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

Don't you mean extinct?

fabiensanglard.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 145 posts

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#31

Post by lstodd »

01284a7e wrote: post #15
CamperBob2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a hacker, which most of you are not (things have changed here over time), you will reject this. You'll also recognize that the problem is not AI in general or LLMs in particular, but the proprietary entities that control the best models. That's the part HN'ers seem to have the most trouble with. They protest AI qua AI, as if that's somehow going to help, when they should be fighting for independent developm…

"they should be fighting for independent development and universal access". Well stated.

I see no sense in fighting for "independent development and universal access" of and to a fundamentally useless thing.

I only snark at those who try to mislabel that thing as something useful. Which it is not.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#32

Post by rdpsentinel598 »

bitwize wrote: post #27
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

No, he is correct. LLMs have much larger working memories for the kind of details you work with in programming tasks. You are at an objective cognitive deficit by not taking advantage of this. Everybody knows what he means by left behind. When you program, you do so with a goal in mind, and you will not be able to reach that goal as quickly without LLMs. You will be outcompeted by those who use them, and this means t…

The reality is that everyone will be replaced by a cheaper alternative someday, with LLMs or not. If you depend on LLMs more and more to do your work and the costs of keeping your tokens increases, your 'left behind' co-workers will still be fine.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#33

Post by WJW »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #12
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

Just about every professional coding job I've ever had has had programmers eager to code more, complaining about how much rigmarole there is around making changes, complaining about constant meetings and endless bureaucracy around change management and requirements. Meanwhile business mostly saw programmer velocity and output as a problem and a business risk, as they struggled to keep up with the rate of change and k…

> My output sometimes rivals that of entire teams' I've been part of

That's not very hard with many of the teams I've seen, with or without LLMs. Though the old adage of "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together" still applies.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#34

Post by KaiserPro »

I joined VFX at the start of the 2000s, I rode the evolution of VFX from special effects, to fully digital, and back again (well not quite, "practical" effects are rarely practical, just really good VFX.)

I left in the late 2010s, Lots of competition meant that wages were kept down, and hours fucking long. It was fun, I loved being at the intersection of Art, infrastructure and programming.

I fear for the future.

I hope that I am ok, because I have experience of high scale that is not really in the training corpus. I've also been in ML for a reasonably long time, so have more experience of getting the dipshit machine to do useful things.

But thats pretty thin gruel.

I am rapidly approaching middle age, which means that no fucker is going to employ me as an apprentice if I want to re-train. My techincal and artistic skills are basically replaced. They are the equivalent of Linotype expert. Technically impressive but utterly fucking pointless for a world where newspapers are dead and so is analog printing. In 40 years I could possibly make a thin living as an artisan. But I plan on being dead by then.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#35

Post by DangitBobby »

liveoneggs wrote: post #28
bitwize wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he is correct. LLMs have much larger working memories for the kind of details you work with in programming tasks. You are at an objective cognitive deficit by not taking advantage of this. Everybody knows what he means by left behind. When you program, you do so with a goal in mind, and you will not be able to reach that goal as quickly without LLMs. You will be outcompeted by those who use them, and this means t…

I use the 1M token opus claude for two days to build a dashboard and it forgets how to run the build script it wrote at the start of the project. Man can it put together a react app lickety split, though

The Claude file, documentation, and memories you leave in the project are part of the harness. Most of Claude's forgetfulness can be eliminated with strategic placement of documentation. After you've got that figured out, you'll have to compact the session long before it forgets because it starts getting sloppy and slow at high context. With your guidance it will basically keep its own harness updated for you as the project progresses.

And it also helps to give it better tools than grep and find to explore, because it can waste lots of tokens and pollute the context with the defaults.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#36

Post by Fordec »

stickfigure wrote: post #25
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

> Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? Customer meaningful features that move the needle on the business. I think this is strictly true. And not because LLMs can write code faster. I think it's true even if you're still writing most of your code by hand and using the LLM as an assistant. My anecdotal but decades-long observation is that most of the time=cost of a project comes not from writing code, but…

And I am gradually coming to the conclusion that "needle" isn't even features. In a world where everyone has AI access, moving the needle in an existing product space can readily be done by whoever. The real game changers will be those who redefine their market segment entirely rendering existing offering completely out of customer demand. And the only way to migrate the business to the new model from the ground up in say four to six months will only economically be able to be done by AI.

My hobby AI projects feature wise match existing company offerings in about a week of turn around. But this alone is valueless. The new thing that didn't exist before 2026 will remain the hard moat. But these moats will dissolve as fast as OpenAI can scrape your public marketing. It's going to be like releasing Meccha Chameleon as a break out hit but a month later the clones on Roblox having greater player numbers. This is the turn around times we're going to have to live with in general for business pivots to the "next" business logic that makes sense in the market.

Closer to the AI world it's going to be as fast as the transition from prompt engineering and MCPs to loop engineering and harnesses. I'm pretty confident popular commentators will see "loops" as old hat by December by raw function of what speed of evolution we're dealing with here now.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#37

Post by nearlyepic »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #11
01284a7e wrote: post #5

"Ride the wave." Or don't. Most LLMs people are using to code are paywalled, and controlled by private, for-profit entities. This is fundamentally different than the past, and diametrically opposed to the hacker. If you're a hacker, which most of you are not (things have changed here over time), you will reject this.

If you're a hacker, which most of you are not (things have changed here over time), you will reject this. You'll also recognize that the problem is not AI in general or LLMs in particular, but the proprietary entities that control the best models. That's the part HN'ers seem to have the most trouble with. They protest AI qua AI, as if that's somehow going to help, when they should be fighting for independent developm…

> when they should be fighting for independent development and universal access.

Because it’s literally not going to happen. The existence of LLMs is a function of how much capital you have. Frontier models require so many resources to train and run that they are functionally inaccessible to the average person.

That’s why capital loves them! It’s a resources play.

You’re also conveniently leaving out all of the other negative aspects of LLMs/GenAI with regards to the arts, open communication, etc..

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#38

Post by nkrisc »

stickfigure wrote: post #25
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

> Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? Customer meaningful features that move the needle on the business. I think this is strictly true. And not because LLMs can write code faster. I think it's true even if you're still writing most of your code by hand and using the LLM as an assistant. My anecdotal but decades-long observation is that most of the time=cost of a project comes not from writing code, but…

Realistically, has the volume of code that can be produced ever been the bottleneck? In every job I’ve ever had, it was never that the devs couldn’t write enough code fast enough, it was everything else that slowed them down, mostly other people.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#39

Post by ctrlkctrls »

bitwize wrote: post #27
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

No, he is correct. LLMs have much larger working memories for the kind of details you work with in programming tasks. You are at an objective cognitive deficit by not taking advantage of this. Everybody knows what he means by left behind. When you program, you do so with a goal in mind, and you will not be able to reach that goal as quickly without LLMs. You will be outcompeted by those who use them, and this means t…

Exactly, it's pretty obvious, and definitely as you sail, not aggressive (someone melts a little too easily) The comment was naive to the point of denial.

This is the future. Adapt or die.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#40

Post by Fordec »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #6

> I asked an LLM to write a Levenshtein distance function instead of adding a dependency to my project. Which you likely failed to review thoroughly, so may be subtly wrong.

Or put the dependency in the unit tests so it's not part of the code base but able to be compared to the canonical implementation.
Post reply on HN