341–350 of 389 posts
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The ability to read code doesn’t decay at nearly the same rate. Neither does your experience.
I read plenty of books, but I'd struggle to write one because that's a different skill that I don't have.
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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'…
The saner philosophers don’t need to argue about AGI because we’re absolutely nowhere near it.
For all I know you're the same guy that says we don't need to talk about nuclear weapons in 1937 because we're nowhere near them.
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And yet, clothes would have remained very expensive if we kept doing fabric by hand. Even destitute people in the poorest countries can have clothes these days, the meaning of “who wears the pants in this house” has lost its original (一条裤子) scarcity meaning.
Doesn't that just say "a pair of pants"? Or literally one line pants.
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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…
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> Programmers are rewriting and reinventing the same techniques more often than any other vocation I can think of And the answer to that is clearly a tool that makes rewriting/reinventing cheaper than actually packaging nice reusable libraries
I'm all for packaging nice reusable libraries, but someone has to actually do it. A lot of them just don't exist (yet).
AI labs should put some incentives in their RL to make their models write shorter code so it's easier to check
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How is it a copout? These exercises are making an assumption that developers have been given even more context.
It's the LLM version of "You're holding it wrong."
LLMs + Harnesses are incredibly effective, as evidenced by the literal millions of people who are paying quite a lot to use them, who speak glowingly of them and would 'never go back'.
Whatever 'shape they take' - they are obviously useful - ergo - 'you're doing something wrong' if you can't make use of them for most tasks.
Mileage varies, there are downsides, but it's the same with anything.
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The Luddites-as-labour-movement view is not entirely wrong, but also misses a lot. They were also an elite group that fought to preserve their own status and the exclusion of women from the industry. I thought this was a pretty good post about it: https://www.verysane.ai/p/against-the-luddites
I am no expert but from books I've read on the topic. It was also pretty diverse movement as is usual with decentralized movements like this. There absolutely were lower class people present who saw it as labour movement. In other words. The Luddites as elite group that fought to preserve status view is not entirely wrong, but also misses a lot. In context of audience here - programmers (elite group). You can say tha…
Economic competition should prove either position right in the long term. If AI really is BAD and is just waiting energy, not providing a real benefit and not really making reasonable quality software/content cheaper produce, then the hype will eventually crash. If its SWEs trying to protect their jobs, then one country or the other is going to lean into it for an overwhelming economic advantage and the rest will be forced to follow regardless of what they feel.
The same thing happened during the industrial revolution or even the neolithic revolution. Superior technology will diffuse no matter what barring an overwhelming geographical barrier.
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> 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…
Even something as "simple" as a kitchen knife - the same basic concept found in ancient roman everyday kitchens - can't be made to the same quality by a machine as per hand. CNC can't do the tolerances needed behind the apex. Even ignoring the story attached to a specific maker and going solely by cutting ability the really top end hand-made stuff noticeably outperforms everything mass-produced.
Have a look at this if you're interested: