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The Coming Loop

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Re: The Coming Loop

#131

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

piva00 wrote: post #123
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This too shall pass. The journey was as important as the destination if not more because it gave confidence in oneself, it made us grow. I mean to suggest, coding for the sake of coding "I wish to code for myself, nothing else": (I had written this somewhere else on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609962 If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company…

> If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it? We've tried it where I work at. People put effort to compile studies, to collect testimonials, catalog and organise the strengths and weaknesses based on engineers' experiences with the tooling. The result was the per…

Was the effort just directed be a single developer though. I have written elsewhere on HN[0] about something I have witnessed but I have seen that if only a single developer is actively against AI, the management actively believes that it is only that single person who is the bottleneck/issue as nobody else is complaining so it must all be right.

Although I get the overall statement more now as well.

> It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.

This perhaps seems to be the greatest reason and I imagine that because all growth within economy is shown to be floating within AI related sector, they want piece of that pie. Do note that most of the issues with it is that the frothy evaluations and how much actual growth is happening downstream rather than just money shaking hands and the bubble nature of things.

but theoretically one can see that there is no winner in all of this no matter how deep one can fall down in layers of. Perhaps something at the layer of DRAM and chip production seem to be the one actually the most profitable at the moment and even they are just witnessing some temporary growth as nobody expects the prices to stay at this ceiling including said companies and yet they have incredibly floaty (but comparatively less so) valuations as compared to other AI things.

On one hand, I expect money to be rational yet on the other hand I am actively witnessing money to be irrational. Yet the whole industry is so muddled up now with so many people wanting the piece of cake of that investor's dollar that I imagine the market somewhat saturated.

Could something rationally not happen because if so, it seems that the thing might be that the burst of the bubble might make the only rational sense of adding realism in the market, but I imagine that it might spook the investors too much too and it might cost too much blood-shed in the markets.

Am I able to explain myself and do any of you believe that there is a rational course of action which can be taken to help stabilize the economy in some aspects?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630281

Re: The Coming Loop

#132

Post by camillomiller »

soulofmischief wrote: post #106
camillomiller wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was literally quoting Sam Altman

No, you mentioned his discussion of the "billion dollar one person startup", which we can both agree is a fanciful idea and more of an eventual "possibility" that will of course not occur as once anyone can be a billionaire, the whole system is going to change. However, your "tasteless high level wanking" is not a quote from Altman, it's a vague and directionless insult that manages to sweep quite a lot of legitimate…

The amount of brain energy spent on justifying the mediocrity machines is astounding.

Re: The Coming Loop

#133

Post by [deleted] »

pedromlsreis wrote: post #77
galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

Reading through the thread, it's striking how many people are feeling the same mix of excitement and exhaustion you describe. I'm in that camp too... the tools are incredible, but the pace and expectations around them can feel overwhelming. I fully agree with what you say regarding Boris, but I would emphasize that I don't think he has malicious intention either. He still is doing his job, to showcase the features th…

[deleted]

Re: The Coming Loop

#134

Post by soulofmischief »

camillomiller wrote: post #132
soulofmischief wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you mentioned his discussion of the "billion dollar one person startup", which we can both agree is a fanciful idea and more of an eventual "possibility" that will of course not occur as once anyone can be a billionaire, the whole system is going to change. However, your "tasteless high level wanking" is not a quote from Altman, it's a vague and directionless insult that manages to sweep quite a lot of legitimate…

The amount of brain energy spent on justifying the mediocrity machines is astounding.

What you just did is called deflection. You failed to address my comment wholesale and instead opted for a back-handed insult on my intelligence.

Do you actually have something substantial to say?

Re: The Coming Loop

#136

Post by mmillin »

handoflixue wrote: post #113
mmillin wrote: post #49

>Yet even with a lot of manual steering, that type of code does not come out of LLMs naturally, and even if the code comes out naturally like that, they will still attempt to handle now impossible errors. This is something I’ve struggled to fight against in many PR reviews. Especially once already written, convincing someone that their excessive null checking is harmful is an uphill battle. Short of better modeling (…

How impossible are we talking? I tend to be a fairly defensive programmer - maybe nothing currently sends this function a negative value, but how hard is it for a future code change to alter that assumption? I always figured a clear error was best. It lets even someone unfamiliar with the code know what assumptions are being made about the valid range of inputs, so they don't have to consider impossible outliers.

Obviously it isn’t totally impossible, but it becomes challenging to know if it’s required or not. It’s hardest when it isn’t just throwing an error but instead defaulting to something only half-sensible. For example replacing a negative number with 0 or overflowing rather than panicking.

When it comes to assumptions about the input, ideally model them in the type system. If you can’t, explicit checks and throws are OK in my book. But don’t check-and-hide any errors. You’ll be hard pressed to debug the issues they’ll cause down the road, since it will usually be far from the implementation that you see the impact.

Re: The Coming Loop

#137

Post by bee_rider »

soulofmischief wrote: post #108
bee_rider wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One car went Mach 1, ever, apparently. Anyway, I don’t think the analogy fits. Ford or whoever didn’t loudly and frequently predict Mach 1 cars, right? The situation is more like: Altman & co are predicting their new car will replace all vehicles: horses, trains, planes, motorcycles, there’s a real possibility the concept of vehicles will not exist other than cars, in the future. Meanwhile it hasn’t really done highw…

Yes, one car did Mach 1. And the first production car, the Benz Velo, could only go 12mph. It's an apt analogy. As I mentioned to OP, applying future aspirations to the current space is incorrect. Some people are able to understand the progression of industrial automation, some people aren't. But if you look at the current batch of frontier models and say, "I just don't see how this is going to be useful", then you'r…

I think my main contention about the analogy is that Mach 1 cars are sort of a ridiculous target, a thing that only happened once just as an attempt to break a barrier, more like a tech demo. Billion dollar startups are very rare of course, but they are real things that happen for practical reasons as part of the industry.

Saying that the person you replied to was looking for the former when they really wanted the latter seems uncharitable. Especially given that replacing most of the engineering department doesn’t seem to be too outside the scope of what some in the space are promising(?).

Re: The Coming Loop

#138

Post by jcgrillo »

ElatedOwl wrote: post #122
contagiousflow wrote: post #75

> You Cannot Quite Opt Out I am so over this. I cannot take anyone seriously that claims inevitability of their ideas, and how you must adopt them without "being left behind". If these tools are so good and so capable the result should be able to speak for themselves rather than this FOMO inducing, emotional language.

the point of that section is that attackers and security researchers will use / are using loops, and you as the maintainer are not able to opt out of others doing this. an unwilling participant.

No, but you always have the option to opt out of being a maintainer. If "the community" is going to behave badly and bury you under a barrage of vibeslop you can just leave.

EDIT: there's a version of this that could be positive--everything could get a hell of a lot more secure. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening.

Re: The Coming Loop

#139

Post by nixon_why69 »

Avicebron wrote: post #129
nixon_why69 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they can be criticized, we can criticize the ExxonMobil CEO the same way and get nowhere The point is, blaming them is pointless, if it wasn't them it would be someone else. How do we react?

"If it's not them it would be someone else" probably should just be shorthanded to the banality of evil. But to answer your question, idk, sensible regulations? (Knowing full well this just kicks the buck of responsibility down the chain)

For AI overdependence specifically, continuing to be a thinking human is resistance. Eventually the pendulum swings, you can't outhype reality forever. People will have outages where nobody human can explain why and the orgs/people who maintained understanding will survive better.

Re: The Coming Loop

#140

Post by sunir »

Dear Abby,

I am torn. I have fallen in love with vibe coding but I still am in love with the software I’ve used for decades that works reliably.

Vibe coding gives me what I need and want right now. Its fast. Fun. Always makes me feel validated.

My older software never changes. It’s constantly telling me no. When it gets mad, it throws errors at me sometimes! But I can’t leave it. It runs my life and I know it will take care of me for years to come.

And the vibe code it’s so flaky… and expensive. It sucks up endless amount of my time, compute, and money and never gives anything back.

But it’s so fun. I tell all my friends about it and they’ve become so jealous they sought out their own vibe coder.

We’ve all found our vibe coders are a bit kinky. It’s become a social thing amongst my friends to talk about building cooler harnesses to control our vibe coders.

I don’t know what to do. My old software pays the bills but she keeps threatening to dump my ass on the curb and replace me with her own vibe coder.

I know she can’t really do it. She needs me too. And I need her.

Can we ever patch up our diffs?

— just some git with uncommitted changes

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