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The Eternal Sloptember
231–240 of 389 posts
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#232[dead]
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM How long do you think it will be before you can't write any code because you're out of practice? One of the dangers of engineering management is that it can turn you into a person that can no longer do the thing. Does that even matter?
The ability to read code doesn’t decay at nearly the same rate. Neither does your experience.
I review every diff the clanker makes.
After a few hours of this I still look at the codebase and think "wtf is this?".
I think writing the code is a very important part of understanding it. LLM driven development is like doing maintenance programming from day one.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were on Usenet before '93 the words still haunt you
Joined Usenet in 1990 and for a few years it was great. I always wonder whether HN suffers from periodic influxes of newbies who don't get it yet and rile up the regulars.
It's not periodic so much as continuous. But yes, HN is constantly where Reddit was about 3 years ago and correspondingly declining. E.g. see the rise in "underrated comment" type comments lately.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't that just say "a pair of pants"? Or literally one line pants.
条 is the appropriate measure word for pants; they're plural in English, but uncountable (like other nouns) in Chinese. You could translate it as "a pair of pants", and that's the appropriate way to put it in English, but really it says "one pants".
I guess the measure word works equivalently to a unit of measurement, then. One bottle of beer, one sack of sugar, one 条 of pant.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right the original article says "Do you think macOS will get better or worse in the next 2 years?" (rhetorically implying "worse"). That could easily be true and Apple "will use even more tokens and spend even more money".
Sure but what would be a bet that can disprove the author? If there’s nothing then the post is useless.
Something that would disprove the author would be an increase in industry code quality. A reduction in bug rates might be a reasonable proxy measure.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#237Nah this person is dead wrong. Lets come back in 2 years and check on it. I'm willing to make a reasonable bet on these terms: companies will go even more AI native, will use even more tokens and spend even more money. EDIT: To people downvoting me, please come up with a reasonable bet and lets try to work it out. EDIT 2: $500 bet paid to your account on whether LLM's are going to still be used productively or not. N…
The author is not arguing against your bet. I think the author wouldn't be surprised if you won that bet. But that doesn't change the argument he does make.
What is a bet that most charitably represents what the author would make? If there’s no such bet then it’s just whining. If there is then I’d like to know.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny, but the more I know about the true Luddites, the more I see their point of view. " the original Luddites were primarily protesting against machinery used to "fraudulently and deceitfully" manufacture inferior goods, bypass labor standards, and strip skilled artisans of their livelihoods."
Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea. Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor. Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skil…
> Most people didn't need their standard of quality (but customers had no choice.)
Customers don't really have a choice either way. Good luck finding quality clothing, services with decent customer support, etc.
Supply chains supporting quality work are destroyed when an industry gets commoditized, and whenever a company doing quality stuff emerges, it eventually gets bought out and the product gets watered down in order to milk its reputation with inferior product.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, exactly, it's 'us' not the AI, which is great. Why on earth would we ever remotely compare a 'tool' to 'a software engineer' ? The 'great delusion' is not that 'AI can't code' - because obviously it can, and very well. The problem is the 'anthropomorphism' and all this AGI nonsense. If we called it 'Stochastic Mechanisms' and did not 'personalize' our prompts, refer to them as 'chat' or give them 'personalities'…
You are a tool. You're a human resource, from the perspective of the organization. That pushes buttons on bunch of other tools. That's why you compare it. Edit: I don't mean tool as a perjoritive.
I think the irony is that the perception of being called a tool as an insult, is exactly your meaning of it.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#240I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is. Either you're a luddite or "ai pilled". In most cases, LLMs can get you 80-95% of the way, sometimes less, sometimes more. And heck, sometimes, it just gets you somewhere wrong. But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers in isolation running in a closet, and using that to say that LLMs do n…
>I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is. There is too much money involved for any rational debate.
Exactly. Also, keep in mind that CEOs have both a personal monetary incentive and a fiduciary duty to do what's in the best interest of their company.
It is batshit insane to me that these days we put a microphone to CEOs, ask them to predict the future, and believe it. The only correct answer that they can say into that microphone is whatever is beneficial to their company, nothing less or more.