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Programmers Aren't People

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: Programmers Aren't People

#11

Post by antonvs »

framel wrote: post #7
msla wrote: post #3

Eh, programmers used to be people who'd desk-check their flow charts before hand-translating them into machine code to enter into a front panel. There's been decades of growth in abstraction since then, and LLMs are just one more layer, another return of the perennial idea of "programming" by writing specifications in a natural language that a machine can automatically translate into actual code which it can run. You…

Humanity previously experimented, many centuries, with writing math in natural language and failed; it is fundamentally unsuited for the task. Furthermore, natural language specifications are, at best, wishful thinking. Feed this into a stochastic parrot, and you have a recipe for disaster. Repeating these mistakes proves coding is still a pseudoscience.

> it is fundamentally unsuited for the task.

Very deepity. But you’ve apparently misunderstood mathematical notation - it’s just a shorthand, nothing stops one from expressing the same concepts in natural language.

> Furthermore, natural language specifications are, at best, wishful thinking.

More deepitism. There are plenty of counterexample to this, your claim only serves to suggest that you have no experience with software development.

> Feed this into a stochastic parrot

To might want to look for terminology in papers that were published after GPT 3.5 was released, it’ll make you sound less like an Amish person objecting to the “English”. Then again you used “clanker” in another comment, so I don’t hold out much hope.

Re: Programmers Aren't People

#12

Post by framel »

msla wrote: post #10
framel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amazing how you understood nothing from any of my words, how about using the clanker to vibe your understanding too?

> amazing how you understood nothing from any of my words, how about using the clanker to vibe your understanding too? "Coding is a pseudoscience" makes sense like "plumbing is a pseudoscience" makes sense: Fluid dynamics might be a pseudoscience, but plumbing either works or it doesn't, and it's either maintainable and modifiable or it isn't. Computer Science is what you're groping for, in your speech laden with thi…

I get the impression you haven’t quite grasped what separates applied science from theoretical science.

Re: Programmers Aren't People

#13

Post by esailija »

> Lately I watch the machine do in a minute the thing I could have billed a morning for

Just raw code output is not really what anyone is paid for

There already existed billions of lines of code doing every possible thing imaginable that software is capable of doing and you could use all of it free of charge with the authors bending over backwards to make it as easy as possible for you to utilize.

Code that nobody understands and cannot be responsible for is just a flat out liability for the business, so these are not the same outputs.

And just going by raw numbers this would imply more than 100x productivity yet there is no tangible productivity change in big picture. 99 per 100 software devs are not fired, software is not getting better. In 600 days doing it the old way people could do any AAA game from scratch. If there is 100x improvement that should take 6 days now. Do you realize how insane even 10x sounds let alone 100x?

Re: Programmers Aren't People

#14

Post by framel »

antonvs wrote: post #11
framel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity previously experimented, many centuries, with writing math in natural language and failed; it is fundamentally unsuited for the task. Furthermore, natural language specifications are, at best, wishful thinking. Feed this into a stochastic parrot, and you have a recipe for disaster. Repeating these mistakes proves coding is still a pseudoscience.

> it is fundamentally unsuited for the task. Very deepity. But you’ve apparently misunderstood mathematical notation - it’s just a shorthand, nothing stops one from expressing the same concepts in natural language. > Furthermore, natural language specifications are, at best, wishful thinking. More deepitism. There are plenty of counterexample to this, your claim only serves to suggest that you have no experience with…

Very deepity?!? You lack basic grammar skills, yet here you are lecturing me about how mathematical notation is just syntactic sugar over natural language. That’s exactly the point: we already have a construct for telling computers what to do. We don’t need to use something subpar to express our intent.

Re: Programmers Aren't People

#15

Post by ido »

esailija wrote: post #13

> Lately I watch the machine do in a minute the thing I could have billed a morning for Just raw code output is not really what anyone is paid for There already existed billions of lines of code doing every possible thing imaginable that software is capable of doing and you could use all of it free of charge with the authors bending over backwards to make it as easy as possible for you to utilize. Code that nobody un…

> 99 per 100 software devs are not fired

While far from 99%, there’s been a lot of layoffs in the last couple years and less hiring such that anyone that has been looking for work can tell you’re there’s a massive in experience before and after ~2023.

Re: Programmers Aren't People

#18

Post by asfjhq »

https://elliotbonneville.com/about/

"I work at NVIDIA during the day as a software engineer, and fiddle with AI for fun on the side"

Every single time. This article is concern trolling or advertisement trolling. I hope Nvidia's stock goes up due to the AI assisted existential crisis thoughts of this programmer.

Re: Programmers Aren't People

#19

Post by asfjhq »

greazy wrote: post #4

Great article. While the definition changes, the expertise shifts and with it the field. Computers eventually became statisticians and data scientists. Printers became graphic designers. What I found most interesting is that when positions undergo such evolution (printer -> graphic designer), a number of skills which were previously different expertise altogether, combine to create a new field. In other words, a new…

If you were a real programmer, you'd know that it is all hype.

Re: Programmers Aren't People

#20

Post by msla »

framel wrote: post #14
antonvs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is fundamentally unsuited for the task. Very deepity. But you’ve apparently misunderstood mathematical notation - it’s just a shorthand, nothing stops one from expressing the same concepts in natural language. > Furthermore, natural language specifications are, at best, wishful thinking. More deepitism. There are plenty of counterexample to this, your claim only serves to suggest that you have no experience with…

Very deepity?!? You lack basic grammar skills, yet here you are lecturing me about how mathematical notation is just syntactic sugar over natural language. That’s exactly the point: we already have a construct for telling computers what to do. We don’t need to use something subpar to express our intent.

> deepity

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deepity

> A superficial equivocation which only seems to be profound.

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