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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#221

Post by aaronblohowiak »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #215
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Compare that to someone writing embedded firmware for device microcontrollers, who would understandably be underwhelmed by the same. One datum for you: I recently asked Claude to make a jerk-limited and jerk-derivative-limited motion planner and to use the existing trapezoidal planner as reference for fuzzy-testing various moves (to ensure total pulses sent was correct) and it totally worked. Only a few rounds of gu…

My comment above I hope wasn't read to mean "LLMs are only good at web dev." Only that there are different capability magnitudes. I often do experiments where I will clone one of our private repos, revert a commit, trash the .git path, and then see if any of the models/agents can re-apply the commit after N iterations. I record the pass@k score and compare between model generations over time. In one of those recent e…

Ah yes the magic is more developed for commonly documented cases than niche stuff, 100% sorry I misinterpreted your post to mean that they are not useful for embedded rather than less capable for embedded. Also, your stuff is way more deep than anything I am doing (motion planning stuff is pretty well discussed online literature).

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#222

Post by spmurrayzzz »

aprdm wrote: post #220
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has also been an interesting social experiment in that we get to see what work people think is actually impressive vs trivial. Folks who have spent years effectively snapping together other people’s APIs like LEGOs (and being well-compensated for it) are understandably blown away by the current state of AI. Compare that to someone writing embedded firmware for device microcontrollers, who would understandably be…

This is not true. You can see people who are much older and built a lot of the "internet scale" equally excited about it, e.g: freebsd OG developers, Steve himself (who wrote gas town) etc. In fact, I would say I've seen more people who are "OG Coders" excited (and in their >50s) then mid generation

I think you're shadow-boxing with a point I never made. I never said experienced devs are not or can not be excited about current AI capabilities.

Lots of experienced devs who work in more difficult domains are excited about AI. In fact, I am one of them (see one of my responses in this thread about gpt-oss being able to work on proprietary RF firmware in my company [1]).

But that in no way suggests that there isn't a gap in what impresses or surprises engineers across any set of domains. Antirez is probably one of the better, more reasoned examples of this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682604

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#223

Post by GrowingSideways »

Ntrails wrote: post #167
hnlmorg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 developmen…

> Programming is just shifting to a language that looks more like Jira tickets than source code. Sure, but now I need to be fluent in prompt-lang and the underlying programming language if you want me to be confident in the output (and you probably do, right?)

> Sure, but now I need to be fluent in prompt-lang and the underlying programming language if you want me to be confident in the output (and you probably do, right?)

Using a formal language makes the problem space unambiguous. That is just as much a benefit as it is a barrier to entry. Once you learn this formal language, the ability to read code and see the surface area of the problem is absolutely empowering. Using english to express this is an exercise in frustration (or, occasionally, genius—but genius is not necessary with the formal language).

Programs are not poetry!

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#224

Post by camgunz »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #73
keyle wrote: post #66

I'd help build Gas City and Gas State, and Gas Country if that would mean we actually would solve the things AI promised to solve. All sickness, famine, wealth ... The problem is, we're just fidgeting yolo-fizzbuzz ad nauseam. The return on investment at the moment is probably one of the worst in the history of human investments. AI does improve over time, still today, but we're going to run out of planet before we g…

As of yet, the AI models doing important work are still pretty specialized. I'd be happy to pitch in to run something like an open source version of alpha-fold, but I'm not aware of any such projects. I have trouble seeing LLMs making meaningful progress on those frontiers without reaching ASI, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

Even alphafold generated a bunch of slop,like impossible proteins and such.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#225

Post by dunk010 »

jcims wrote: post #41
pjm331 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas town is the cackling mad laughter emitting from someone who knows they are being both insane and prescient simultaneously. Today, it is insane. But I fully expect to be hearing about a very serious thing in the near future about which people will say “gas town was an early attempt at this”

This is the best take I've seen in here. I've been tinkering with it for the past two days. It's a very real system for coordinating work between a plurality of humans and agents. Someone likened it to kubernetes in that it's a complex system that is going to necessitate a lot of invention and opinions, the fact that it *looks* like a meme is immaterial, and might be an effort to avoid people taking it too seriously.…

I've had to read so far down to get a single non-stupid, ignorant, or inflammatory comment. What's wrong with HN, jeepers. Some actual discussion of the thing itself and not just pearl clutching would be appropriate here.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#226

Post by krackers »

krupan wrote: post #185

Gas town and the like all basically sound to me like, "AI is amazing! Ok, actually it isn't very good, but maybe we can just use more AI with our AI and then it'll be good!" And I'm not surprised at all to learn that this path took us to a "Maintenance Manager Checker Agent." I wonder what he'll call the inevitable Maintenance Manager Checker Agent Checker Agent? Maybe I've been in this game too long, but I've encoun…

If you add enough agents, you basically recreate the structure of human teams again. And the lessons from mythical man month etc. start applying. Large companies/teams don't seem to produce higher quality software than small ones, in fact they usually seem to be worse.

At best the notion of "subagents" today seems to be a hack to work around context length limits.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#227

Post by phist_mcgee »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #198
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…

This has also been an interesting social experiment in that we get to see what work people think is actually impressive vs trivial. Folks who have spent years effectively snapping together other people’s APIs like LEGOs (and being well-compensated for it) are understandably blown away by the current state of AI. Compare that to someone writing embedded firmware for device microcontrollers, who would understandably be…

I think this says a lot about yourself and where your prejudices and preferences lie.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#228

Post by brunoborges »

mjr00 wrote: post #207
brunoborges wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. Rich people use voice because they have disposable income and they don't care if a flight is $800 or $4,000. They are likely buying business/first class anyways. Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights. The average person doesn't have the privilege of using voice because it doesn't h…

As someone who's friends with executive assistants: rich people use executive assistants (humans) because they are busy and/or value their time more than money and don't want to bother with the details. None of them are using voice assistants. > Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights. Delegating to a human isn't the same as using a voice as…

> None of them are using voice assistants.

Rich people will literally just talk to their executive assistants and just ask what they want. They may use phone calls, voice mails, emails, and text. But you'd be crazy to argue that they never use just voice with their IRL assistants.

Your point is that voice is a terrible interface to get something done. My point is that some people have the privilege to use voice to get something done.

Some companies are just trying to remove the human who is taking the voice command and replacing with AI.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#229

Post by mjr00 »

brunoborges wrote: post #228
mjr00 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's friends with executive assistants: rich people use executive assistants (humans) because they are busy and/or value their time more than money and don't want to bother with the details. None of them are using voice assistants. > Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights. Delegating to a human isn't the same as using a voice as…

> None of them are using voice assistants. Rich people will literally just talk to their executive assistants and just ask what they want. They may use phone calls, voice mails, emails, and text. But you'd be crazy to argue that they never use just voice with their IRL assistants. Your point is that voice is a terrible interface to get something done. My point is that some people have the privilege to use voice to ge…

You're completely missing the distinction between "using a human brain (by telling a person what to do)" [yes this includes via voice] and "using a machine via voice interface."

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#230

Post by troupo »

soulofmischief wrote: post #218
troupo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functional illiteracy and lack of any capacity to hold any context longer than two sentences has long been a plague on HN. Now that we've outsourced our entire thinking process to "@grok is this true", it has now claimed almost the entirety of human race. soulofmischief: complains that AI-skeptics would say the Wright brothers were idiots because they didn't imediately implement a supersonic jet ares623: we were prom…

Apply your own "functional literacy". I made a clarification that those outside of an industry have to separate the opinions of professionals and hype artists. The irony of your comment would be salient, if it didn't feel like I was speaking with a child. This conversation is over, there's no reason to continue speaking with you as long you maintain this obnoxious attitude coupled with bad reading comprehension.

It's a hillarious attempt to save face.

"Separate opinions of professionals" etc.

Here's Ryan Dahl, cofounder of Deno, creator of Node.js tweeting today:

--- start quote ---

This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.

https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666

--- end quote ---

Professional enough for you?

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