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I'm just having fun

jyn.dev

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Re: I'm just having fun

#41

Post by godelski »

flir wrote: post #39
godelski wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm. How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal). Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive". Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for…

Hah. I think of it as a slime mold. There's the main body (bodies?), but it's always shooting out little bits of itself that try weird stuff - founding underwater communes, or climbing mountains in Crocs or something. Most of these offshoots don't have that much of an impact, but occasionally one lucks out and discovers America or peanut butter and the main body saunters off that way.

Yeah we find this type of optimization all over nature. Even radiation is important to create noise. We need it in machine learning. A noisy optimizer is critical for generalized learning. Too much noise and you learn nothing but no noise and you only memorize. So there's a balance

Re: I'm just having fun

#42

Post by taylorlapeyre »

I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:

> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."

Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.

MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.

Re: I'm just having fun

#43

Post by strken »

flumpcakes wrote: post #36

Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting: I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.

I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.

Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.

Re: I'm just having fun

#45

Post by toast0 »

rtewrtjkewrkj wrote: post #10

I feel like I can't have fun anymore because the AI can just do the thing instantly and you've got people on this website advocating to let the AI do everything while you merely read the code.

I've not used AI to write code, but everyone who I've spoken to who has says it actually takes a lot of work. It sounds like you get intern level work out of AI, but without the hope that your investment in time results in skills and personal development for the intern.

All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.

If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p

Re: I'm just having fun

#47

Post by eterm »

flumpcakes wrote: post #36

Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting: I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.

It's a signal they want to put out that they don't respect the rules of grammar.

They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.

It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).

Re: I'm just having fun

#48

Post by cassonmars »

godelski wrote: post #30
nanolith wrote: post #25

We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest. Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money fo…

You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm. How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal). Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive". Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for…

You would likely enjoy Isaac Asimov's "Profession": https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

Re: I'm just having fun

#49

Post by globalnode »

godelski wrote: post #30
nanolith wrote: post #25

We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest. Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money fo…

You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm. How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal). Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive". Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for…

nice observation.

Re: I'm just having fun

#50

Post by ffuxlpff »

DoctorOW wrote: post #6

I don't work in programming, but "you can do hard things" applies to my work as well. It drives me nuts when coworkers refer to me as really smart when in fact I'm merely curious. "I have no idea how you did that!" You should ask. That's how I learned it.

People who cannot learn hard things don't have time, or they think they don't have time. Actually they try to fake their way through because they believe it is impossible or at least too late to sort things out properly.

The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.

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