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The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#51

Post by isthatafact »

Arainach wrote: post #36
SoftTalker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's the world we live in now.

It doesn't have to be. Comments such as yours add nothing to the conversation. It's an ad hominem attack. In the absence of explaining why you believe it "looks like AI", it's a baseless accusation

Implicit in "this post looks like AI"—at least the vast majority of the time—is that it is a wordy ramble with no real value because it says nothing novel or substantive—so I would not call it an hominem attack, but rather an honest criticism of the actual (lack of) content.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#52

Post by cableshaft »

Arainach wrote: post #29
SoftTalker wrote: post #23

Weird post given it looks like an LLM wrote it.

I'm sick of hearing about AI, but I'm significantly more sick of anyone who knows how to write English prose at a level higher than "typical rural American" being accused of using AI to write.

Agreed. Feels like I see this accusation made on every other post on this site nowadays. And maybe it's even true.

But if it's not, it's insulting to the poster, and if it is, then who cares if people are engaging with the post.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#54

Post by mattmanser »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #46

Anecdote: I haven’t done any web development since 2002 and I always farmed that off to someone else. But since I started using coding agents, I have done two feature full internal web apps authenticated by Amazon Cognito. While the UI looks like something from 2002, I am good at putting myself in the shoes of the end user, I iterated often (and quickly) over the UX. I didn’t look at a line of code and have no plans…

I didn’t look at a line of code... I know it’s secure - I validated the endpoints can’t be accessed unauthenticated and the IAM role

Oh god, this made me laugh so hard.

Best 'we gonna get hacked' comment of the day.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#55

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

mattmanser wrote: post #54
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #46

Anecdote: I haven’t done any web development since 2002 and I always farmed that off to someone else. But since I started using coding agents, I have done two feature full internal web apps authenticated by Amazon Cognito. While the UI looks like something from 2002, I am good at putting myself in the shoes of the end user, I iterated often (and quickly) over the UX. I didn’t look at a line of code and have no plans…

I didn’t look at a line of code... I know it’s secure - I validated the endpoints can’t be accessed unauthenticated and the IAM role Oh god, this made me laugh so hard. Best 'we gonna get hacked' comment of the day.

Please tell me how is going to be “hacked”?

A) The IAM role of the Lambda runtime it’s running in is least privileged and only has access read and write access to the required S3 bucket and other required AWS services and even those are tightly scoped.

B) For authentication I used Amazon Cognito and ran a curl shell script against each endpoint for authentication vs non authenticated end points

C) The database user has least privilege access

So how pray tell could insecure code overcome that?

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#56

Post by peteforde »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #49
peteforde wrote: post #21

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

Okay, it's been several weeks. How much of what you did have you retained? Could you do all of, some of, a small fraction of, or none of the work again today if you had to?

My reaction to this question is that it might technically be in good faith, but you're pushing it.

Let's say that LLMs didn't exist, and I learned these same skills in an oddly specific hands-on workshop, or from an oddly specific textbook, or fuck it, let's say that I hired some greybeard pedal designer to just sit beside me and answer all of my stupid questions without judgement for a few weeks at their hourly rate.

Would you feel compelled to challenge whether I had retained what I learned or inexplicably woke up this morning, tabula rasa, and realized that I'd forgotten everything I spent a week teaching myself? I honestly don't think that you would.

For the record, I could reimplement any part of the circuit on demand if I needed to. I might be tempted to look at my notes for the JFET switching because it was genuinely hard to keep in my head, but that's more of a confidence thing than a "shit, I forgot how op-amps work" thing.

I've since implemented a variation into a matrix mixer concept that I'm working on, when it detects that a TS cable has been inserted into a TRS jack.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#57

Post by peteforde »

sagarm wrote: post #39
peteforde wrote: post #21

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

LLMs absolutely let you explore ideas and areas you wouldn't have otherwise...but does your new design actually _work_? I'm curious whether the "knowledge" you gained was real or hallucinatory. I've been using LLMs this way myself, but I worry I'm contaminating my memory with false information.

I think that you're confusing what you're doing with what I'm doing.

What I'm doing is learning the circuit constructs that I need and then putting them to work in real circuits. There's usually a few breadboard steps in the middle, which you could call reinforcement learning.

To me, the telling thing about your question is the implication that I would spend a week learning how to do something and then not test it out. I know that this reply reads as salty, but I'm really struggling to contain my own "wtf" on this end.

Seriously, people that are so determined to prove that LLMs don't work despite how easy it is to test for yourself and see that they clearly do work are the ones that are hallucinating.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#58

Post by peteforde »

WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #47
sagarm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs absolutely let you explore ideas and areas you wouldn't have otherwise...but does your new design actually _work_? I'm curious whether the "knowledge" you gained was real or hallucinatory. I've been using LLMs this way myself, but I worry I'm contaminating my memory with false information.

At some point this existential doubt about your own work and others seems pretty weird. Go ahead and figure out ways to interrogate on your work with technical means, that's a critical part of the process with an LLM or not.

Thank you.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#59

Post by peteforde »

OptionOfT wrote: post #50
peteforde wrote: post #21

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

No, you touch on the aspects where you're able to use AI as an extension of your skills. This is completely different than my colleague who isn't a software engineer, and now all of the sudden is creating PRs which I need to review and correct. I'm a sceptic. I use it to explore the unknowns and go from there.

With as much kindness as I can manage, it doesn't sound like you're exploring very hard.

All of this stuff is remarkably easy to self-verify if you aren't, well, lazy.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#60

Post by peteforde »

acmerfight wrote: post #26
peteforde wrote: post #21

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

This is a phenomenal example of exactly what I am advocating. Notice you didn't ask the AI to 'just design a stereo pedal for me.' You interrogated it, reasoned about netlists, and forced the concepts into your brain through intense friction. That is pure deep work.

Throughout the reverse engineering process, the LLM and I both were expecting each op-amp stage to use the next ladder value capacitor. We'd talked ourselves into how and why that would make sense.

At the end I was curious enough that I desoldered those five caps and realized that they were all 2.2nF except for the last stage which was 1nF.

I brought that news back to the LLM and we realigned our understanding of how the effect was achieved, ultimately coming to realize that our approach would have created notches at different frequencies instead of just shifting the phase by about 900 degrees.

It was an incredible learning experience. I try hard not to personify LLMs but this really did feel like working side by side with a friend on a problem until it was solved.

IRL, I suspect that most people who would be able to tackle that challenge with me lack both the time and patience to actually do it.

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