Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leave Me Behind

androidessence.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 344 posts

Re: Leave Me Behind

#221

Post by aspenmartin »

hansmayer wrote: post #214
aspenmartin wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. Well, first of all you and the author point to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" or the one I have heard a lot "next-token predictors", and the connotation I read from these being that this makes them inherently dumb or unint…

> to the same derisive comment of these models being, in your words "stochastic code extruder" So many excited and insulted LLM adopters on this thread. There is nothing derisive in that comment, it is simply the purest possible definition of how they work. Stochastics is a branch of maths you know. > can solve Erdos problems is sort of the proof in the pudding For the non-engineer, non-mathematician it may sound aut…

> So many excited and insulted LLM adopters on this thread.

neither excited nor insulted.

> There is nothing derisive in that comment, it is simply the purest possible definition of how they work. Stochastics is a branch of maths you know.

Not sure what you mean by stochastics but this is more statistics. They are trained with a next token loss, that doesn't belie "how they work".

> For the non-engineer, non-mathematician it may sound authoritative, but you'd probably be surprised to learn that most of Erdos problems are not at all complex - they are just not very interesting or relevant.

It sounds like you are both an engineer and a mathematician? Can you confirm? These are problems unsolved for many years. You think no good mathematicians have taken a stab at them, even if just to say they have resolved an unsolved Erdos problem? They are "not at all complex" is quite an extraordinary thing to say I'm wondering if you actually do have the pedigree you are trying to make it sound like you have, or if you are just regurgitating the same HN talking points you've heard.

> Yes and yes - have you not heard of that AWS incident with Kiro when the "agentic" shit deleted an entire infrastructure environment, complete with data, config, etc.?

And this means agentic code is inherently inferior to human code? Howso?

> Apart from the obvious absurdity of this statement - I know a lot of you non-engineer types feel "empowered" by the LLMs, in the sense of how they immediately seem a genius when you ask them on a topic you are not expert in, but you may want to read a book on programming first - maybe you'll get a clue then.

in the beginning you mentioned there were a lot of "excited and insulted LLM adopters" and yet...this sounds quite excited and defensive. Believe it or not, I am not a "non-engineer type" and its telling you assume that people who don't seem to share the same opinion as you are somehow less qualified than I assume you think you are? Why is this statement obviously absurd. Maybe you work in a really talented engineering team, which kudos to you I also have worked in teams like this, and I have also seen what is the p50 engineer and they are just as error prone or more than Claude. Thank you for the advice to read a book on programming as if that somehow would have any bearing on this at all?

Re: Leave Me Behind

#222

Post by nradov »

ary wrote: post #167

There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…

Nah, there's no evidence of reduced quality. If anything it's the reverse. I've seen AI code review tools be tremendously effective at catching defects which otherwise would have shipped.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#223

Post by idiotsecant »

ary wrote: post #167

There are a number of comments here where people open up about their contrasting experiences of not being a part of a programming community. Those are well addressed, I think, but there is another point to consider. We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think t…

I think history will prove that this is a less nuanced view than is required to accurately describe the situation. Abandoning human agency through the use of generative AI harms us all. Using AI as a force multiplier to implement human agency helps us all. It's possible to recognize that asking AI to do everything results in a poor product and brain rot for the humans. It's not at all clear that this is the case for using AI to build boilerplate, help with tests, etc.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#224

Post by unknownfuture »

daveidol wrote: post #218
unknownfuture wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now. What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, prod…

Well said. People love to make everything black and white / good and bad. But things are rarely that simple.

And I get that compulsion to boil this mess down into a simple good/bad dichotomy.

I absolutely have deeply mixed feelings about these tools, the ethics associated with them, the impact on the industry, on the talent pipeline, etc.

But I also can't deny that they are incredibly powerful tools that are here to stay in one form or another.

And I say that as someone who, a year ago, was absolutely convinced that they were incremental at best and scoffed at everyone who said something like "yeah but they're so much better now!" or "they're only going to get better!"

Well, they were right, they did, and the world has changed. AI generated code is landing in the Linux kernel. 250+ security holes were found and fixed in Firefox. The impact is here and now, and it's mixed and ugly and complicated.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#225

Post by joe_mamba »

clsdvd wrote: post #83
joe_mamba wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago. How can people say false things like this with a straight face? Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Leave Me Behind

#226

Post by ethin »

joe_mamba wrote: post #43
lazystone wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we all been fooled by the sentence: "It's yet another automation, it's like horses were replaced by cars". It is not. Industrialization and automation is about manual labor. LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. And while I'll give two thumbs up for using ML(there is not 'I' in 'AI') as a technology for some tasks, outsourcing thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.

>LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want. If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those mad…

> I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.

Do you really though?

Here's a question: how many times do you visit claude.ai or open Claude Code (or whatever harness you use) (or use whatever model you prefer) to help you solve a problem, ask it a question, etc.?

One thing I've noticed, which seems to go completely unmentioned, is how these LLM tools are like drugs. It can pump out thousands of lines of code ---> it can write my entire program for me ---> I've written quite a few programs with it and I don't write a single line anymore ---> I go to it for what would normally be things I could do on my own. The problem is that this isn't some immediate thing: like a drug, it sneaks up on you and you don't even realize it until it's far, far too late. I've been programming since I was 13 and I've just now started to notice the deskilling that's been happening to me. I've just now started noticing how often I'll visit Claude Web for something I should be able to do on my own. Nobody really seems to mention this, or it's repharsed as a good thing. And I don't get it: how is undergoing cognitive surrender a "good" thing by any metric other than the metric a beancounter would use? What worries me is that I fear this is happening to way, way more people than those who actually bring it up, potentially yourself included, and you just haven't yet realized it because you haven't really thought about it. That is ultimately what this "AI revolution" is going to bring. It's what the billionaires want, and what they want is usually what they get because the systems we've built are set up to not constrain them.

Re: Leave Me Behind

#227

Post by h_i_vitale »

ganSo wrote: post #68
h_i_vitale wrote: post #3

Not gonna pretend that this is anything other than the author's personal gripe with this whole thing, but this is really just the sunk cost fallacy with extra steps. Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.

What's your take on it?

You mean on his writing? My take is that most of the text is him grandiosely talking about the skillset he built is... somehow nullified with the appearance of AI and is taking the path of graphic artists that are focusing their no-AI work as craft.

He believes that AI is making him redundant and soul-less, and at the same time tries to minimize it by reminding everyone that LLMs are a tool - yet he argues that software can now be created without humans so his perception of AI is inconsistent at best.

This is the writing of a person with an existential crisis, which will be obviously egocentric by nature, and I wish the author the best. His approach is not too different of Japanese woodcarvers, Linotype experts switching to computers... there is no real mention about "AI creep" so the extent of AI usage is inconsequential. He has realized he mastered a craft that, as all types of crafts, are subject to technological advancement. At a personal level, it's a hard pill to swallow

Re: Leave Me Behind

#229

Post by moralestapia »

SoftTalker wrote: post #192
moralestapia wrote: post #136

“So leave me behind.” That’s easy to say for someone in their 50s who built wealth under favorable conditions. But it’s quite ignorant and inhumane to say that to someone in their 20s who is just starting their career. Too bad to see these boomer antics continue to be perpetuated.

People in their 50s are not boomers.

>[...] these boomer antics continue to be perpetuated.

>continue to be perpetuated

Re: Leave Me Behind

#230

Post by ripe »

cousin_it wrote: post #135

I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...

That Sam Kriss article is a wonderful read!

"If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you"

Thank you for posting.

Post reply on HN