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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#131

Post by 4bpp »

nl wrote: post #56
chrisjj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How rich do you have to be not care about the environmental cost?

I think Andrew Ng wrote a great piece on this. For example, in the US, which do you think uses more water: Golf Courses or Data Centers? a) Gold Courses use twice as much water as Data Centers b) About the same c) Data Centers use twice as much water as Gold Courses The answer is "None of the above": "Golf courses in the U.S. use around 500 billion gallons annually of water to irrigate their turf [snip] data centers…

Environmentalism has always been a "weight of our sins" sort of issue. Plastic straws are a rounding error relative to all the capricious uses of plastic and fossil fuels in our economy, but few things feel as frivolous as using once and then throwing away a piece of plastic for personal convenience while engaging in an already-kinda-sinful feeling activity like indulging in a soft drink, while simultaneously the paper straw that turns to cardboard mash in your mouth is perfectly calibrated to make you feel like you are doing real penance without encumbering anything economically important.

So plastic straw bans (instead of plastic slipper bans, plastic food packaging bans, taxes on plastic clothes fibres...) are what we get. And because the structure of the cause/problem is the same, the language of environmentalism naturally attaches itself and gives form to the vague sense of moral unease surrounding AI. Governments are surely already building tomorrow's tightly integrated thought police drone swarm complexes, but a crusade against those who simulate a zoo of programming weasels in our midst is much easier and morally no less fulfilling.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#132

Post by nl »

chrisjj wrote: post #127
nl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Andrew Ng wrote a great piece on this. For example, in the US, which do you think uses more water: Golf Courses or Data Centers? a) Gold Courses use twice as much water as Data Centers b) About the same c) Data Centers use twice as much water as Gold Courses The answer is "None of the above": "Golf courses in the U.S. use around 500 billion gallons annually of water to irrigate their turf [snip] data centers…

... computation produces dramatically less carbon than alternatives. Google had estimated that a single web search query produces 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. In contrast, driving from my home to the local library to look up a fact would generate about 400 grams So, how much less carbon is produced by a Gas Town run than the equivalent number of drives to the library? /i

It's called Gas Town for a reason...

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#133

Post by lordnacho »

GrowingSideways wrote: post #129
dchuk wrote: post #98

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…

> raw coding is now a solved problem Surely this was solved with fortran. What changed? I think most people just don't know what program they want.

You no longer have to be very specific about syntax. There's now an AI that can translate your idea into whatever language you want.

Previously, if you had an idea of what the program needed to do, you needed to learn a new language. This is so hard that we use language itself as a metaphor: It's hard to learn a new language, only a few people can translate from French to English, for example. Likewise, few people can translate English to Fortran.

Now, you can just think about your program in English, and so long as you actually know what you want, you can get a Fortran program.

The issue is now what it was originally for senior programmers: to decide what to make, not how to make it.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#134

Post by jkhdigital »

bonesss wrote: post #126
jamestimmins wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes at some point innovative software and naming are at cross purposes, and if your naming gets too extreme ultimately that will get all of the attention.

Anthropomorphizing chunks of your system is kinda weird given interactive chat as the UI to the LLM. Akka and others have standardized names for all this stuff (and seem to fully know that a code ‘actor’ is code). These wheels don’t need reinventing (much less as ‘ the Marvin’s’, a lovable set of bi-racial quadruplets who always get you where you’re going ). In fact, I dare say a lot of LLM fascination for orchestrat…

That last line is exactly what I was thinking. Find an expressive language and then progressively formalize your workflows in DSLs that enforce correctness by design, not through layers and layers of natural language “skills” and deadweight agentic watchdogs.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#135

Post by jkhdigital »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #62

I don't understand why people are making this so complicated. We have a battle tested SDLC. We don't need to reinvent this shit. We just need to make some affordances in the tools and processes we set up for the majority of the actors in the system to be agents (such as rationing human attention). Spec your software like an architect/po, decompose it into a task dag, then orchestrate for each lane and assemble all ch…

I can’t stop thinking about this exact notion. The main reason we don’t always use stuff like TLA+ to spec out our software is because it’s tedious AF for anything smaller than, like, mission-critical enterprise-grade systems and we can generally trust the humans to get the details right eventually through carrot-and-stick incentive systems. LLM agents have none of the attentional and motivational constraints of humans so there’s no reason not to do things the right way.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#138

Post by hnlmorg »

lordnacho wrote: post #133
GrowingSideways wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> raw coding is now a solved problem Surely this was solved with fortran. What changed? I think most people just don't know what program they want.

You no longer have to be very specific about syntax. There's now an AI that can translate your idea into whatever language you want. Previously, if you had an idea of what the program needed to do, you needed to learn a new language. This is so hard that we use language itself as a metaphor: It's hard to learn a new language, only a few people can translate from French to English, for example. Likewise, few people ca…

The hard part of software development is equivalent to the hard part of engineering:

Anyone can draw a sketch of what a house should look like. But designing a house that is safe, conforms to building regulations, and which wouldn't be uncomfortable to live in (for example, poor choice of heat insulation for the local climate) is the stuff people train on. Not the sketching part.

It's the same for software development. All we've done is replace FORTRAN / Javascript / whatever with a subset of a natural language. But we still need to thoroughly understand the problem and describe it to the LLM. Plus the way we format these markdown prompts, you're basically still programming. Albeit in a less strict syntax and the "compiler" is non-deterministic.

This is why I get so mythed by comments about AI replacing programmers. That's not what's happening. Programming is just shifting to a language that looks more like Jira tickets than source code. And the orgs that think they can replace developers with AI (and I don't for one second believe many of the technology leaders think this, but some smaller orgs likely do) are heading for a very unpleasant realisation soon.

I will caveat this by saying: there are far too many naff developers out there that genuinely aren't any better than an LLM. And maybe what we need is more regulation around software development, just like there is in proper engineering professions.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#139

Post by soulofmischief »

troupo wrote: post #108
soulofmischief wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your problem is thinking that hype artists, professionals and skeptics are all the same voice with the same opinion. Because of that, you can't recognize when sentiment is changing among the more skeptical.

You are responding to some voices in your head, not to the context of the conversation. You're also presuming too much about what I'm thinking and being dead wrong about that.

I am responding to what you wrote:

> We are perpetually just months away from software jobs being obsolete.

only hype artists are saying this. and you're using it as a way to negate the argument of more skeptical people.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#140

Post by Kostchei »

brushfoot wrote: post #136

Gas Town seems like a more confusing/expensive alternative to GitHub Copilot Agents. https://github.com/copilot/agents Go to the URL, type what you want done, and a cloud Claude agent creates a PR. $10/month.

try the tools. Really. If you are remotely interested in tech or AI, try the tools Copilot this is not. You may be trolling of course. There are huge steps between these various tools, if you try them, for a smidge of investment, it will become obvious what the trajectory is.

It is like saying "I don't handwrite anything, I care too much about line spacing, I only use a dot matrix printer" when some one is trying to sell you a calligraphy pen and coloured inks, and you have only tried a ballpoint pen. You might be the wrong market, but they are not even close in use case and application.

(spelling)

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