.
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It would be a skill issue if someone would show they’re able to use it to produce good software while showcasing that it’s due to their mastery. Till this day, I don’t think there’s any such demonstration. Any defects of the technology is always blamed on skill issue.
People who produce good software don't feel the need to show off how modern and agentic they are.
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The possibility to have an agent implement every little thing that comes up in your mind as you're building doesn't spark the tiniest bit of joy? Previously, "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really ?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before.
Not even a little bit to be frank. The joy of things came from their implementation to me. I will write something and then peruse its code on github for hours afterwards just looking, like one would at an art gallery. If I did not toil on it I wont use it most likely. There's a very very small amount of software I ACTUALLY desperately need in a way that I would not care how it came to exist. Do not get me wrong, thos…
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The nice thing about religious faith is that most minds can hold only one at a time. I may believe in an oddly resurrected deity who took the shape of a man , but I don't have room for anything crazier. "We are fools for Christ's sake." 1 Corinthians 4:10
I think you got downvoted unfairly because I really think you're sincere. My brain heard your comment in the voice of Nightcrawler from X-Men —and as the descendant of German Catholics, he's become one of my favorites.
Also I want to add some Claremont era flourish to my response, ja?