Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roncesvalles' law: Bad posts have bad comments.
Does this imply that good posts do not have bad comments?
It's more about the average quality of comments.
Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
211–220 of 230 posts
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you believe a junior developer now will never surpass you? Why couldn’t AI do the same?
It's not a matter of whether it surpasses me. In some respects it already has - I watch Claude Code spitting out long terminal commands that I've never even seen in my 15 year career. The question is whether AI will ever become good enough to magically infer information where none is provided. For instance, I've had this startup idea for an itemized physical storage company. We'll never reach a point where I can simp…
It might have a better vision than you and pursue that vision instead. Why should the AI wait for your impetus when countless founders and CEOs didn’t?
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#213Not only is the article AI generated, it's recycling a shallow pov that hundreds of other people are just copying.
Just google "taste is the new moat"
Doesn't deserve to be on the front page.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well that is not how anyone is doing agentic coding though. That sounds like just a worse version of traditional coding. Most people are building test suites to verify correctness and not caring about the code
Test suites don't verify correctness. They just ensure that you haven't broke something so bad the specific instances that the tests assert have turned into a failure. You can have a factorial function and more likely the test cases will only be a few numbers. Which does not guarantee correctness as someone who know about the test cases can just put a switch and return the correct response for those specific cases. T…
Regardless that is why most people are moving faster than writing by hand
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but that gap gets smaller every year (and will ostensibly be closed) As long as you build software for humans (and all software we build is for humans, ultimately), you'll need humans at the helm to steer the ship towards a human-friendly solution.
The thing is, do humans _need_ most software? The less surfaces that need to interact with humans, the less you need humans in the loop to design those surfaces. In a hypothetical world where maybe some AI agents or assistants do the vast majority of random tasks for you, does it matter how pleasing the doordash website looks to you? If anything, it should look "good" to an ai agent so that its easier to navigate. An…
Yeah. The UI will still be there, but it'll be a guy.
A little guy who lives in your phone and who's really good at APIs. (And, by that point, hopefully good at keeping track of things, too!)
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Test suites don't verify correctness. They just ensure that you haven't broke something so bad the specific instances that the tests assert have turned into a failure. You can have a factorial function and more likely the test cases will only be a few numbers. Which does not guarantee correctness as someone who know about the test cases can just put a switch and return the correct response for those specific cases. T…
Regardless that is why most people are moving faster than writing by hand
Moving faster towards what? The biggest diff? The most tickets closed? Or a working software?
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
The joke is that the person "saying" this is wearing their "I'm a rational, independent thinker!" tech uniform (expensive Nordic outdoors wear, so practical, so smart, so active, Vimes' boot theory, et c, not like those clowns in business wear, I'm interested in practicality not signaling, that's why I'm spending so much money signaling so hard about how rational I am). They are visibly displaying a complete lack of…
Thanks for explaining. We don't get much of this 'uniform' here in Singapore. It's too hot for tech people to wear long trousers and long sleeves. I guess it makes sense of a joke. Though I don't think sense in fashion correlates much with sense in technology: the guy might just be wearing what everyone else is wearing, so that his wife doesn't bug him about it and he can concentrate on the hills he's actually prepar…
I don't think any wife has ever asked for this look :-)
Someone just trying to minimally not-stand-out could do so way cheaper. The high cost is part of the point (for signaling).
The other major standard look is rich-hipster: $300 Japanese jeans ("they bought the actual looms Levi's used in the '50s! It's more authentically Levi's than Levi's is now!"), $350-400 work-, jump-, or motorcycle-pattern leather boots, $150+ shirt probably in some variety of rugged wool. Corduroy or denim trucker's jacket, also with some authenticity-story and expensive. Folks adopting this look are probably a little more self-consciously into fashion than the ones who go the "walk into an REI and buy five outfits, choosing the most expensive option for everything" route.
Turns out you can get more-rational-than-thou "screw fashion" tech dorks to spend just as much money on their cookie-cutter work-uniforms as a first-year investment bank employee in lower Manhattan with their week's-worth of HF or BB suits in sober greys and blues, you just have to take a different approach.
(I am 100% guilty myself of being a sucker for "authenticity" and heritage/old-timey-quality marketing, though I do deliberately try to avoid looking like a walking trope by branching out beyond the categories of clothes like those depicted in the original joke-image; the "standard" looks are very real though, you can spot a lot of US tech workers a mile away by knowing them)
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#218worse is better wins again.
there's a reason people prefer aged products - they gain a character of their own, similar to art or works produced under constraints.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a matter of whether it surpasses me. In some respects it already has - I watch Claude Code spitting out long terminal commands that I've never even seen in my 15 year career. The question is whether AI will ever become good enough to magically infer information where none is provided. For instance, I've had this startup idea for an itemized physical storage company. We'll never reach a point where I can simp…
It might have a better vision than you and pursue that vision instead. Why should the AI wait for your impetus when countless founders and CEOs didn’t?
AI has no intrinsic way to align its efforts to solve human problems. In order to solve that problem, you'd need an enormous amount of nearly real-time data feeding into the model. Then the model would need to routinely look for patterns and identify ways to improve human life in some way. It would make today's models look tiny by comparison.
What we're building today isn't even remotely close to that.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#220Title: Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left Followed by an entire AI generated fluff piece https://www.pangram.com/history/347cd632-809c-4775-b457-d9bc... Flagged
Every fucking time.
I hate this timeline.