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The Eternal Sloptember
281–290 of 389 posts
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. And yet my working class grandparents didn't eat off the floor, they had great quality tables. Mine is made of disguised cardboard. This is a big part of the problem, there is zero trust that any potential improvement in cost or access will reach consumers. Companies don't…
And my dinner table is solid wood from IKEA. Affordable quality is perhaps harder to find in the US than in some other countries. Because professional salaries are so high, the top 10% is responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That makes middle spenders a less lucrative market than in countries with more equal incomes.
So many posters here going on about cheap IKEA tables. Did they ever visit IKEA? I have an IKEA wooden dinner table with the top made from sturdy panels of solid wood bars glued together for eternity. We've only had it for twenty years of course, so who can tell if it is any good…
Sure, the LACK coffee table is recycled honeycombed cardboard. That's on purpose, and totally fine. I hope people don't eat their dinner of those outside of student life though.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost improvements reached you, you just don't see them in the table quality. You see them in the fact that every single home you'll visit to buy or rent has a fully equipped kitchen including a fridge, oven, likely a microwave, dishwasher and even a washing machine (which alone has a huge economic impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gvsz_vc7B0 ) You see it in the fact that your home is safer from fires than…
The real problem is that today, you rarely can pay more to get better. If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered. Because that requires manufacturers ready to give up stealth corner cutting as the cornerstone of their earnings in favour of the hard and long task of developing an image of reliability. ------ Three cases I know enoug…
"If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered."
You do at the bottom of unregulated markets. For dishwashers and ovens, safety regs generally impose a high floor on the market. There is no $40 oven, because it's physically impossible to make a safety-compliant oven for $40. If it weren't for market regulation, $40 death-trap ovens would be a thing for sure.
The very cheapest compliant unit isn't _much_ worse than a mid-market unit, it might be a bit flimsier and wear out sooner; high-end luxury units aren't much better than mid-market units - because there's not much innovation driving progress at the top end. AEG and Bosch are still generally solid engineering, but there's not much point in paying more than that unless you like the aesthetics.
Mercedes and BMW - small-volume performance models aside - are like the big fashion brands, Vuitton etc., they're selling the idea of luxury to people who aren't even nouveau-riche, more like borrowing money to cosplay loudly as nouveau-riche. Compare old 1970s Merc convertibles with today's, the modern ones are just kind of ugly, aggressive and sad.
ADAM Audio loudspeakers are pretty good or were last time I bought a pair. They're designed as studio monitors but great for listening too. Perhaps they've gone downhill since being bought by a listed company a few years ago?
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#284When digital cameras replaced traditional ones, we thought it would make photography more democratic: each of us would be Helmut Newton for 15 minutes. But it didn't give us the beautiful portraits and inspired lanscapes we expected, only millions of pictures of food. How much will it take for AI agents to pass from distilling decades of collective wisdom to copying each other's worst mistakes?
>But it didn't give us the beautiful portraits and inspired lanscapes we expected, only millions of pictures of food. Here's a sample of my work using digital cameras, not a food picture in sight. https://flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/7217772029640662... The thing about having the ability to take effectively free photographs is that it really lets you experiment and learn the edges of what's possible. I was ins…
The comparison between AI and digital photography is a great one IMHO.
I used to be deep into photography in the 00s, until I came to the conclusion that I was spending lots of money, spending hours trying to take the perfect picture and then hours reworking them on the computer... for what?
Sure, I had fun while doing all of this, but to me art is about sharing. And given the sheer amount of pictures that were published daily on Flickr at the time, I basically had to spend more time in trying to reach out to people to share with them, than in creating something, which was my initial goal.
Or I could strong-harm my relatives, but I myself hate people that are forcing me to watch at their kids/holidays pictures, so...
And looking at the figures on your pictures, taking them at absolute value (not considering what personal value you can give them), it seems that your art is not seen by many. Contrary to thousands of random pictures of take-away than can reach thousands of eyes in a mater of hours.
Which is, to me, depressing. You put your soul in something and it has almost no reach, while random snapshots got millions of views.
And I see how the same thing will apply to software: flood of vibecoded trash that can be used by many, while deeply thought after software will be used by a few.
The good news for me here is that I never thought software as art but only a tool. I can vibecode the hell out of an issue, and the code will live on my private repos. Don't care. Sometimes I put stuff on Github but I don't care if someone (or something) uses it. I'm focussed on solving my issues.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#285"I don’t think models like this will ever be able to program,"
I don't get how anybody who has used the SOTA models in the last 3-4 months can write a sentence like this?
They most certainly can program. And usually better than 90% of my coworkers.
The question is really.. Can they engineer? By which I mean handle the duties of a software engineer working in a team, managing a large complex system, making reviewable pieces, forward progress in incremental steps, etc.
No, that part I'm definitely more skeptical about. That requires slave driving by the person in front of the prompt.
But this is a useful distinction to make. Because making overly pessimistic claims about the coding capabilities of the models makes me question the author's experiences with them.
I think agentic tools are toxic to team programming culture and engineering that produces reliable stable results. But I wouldn't for the life of me question their ability to write programs.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. This is only true in the beginning, when machines are still primitive (e.g. first automatic looms). Nowadays machines mostly yield much better quality than any human can produce (e.g. automated welding, anything CNC controlled). Many things are only possible to build with machines (e.g. semiconductors). > A hand-crafted solid wood table is sti…
Ikea does sell both ends of range; its has solid wood and particle boards.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reality: the top nth percent of coders are seeing absurd, dramatic gains in productivity using LLMs. See: antirez, Simon Willison, Steve Yegge. The more experience you bring to the table, the more value you get from these tools. Look, about 12 years ago articles about how if you're not pair programming you're doing it wrong were on HN's home page every day. Doing well prompted plan -> agent -> debug cycles is like pa…
antirez is famous for creating Redis, which took a dump in quality and everyone switched to a fork called Valkey.
Rubbish. The license change was the reason for the fork of community, and people switching. Quality was never cited as the issue.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#288My point is, before LLM's 90% of the code was already human made slop, now its just going toward computer generated slop instead.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The author, George Hotz, owns an AI company: https://comma.ai/ He is just making a moment-in-time assessment of how he feels about current state of LLM coding. I don't think it's a super-strongly held opinion, I'm sure he would be willing to change his opinion if the next two years of LLM development produce exponentially better results.
> The _Eternal_ Sloptember
> I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history
> Agents _will_ end up hurting large organizations more than high performing individuals or small orgs
> Do you think macOS will get better or worse in the next 2 years?
> I don’t think models like this will _ever_ be able to program, I think the process matters.
From this quote especially how can you say he only thinks about the "current" state of LLM coding?
You are wrong. I don't think this is a point in time assessment. I don't think it is not supper strongly held. I do think he will change his mind though.
That's why I asking for terms of the bet.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In all honesty I'm already feeling challenged but given how much time I save And how much is that?
Easily 99 percent on most tasks. As an example, for a Python project with a dozen modules and ~50 files,a simple instruction like "Design a config file backed by Pydantic to store the project's settings. Keep the models modular" sets up nested Pydantic models, moves the settings to sensibly named JSON fields and updates the code to use Pydantic classes everywhere. Takes a few minutes maybe. Manually done the same tas…
AI: I would urge you to reconsider, this is a multi week project.
Me: Do it anyway
10 minutes later
AI: Perfect!