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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#421

Post by martin-t »

niek_pas wrote: post #220
malwrar wrote: post #47

I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, no…

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it. I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

I see this take a lot and I think it's harmful in ways you might not realize.

Even if it's true and you genuinely have nothing to hide, have nothing to lose from being profiled, there are people who absolutely do.

Look at the radicalization happening in countries around the world, including the USA. It might be OK to be part of a minority or to have an uncommon opinion. A few years pass and suddenly the same person is considered an undesirable, a foreign agent, a terrorist or a deviant.

I've posted a lot of shit online which can be connected to my person and which could label me as any of the groups above. But that's a decision I make for myself. I would never dare make it for others or claim that they should not care about surveillance and take the same risks I do.

I know a guy from russia who lost his job because he expressed an antiwar opinion. The same thing can happen in the US or and other country you consider civilized. The US proto-dictator is already sending death-threats to people who only expressed the opinion that soldiers can refuse illegal orders. Neither you or me can know what will happen next.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#422

Post by archagon »

So many insecure AI boosters in the comments slandering and mocking the author. And yet the upvotes clearly indicate that the sentiment in the article resonates widely with the community.

Well, there’s not much of a point leaving a comment saying “yes, this, exactly this,” so I’ll leave one here on behalf of my fellow lurkers.

The more AI gets shoved down my throat, the less I’m inclined to use it for anything, and the more I’m inspired to write my own writing, make my own art, and create my own code — with great creative joy and burning anger. Enjoy your 1000x productivity gains and your inevitable burnout as you downskill to a glorified inference loop.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#423

Post by ModernMech »

TomasBM wrote: post #417
ModernMech wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence that software development cannot be automated is we already tried to do it in the 90s with OOP, UML, and outsourcing. It didn’t work out for the same reasons vibe coding isn’t working out — because building the system is the same as specifying it, and that is a creative iterative process. We are at the point where sure ai can write code, but we could always do that; lack of code writing ability was not w…

This may be evidence that it's more difficult than evangelists first imagine, but it's not evidence of a technical obstacle. Generally, "automation failed" does not imply that "automation is impossible". To your individual points: - OOP and UML are domain-specific abstractions. Aside from still being very much used in expanding niches [1], they have failed to automate much work because their proponents failed to cove…

I'm not saying there is a technical obstacle, I'm saying there's a practical obstacle that LLMs and vibecoding don't overcome.

The evidence isn't in that it failed but why it failed. It's not that the problem was more difficult than they anticipated, it's that they didn't comprehend the nature of the problem they were solving from the outset. Software development is an incremental creative activity that involves good taste, constantly shifting and vague requirements, and keen understanding of human factors and ergonomics. LLMs fail at all three. And in fact the shifting and ambiguous requirement element is fatal to the notion of automating the process.

Outsourcing and oop and uml and LLMs and vibecoding --- they're all the same futile attempt at the same thing: abstracting the human out of a loop built for the benefit of humans. It's nonsensical, and the only people who want to do it are capitalists, so it's doomed to fail yet again.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#424

Post by progbits »

malwrar wrote: post #47

I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, no…

I've heard it phrased as: Would you rather LLM trained on your comments, or one trained on facebook comments.

Obviously that's a false dichotomy and a pretty defeatist attitude. But it does have a point.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#425

Post by hexaga »

mxkopy wrote: post #176
pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

I don’t think it could be the most important skill to have. The most common, and the most standardized one for sure, but if coding agents are doing fundamental R&D or running ops then nobody needs skills anyway. > As it turns out, neural nets “won” > The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much. I get the feeling you don’t know what you’re talking about. LLMs are impressive but what hav…

Neural nets are used in way more applications than just LLMs. They did win. They won decisively in industry, for all kinds of tasks. Equating the use of one with the other is a pretty strong signal of:

> you don’t know what you’re talking about

Consider: Why did Google have a bazillion TPUs, anyway?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#426

Post by martin-t »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #249
niek_pas wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it. I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

Dog in the Manger. I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share". There's hardly any other…

So who should the value go to?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#427

Post by [deleted] »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #375
phpnode wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just isn’t true at all, with guidance and guard rails they produce much better code than the average developer does. They are only going to get better.

That is completely false in my experience. I have never once seen an LLM produce code that would be acceptable. It certainly is worse than what a human can do.

[deleted]

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#428

Post by dgb23 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #150
tpdly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fooling yourself. People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.

You're fooling yourself. It's very easy to get demonstrably working results in an afternoon that would take weeks at least without coding agents. Demonstrably working , as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use. I had a coding agent write an entire declarative GUI library for mpv userscripts, rendering all widgets with ASS subtitles, then proceeded to prove to my satisfaction that it does…

That’s actually an amazing case of agents. I love programming, but be honest, there are a lot of tasks like this that are just very time consuming and not interesting at all.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#429

Post by martin-t »

coldpie wrote: post #346
TeMPOraL wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dog in the Manger. I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share". There's hardly any other…

> I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person Rather, I don't like that the terms I released my work under aren't being respected. I believe LLMs are derivative works of the pieces they are trained on. I spent more than ten years working on open source code, and now the models that were…

I am in exactly the same boat, down to the ~10 years. Only difference is I ended up picking AGPL for my later works. Like it made a difference...

The whole situation disgusts me.

- They expect me to pay for access to my own stolen code.

- Arguing stealing should be legal because China does it and if US companies don't, they'll be left behind.

- People like the poster you're replying to who argue you're not entitled to 100% of the value you create - completely ignoring that the value will go to some-one and that some-one is already much richer than any of us and getting richer faster while providing less value, if any. Honestly, this makes me wanna track these people down just to find out if they're also in the owner class and are just secretly laughing at us while pretending "we're all equal" or if they're workers who genuinely don't understand how much they're being exploited and how much worse it's gonna get.

- People don't give a fuck. Colleagues happily using "AI" because it "saves time", not realizing if this continues, we'll all be without jobs and the only way this was possible was by stealing from each other and most of us being OK with it.

Honestly, I am hoping for a revolution. A proper one, with guns if need be, but most importantly, where people get what they deserve in full.

Last time this happened was during the second industrial revolution, so many people got fucked so hard, entire countries turned to communism. That was a bad idea but we can do better. It's not (just) about how owns the means of production but who owns the product. Even if "AI" turns into actual AI, as long as it's built on top of our work, we should own it - that means both controlling it and getting paid proportionally to our contribution.

The currently rich people can negotiate what fraction they get paid if they show us they're providing value. Of course, only after we get back what they stole and unless they end up executed. The value of a human life is apparently $7.5M so anybody who steals more than that should logically get a death sentence.

But none of this will happen, people are too stupid and will get manipulated by a charismatic liar like every single time before.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#430

Post by code_for_monkey »

rglover wrote: post #414
code_for_monkey wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you think the other big banks arent doing this? Bank jobs are pretty broad, theres a ton of code getting written here.

I'm less concerned about the code and more concerned that you said there's no culture around reading it/reviewing it... at a bank . If anything screws up, that's people's lives being messed with, potentially in a way none of the engineers on staff know how to fix. If I were an actuarial in that environment I'd blow a valve.

Its a big bank, Im not working on anyones debit account. Me and everyone Ive ever seen here is working on internal tools, nothings going to wipe out anyones savings. Also, yeah, its a bank, I hit the "im going to blow a gasket" line so long okay I cant even remember what things are supposed to be like.
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