231–240 of 500 posts
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"I hate CGI video" "So you hated the TV Series Ugly Betty then?" "What? that's not CGI!" This video is 15 years old https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY
I think that's a different category, though. Those backgrounds are actual video recordings of real places, not 3D environments modeled from scratch. It looks 'real' because the background actually exists.
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> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective. Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonge…
Roguelike/lites are is of the most popular genres of indie games nowadays. One of it's main characteristics is randomization and procedural generation.
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> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.
Because code reuse is hard. Like, really hard. If it weren't we wouldn't be laughing at left-pad. If it weren't hard we wouldn't have so many front-end JavaScript frameworks. If it weren't Unreal wouldn't still have their own GC and std-like implementation today. Java wouldn't have been reinventing build system every five years. The whole history of programming tool is exploring how to properly reuse code: are functi…
(Many small dependencies can be avoided by letting the LLM just re-implememt the desired behavior; ~ with tradeoffs, of course)
The issue is orchestrating this local reuse into a coherent global codebase.
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I was talking about libraries, higher-level units of reuse than individual functions. And your "syntactic" vs "semantic" reuse makes zero sense. Functions are literally written and invoked for their semantics – what they make happen. "Syntactic reuse" would be macros if anything, and indeed macros are very good at reducing boilerplate. You might have a more compelling argument if instead of syntax and semantics you c…
A library is a collection of data structures functions. My argument still holds. > Syntactic reuse would be macros Well sure. My point is that what can be reused is decided ahead of time and encoded in the syntax. Whereas with LLMs it is not, and is encoded in the semantics. > Pragmatics Didn't know what that is. Consider my post updated with the better terms.
The industry has known how to reuse codes for two decades now (npm was released 16 years ago; pip 18 years ago). Using LLMs for code reuse is a step in the wrong direction, at least if you care about maintaining your code.
> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…
You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring. And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachab…
And yet "No Mans Sky" is massively popular.
> ny software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.
And any software engineer worth their salt realizes there are 100s if not 1000s of problems to be solved and trying to paint a broad picture of development is naive. You have only seen 1% (at best) of the current software development field and yet you're confidently saying that a tool that is being used by a large part of it isn't actually useful. You'd have to have a massive ego to be able to categorically tell thousands of other people that what they're doing is both wrong and not useful and that they things they are seeing aren't actually true.
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If you do not plan out the architecture soundly, no amount of prompting will fix it if it is bad. I know this because my "handmade" project made with backward compatibility and horrible architecture keeps being badly fixed by LLM while the ones that rely on preemptive planning of the features and architecture, end up working right.
I think that's true, but something even more subtle is going on. The quality of the LLM output depends on how it was prompted in a way more profound than I think most people realize. If you prompt the LLM using jargon and lingo that indicate you are already well experienced with the domain space, the LLM will rollplay an experienced developer. If you prompt it like you're a clueless PHB who's never coded, the LLM wil…
LLMs are physically incapable of generating something “well thought out”, because they are physically incapable of thinking.
What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…
No I don’t agree. Just because it’s « boilerplate », that does not mean it’s worthless or doesn’t carry novelty. There is « boilerplate » in building many things, house, cars etc where to add real new stuff it’s « always the same base » but you have to nail that base and there is real value in it. With craft and deep knowledge and pride. Every project is different and not everything can be made from a generic out-of-…
Of course it is not. It is needed, by definition.
> or doesn’t carry novelty.
Of course it does not. Why would a piece of code that simply fills a large C structure with constants be innovative?
> Every project is different and not everything can be made from a generic out-of-shelf product
Tangential to use of LLMs for boring boilerplate stuff.
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Your comment made me think of the Japanese. They have a highly industrialised society, but they also value greatly hand-made products from food and clothes to woodwork and houses. And they also like to emphasise how long it takes for someone to become a master at a given trade.
It was really eye opening seeing they’re able to eat raw eggs and (to maybe a lesser degree of safety) raw chicken because their society requires high standards of cleanliness in food production. We are literal cattle over here in the states. Though, given Amodei and Altman’s behavior (along with the rest of the billionaire class) that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
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If you consider only the product is relevant and not how it is made, then no it does not matter; or at least it doesn't matter as long as you don't personally attach any emotional qualities to products beyond their material qualities (unlike the vast majority of people). But the comment you reply to explicitly points out the process is in fact relevant as it is itself a cultural artifact. You're not replying to their…
The main point is "It's good for the heritage and good for the customers." How are the customers hurt if their pie has not been baked by a babushka in Petrozavodsk using the old original recipe, but by an anonymous migrant worker in a dark kitchen using an optimized recipe if the end result is objectively the same? The packaging doesn't have to say who it was made by. I also don't see the problem with the heritage. T…
The issue is how this will be handled in law. Can the law define this in a way that is not overly strict or overly permissive? The current attempts is effectively the law doing this, but with an overly strict approach of what counts as 'objectively the same' by judging the process and not purely the outcome. Would it be possible to make the law's definition of this more permissive, to focus only on the product produced, without accidentally becoming overly permissive?
> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…
People definitely do care. Nobody wants vibe-coded buggy slop code for their game.
They want well designed and optimized code that runs the game smoothly on reasonable hardware and without a bunch of bugs.