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

I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 697 posts

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#351

Post by Der_Einzige »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #325
woah wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had an AI write a toy game engine with realistic camera and lens simulation on the view from scratch in rust in one day while i was working on other stuff all for the price of a $20/month Cursor subscription

"AI" LLM don't write anything, but copied someones symbolic isomorphic work that could fit the expected definition in the reasoning model. Like all copyright submarines, your firm now runs the non-zero risk someone will sue for theft, or hit the product with a DMCA claim. What is the expected value of piracy versus actual business. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MalBJuI9O5k

Information wants to be free. No one in any administration now or in the future will ever go back to the "let's sue grandma for 1 trillion dollars" era of the early 2000s. Piracy is good and important for national security.

~~~(====3

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#352

Post by Der_Einzige »

takklob wrote: post #287
Der_Einzige wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Either you're thinking of the "room temperature semi-conductor" thing out of Korea, or you're some boomer who forgot that cold fusion was in the 80s.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#353

Post by j45 »

Programming changed all along.

New concepts came out all along.

They became standardized all along and came down market to smaller and smaller projects.

Source control.

Cloud.

Agile/Scrum.

Code completion IDEs.

Higher Level languages.

These were not LLMs but did represent a shift that had to be kept up with.

LLMs are no different, just a bigger jump.

There is just as much opportunity here.

Software development and software developers are not going away.

More software that never could be built will now be built.

For the forseeable future there will always be software that needs to be overseen by a human.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#354

Post by reactordev »

alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

Wholeheartedly agree.

And you were casting spells at Relic. Bedazzle spells as young gamers played your games and grew up to become artists and engineers…

Remember your audience and not just the product. Homeworld shaped me in ways I couldn’t even tell you.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#355

Post by xg15 »

> They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.

But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.

I feel this is conflating different things. Yes, the abstraction tower was massive already before, but at least the abstractions were mostly well-defined and understandable through interfaces: even if you don't understand the intricacies of your storage device, driver and kernel, you can usually get a quite reliable and predictable mental representation how files work. Same goes for network protocols, higher-level programming languages or the web platform.

Sure, there are edge cases where the abstraction breaks down and you have to get into the lower levels, but those situations are the exception, not the norm.

With AI, there is no clearly defined interface, and no one really knows what (precise) input a given output will produce. Or maybe to put it better, the interface is human language and your mental representation is the one you have talking to a human - which is far more vague than previous technical abstractions.

On the bright side, at least we (still) have the intermediate layer of generated code to reason about, which offsets the unpredictability a bit.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#356

Post by r_lee »

bitwize wrote: post #340
rubenflamshep wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has leaned fully into AI tooling this resonates. The current environment is an oligopoly so I'm learning how to leverage someone else's tool. However, in this way, I don't think LLMs are a radical departure from any proprietary other tool (e.g. Photoshop).

Indeed. Do you know how many small consultancies are out there which are "Microsoft shops"? An individual could become a millionaire by founding their own and delivering value for a few high-roller clients.

what makes you think that's actually possible? maybe if you really had the connections and sales experience etc...

but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high if the same thing can be done by other individuals?

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#357

Post by nimonian »

abraxas wrote: post #69

I'm the exact age as the author and this post could have been written by me (if I could write). It echoes my story and sentiment exactly right down to cutting my literal baby teeth on a rubber key ZX Spectrum. The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are getting more narrow by t…

> this post could have been written by me (if I could write)

This post was written by AI

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#359

Post by r_lee »

goatlover wrote: post #312
jonas21 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible. Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.

Or perhaps they would have advanced the cause of labor and prevented some of the exploitation from the ownership class. Depends on which side of the story you want to tell. The slur Luddite is a form of historical propaganda. Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why…

problem today is that there is no "sink" for money to go to when it flows upwards. we have resorted to raising interest rates to curb inflation, but that doesn't fix the problem, it just gives them an alternative income source (bonds/fixed income)

I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.

so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#360

Post by hamdouni »

Total resonance with this part :

"They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of."

Post reply on HN