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Some things just take time

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: Some things just take time

#231

Post by samiv »

Now that everyones running faster than ever and trying to outrun the competition by slapping more code on than they do you can only brace for the results.

I expect these tools will quickly let people to ramp up several orders of magnitude of more complexity and lines of code to any software project.

The your 100kloc JS electron app will become a 10m loc JS electron app running on a 500m loc browser runtime.

Repeat this across the stack for every software component and application and library. If you think things are bloated now just wait a few years and your notepad will be a 1m line behemoth with runtime performance of a glacier.

Re: Some things just take time

#232

Post by johnnyanmac »

jareklupinski wrote: post #41
big-chungus4 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before. You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.

you fill the 3 liter bottle up to the top, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle then you fill 3 liter bottle again, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle until the 5 liter one is full empty the 5 liter bottle, and pour the 1 liter in the 3 liter bottle into the 5 liter bottle fill the 3 liter bottle again and pour that into the 1 liter already in the 5 liter bottle to get 4 liters of water

I'm so glad that style of inerview was dying out right when I graduated. And I love puzzles. But I don't need wannabe IQ tests for a job that expects me to work in legacy code and coordinae with other engineers.

Re: Some things just take time

#233

Post by johnnyanmac »

ghurtado wrote: post #65
NiloCK wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referring to with the phrase "status symbol"? I can't connect it at all to your listed points. An Olympic medal is about obvious a status symbol as I can imagine but it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred. The status signified with a knit sweater is membership (and good standing!) in a caring family with elders not yet fully subsumed into their phones. People, acquaintances and strangers alike,…

> it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred. https://www.ebay.com/b/Olympic-Medal/27291/bn_55191416?_sop=... > People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently comment on the knit socks I often wear, Ok, that explains pretty much everything about your line of thought. Thanks.

You're the kind of person that would try to buy a Nobel peace prize off a recipient, aren't you?

Re: Some things just take time

#234

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

Chaosvex wrote: post #209
snthpy wrote: post #207

The point about all the extra efficiency just making us more stressed and busy resonates deeply with me. It also stood out to me in the recent episode of the No Priors podcast with Andrej Karpathy. It's that feeling of falling behind is you're not using all available compute. Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous.

> Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous. It really is but it's come at the cost of actually being useful. It has a vague 'about' modal and that's your lot, which is confusing since they're encouraging people to join. I'm just not sure anybody's going to know what.

> It has a vague 'about' modal and that's your lot, which is confusing since they're encouraging people to join.

It's a surprisingly good filter and gets curious people to send mail in :)

Re: Some things just take time

#235

Post by ErroneousBosh »

imtringued wrote: post #222
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GD92 packets? No idea what you’re talking about but if it has a spec then it doesn’t matter if it’s trained on it. Okay, so you're running into the same problem that LLMs are. > Break the problem down into small enough chunks. Give it examples of expected input and output then any llm can reason about it. So I have to do lots of grunt work? > You’re describing a basic tcp exchange, learn more about the domain and h…

>Okay, so you're running into the same problem that LLMs are. I can't tell if you are a troll or not, but you can't complain that nobody understands your intentionally vague and obtuse way to describe the problem at hand to pretend you're superior. https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/NoticeDownload/Do... You have to rename the file ending to PDF. It's probably the wrong spec, because I'm basing this research o…

That is the correct spec.

Remember, I've already written something that does this. I'm trying to understand how and why an LLM would help.

Which part of the job is the LLM supposed to do?

Re: Some things just take time

#236

Post by zelphirkalt »

The website of earendil definitely still takes time, as it is right now only a gray area with white on gray labels in the corners, not displaying anything in the content area. The labels don't work like links either. The background image doesn't load, until one clicks some subitem of the "about" label and then "closes" the content that is shown. The theme toggle (?) at the bottom right does nothing, website stays gray, no content shown.

This website does not resonate with the message I got earlier from the article. It does not give the impression of someone taking appropriate time to make it.

Re: Some things just take time

#237

Post by johnnyanmac »

vessenes wrote: post #123
titanomachy wrote: post #6

> We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.

The point of the essay is good. You called out exactly my reaction; we value those things because of the marketing dollars that went in to them. As a wealthy friend from Geneva said to me once, “Look around this dinner party - the Swiss here have either an Apple watch or nothing on their wrist.” Swiss watches are an export good, and Hermes is a luxury brand. Both of generally good quality. And much, much better marke…

Not really. Some items naturally have value due to utility. Natural resources only lose their value if we somehow move on from all its utilities (like coal is, day by day).

Some are indeed via marketing, but any itema have intrinsic or at least, emotional value.

Re: Some things just take time

#238

Post by js8 »

gopalv wrote: post #100
Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

> Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback" from a customer standpoint. Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start…

Don't wait for feedback from "real users", become a user!

This tayloristic idea (which has now reincarnated in "design thinking") that you can observe someone doing a job and then decide better than them what they need is ridiculous and should die.

Good products are built by the people who use the thing themselves. Doesn't mean though that choosing good features (product design and engineering) isn't a skill in itself.

Re: Some things just take time

#239

Post by johnnyanmac »

bytefish wrote: post #101

As for the tree analogy and open source. Yes, you cannot build years of community and trust in a weekend. But sometimes it's totally sufficient to plant a seed, give it some small amounts of water and leave it on its own to grow. Go ask my father having to deal with a huge maple tree, that I’ve planted 30 years ago and never cared for it. Open Source projects sometimes work like this. I've created a .NET library for…

You didn't so much "leave it on its own" as much as outsource the duty to nature. Turns out nature spent eras optimizing for tending to trees.

Can't really say the same for vibecoding. You still need to do a lot of work that's ultiamtely putting lipstick on a pig. Maybe someone talented can make it pretty, but it has a quality ceiling, and most won't get anywhere close to that; people will just see a pig with lipstick on it.

Re: Some things just take time

#240

Post by johnnyanmac »

Vegenoid wrote: post #78
an0malous wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed this dynamic acutely working at YC startups the last 5ish years. Coding has become like a sweatshop. I don’t think it’s exclusive to startups or tech either, it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that there’s no real innovation anymore. Capitalism demands constant growth, and when there are real technological improvements you can achieve that growth through higher productivity. If there…

> it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that there’s no real innovation anymore This doesn't sound right to me. We are currently getting smacked upside the head by an enormous technological innovation. I believe that, even within the framework of capitalism, this problem has social and political roots. The "robber baron" period late 19th century America has strong similarities to what we are seeing…

When are we throwing anti-trust at the robber barons? That's the real question.

And as of now, we are not having "technological innovation". We found a new jackhammer and are tearing up the entire house experimenting with it. Maybe when the "shiny new thing" effect wears off we'll get true innovation. But as of now people are just getting paid to show off jackhammers.

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