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AI is stifling new tech adoption?

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Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#401

Post by godelski »

milesvp wrote: post #300
crazygringo wrote: post #252

No, AI isn't. Any new tech, or version upgrade, or whatever, takes time for people to become familiar with it. You might as well say "Stack Overflow is stifling new tech adoption" because brand-new stuff doesn't have many Q's and A's yet. But that would be a silly thing to say. I'm not going to adopt a brand-new database regardless of LLM training data cutoff, just because enough people haven't had enough experience…

Strong disagree here. I've been trying to learn Zig, and I'm thwarted enough by chatgpt giving me outdated information on Zig's unstable API that if I didn't have a strong incentive to learn it for it's cross compiler, I'd likely turn my efforts towards another language. This effect can greatly alter the adoption curve of a new tech, which can leave it dying on the vine. You're not wrong though, in that Stack Overflo…

Honestly, the shittiness of Google and terrible LLM answers has just made me start reading docs more. In the past few years I think I've become a substantially stronger programmer because of this. So in a way, thanks Google for becoming shit and thanks GPT for being frustrating as hell.

The problem is that sometimes doing things the hard way is the better way. I think learning programming, math, or any tough subject requires struggle. People like these things because it removes a lot of struggle but it more seems like this is a temporary advantage instead of a more long term one. My big concern is how we are becoming more and more addicted to instant gratification, at so many levels. Businesses are valuing quarterly profits above yearly. We've taken "ship early, ship often" to the extreme, as well as "move fast and break things." These are find adages, but like all things have limits. But the world gets more complex and as a result, solving problems becomes harder. You can't get away with first order approximations now and we're just building empires of technical debt. Too big to fail, too entrenched to compete against. But I still think, at some point, we have to say "fuck it, I'm doing things the right way, not the fast way."

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#403

Post by phito »

mattmanser wrote: post #365
_puk wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having spent the past week deep in cursor, it's amazing for building out a basic web app.. but getting it to a point of productivity takes a while.. Command line install for latest svelte.. nope npx install is now deprecated, have to do it another way.. ok, let's go old school and read the docs. Great, it's up and running, but nope, Svelte has just hit V5 and the LLM isn't aware of the changes.. ok, do I drop back to…

The unfortunate truth is that the one true way these days is React, and if you're doing anything else you're in for a world of pain.

Looking at the react devs in my company, they already live in a world of pain and confusion. So many simple, silly things turn complicated because of it.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#404

Post by williamcotton »

swatcoder wrote: post #400
williamcotton wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > learning by reading documentation and tutorials > But to the point of the person you were responding to, the LLM was not fulfilling a generally unmet need. Everything a professional or practiced amateur needs was there already. But isn't this stretching the definitions of documentation and tutorials a little bit here? A demo app and a bunch of undocumented header files became documentation and tutorials with the…

Perhaps. As an experienced audio developer, it's a distinction without a difference. We get used to reading code and deciphering how to use or improve it (wait until you start working with other's DSP code!), and some features and conventions of C/C++, like the segregation of declarations from definitions, make it especially self-documenting for those that are fluent in it. Having integrated SFZero myself (albeit to…

The way I use LLMs is as a learning tool. Sure, it can get me unstuck when I add some error messages to the context, but I always take the time to have it explain things, e.g. the reference counted memory model of some of the classes in JUCE. I prompt for a personalized tutorial with the specific problem I'm working on as the subject matter.

I'm also a C programmer and Max/MSP user so this syntactical stuff is mainly just different ways of managing the stack and the heap while turning MIDI into sounds!

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#405

Post by iammrpayments »

jimmaswell wrote: post #294
mxwsn wrote: post #286

This ought to be called the qwerty effect, for how the qwerty keyboard layout can't be usurped at this point. It was at the right place at the right time, even though arguably its main design choices are no longer relevant, and there are arguably better layouts like dvorak. Python and React may similarly be enshrined for the future, for being at the right place at the right time. English as a language might be anothe…

QWERTY is a poor example. The keyboard layout is not the bottleneck for anyone who does not participate in olympic typing competitions. DVORAK is just as arbitrary as QWERTY to everyone else including professionals, and there's value in backwards compatibility e.g. old keyboards don't become e-waste.

The keyboard layout becomes a bottleneck after you develop carpal tunnel syndrome and bad posture due to internal shoulder rotation

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#406

Post by godelski »

williamcotton wrote: post #363
lasagnagram wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered learning by reading documentation and tutorials, instead of asking the lie generator? I mean, how do you think people learned things before 2023?

What about a library that doesn’t have any documentation or tutorials, like the Soundfont lib for JUCE where the LLM was essentially I had to get a working product?

  > What about a library that doesn’t have any documentation or tutorials
This always sucks, but since it is something you have to deal with, the answer is "read the code." Hopefully the code has some test cases somewhere, and that is the best place to start. But if not, you unfortunately got to profile and trace the code yourself. It takes awhile, but you usually come out with a pretty good understanding (after A LOT of confusion) and can usually find some good things to fix.

How do you profile and trace it? A debugger is actually one of your best friends here. But this is also what things like cscope and tags (ctags) are for. I suggest becoming familiar with grep, find, sed, and awk as these will also greatly help. I strongly suggest also grabbing a pen and paper. You'll want to draw diagrams. It sucks, but it gets easier over time.

I'll also say that having to do this shitty task drills into you the importance of writing documentation, comments, and writing concise functions in your code. Only a psychopath could go through this trouble and think "fuck it, the next guy can do it too." Unfortunately there's lots of psychopaths lol. Remember, usually "the next guy" is you. You when you forget everything 6 months and 3 projects later. So document and comment while you trace. If your boss tells you not to worry, he's a psychopath too. Just wasting company money making it harder to onboard new employees. And in the worst/best case? Your documentation/commenting just makes the LLM better and more accurate. So there's really no good reason to not doc/comment other than excuses about moving fast. But remember, even though there's never time to do it right, there's always time to do it twice (when you fix what's wrong). And all this work reduces the tech debt and time everyone spends debugging. You have to invest in your work.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#407

Post by godelski »

jeremyjh wrote: post #321
milesvp wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree here. I've been trying to learn Zig, and I'm thwarted enough by chatgpt giving me outdated information on Zig's unstable API that if I didn't have a strong incentive to learn it for it's cross compiler, I'd likely turn my efforts towards another language. This effect can greatly alter the adoption curve of a new tech, which can leave it dying on the vine. You're not wrong though, in that Stack Overflo…

Imagine a world without ChatGPT or Stack Overflow. Is it easier to build your Zig project in that world?

Possibly yes. But this is hard to know and I certainly don't. What I can say is that it would certainly be easier without SEO and that both things you listed tend to exacerbate SEO Hell. SO less so, but it'd be naive to think it is immune. Though not quite to the degree of Reddit. But LLMs tend to reflex the training, so...

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#408

Post by koakuma-chan »

mattmanser wrote: post #365
_puk wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having spent the past week deep in cursor, it's amazing for building out a basic web app.. but getting it to a point of productivity takes a while.. Command line install for latest svelte.. nope npx install is now deprecated, have to do it another way.. ok, let's go old school and read the docs. Great, it's up and running, but nope, Svelte has just hit V5 and the LLM isn't aware of the changes.. ok, do I drop back to…

The unfortunate truth is that the one true way these days is React, and if you're doing anything else you're in for a world of pain.

But I thought it was a joke, or do people really choose their tech stack based on LLM support?

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#409

Post by john_moscow »

lasagnagram wrote: post #353
milesvp wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree here. I've been trying to learn Zig, and I'm thwarted enough by chatgpt giving me outdated information on Zig's unstable API that if I didn't have a strong incentive to learn it for it's cross compiler, I'd likely turn my efforts towards another language. This effect can greatly alter the adoption curve of a new tech, which can leave it dying on the vine. You're not wrong though, in that Stack Overflo…

Have you considered learning by reading documentation and tutorials, instead of asking the lie generator? I mean, how do you think people learned things before 2023?

The lie generator can very efficiently pull the relevant parts of the documentation and tutorials, and it's not that hard to programmatically ask it for a quote and compare it against the actual tutorial.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#410

Post by vram22 »

hinkley wrote: post #316
milesvp wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree here. I've been trying to learn Zig, and I'm thwarted enough by chatgpt giving me outdated information on Zig's unstable API that if I didn't have a strong incentive to learn it for it's cross compiler, I'd likely turn my efforts towards another language. This effect can greatly alter the adoption curve of a new tech, which can leave it dying on the vine. You're not wrong though, in that Stack Overflo…

Someone recently put it that it’s the first 10% of adoption that sets the future for a product. There are people online calling it the “tech adoption cycle” but this is a concept I encountered in a literal Business 101 class. 2.5% of the population are Innovators. 12.5 are early adopters. Then there’s 70% in the middle where most of your cash comes in, and by the time the laggards hit you’re optimizing for cost per u…

Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

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