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Now is the best time to write code by hand

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51–59 of 59 posts

Re: Now is the best time to write code by hand

#51
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not offended and I find it funny, though you nailed my itching: > "Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it…

Just curious, would that include lab grown animal products?

My personal take is yes, assuming there's no animal exploitation or cruelty involved.

That said AFAIK there is no consensus: some abstain from all animal inputs while others focus on avoiding harm, which itself can be interpreted in different ways. It's more a philosophy than a rulebook, lab-grown meat kind of sits in a gray area. I'd be curious to try it :-)

Re: Now is the best time to write code by hand

#53
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually this does nothing but create more noise in an org. The Job of the engineer is to be really good with the tech not business.

Some examples of skills you could develop: -formal verification -computational fluid dynamics -control theory -materials science -graphics I think what I’m suggesting is: consider being more than just a software engineer. Become a software engineer with expertise in other fields. Or a software engineer AND a fluid simulation engineer. This might not make sense for someone who currently works at say a business SaaS co…

I had exactly this way of thinking last year and began specializing myself: github.com/glouw/ensim4

I reckon moving forward software will became an applied tool to the applied sciences. I mean, it always has been, but the barrier to entry has lowered for the easily verifiable, and that is programming, and not the problem being solved

Re: Now is the best time to write code by hand

#54
post #17

What I've been noticing is the abundance of the same "revolutionary" idea spoon fed by claude to everyone and their mom. Coding gives the edge in creativity

One great opportunity is for expert-developers to push the boundary of better algorithms or libraries. No one rolls out their own cryptographic library, majority problems faced in our systems are common. If that common problem is solved once and packaged into a library to be used by anyone, no one else needs to bother looking at it. Most of modern software dev is all about plumbing. The harder parts need to solved on…

Yeah but in my opinion AI generated code is still pretty low to mid quality and can't push boundaries. And as people rely more on it they sort of forget how to have unique ideas too.

Re: Now is the best time to write code by hand

#55

Practicing code specifically is one of many options for engineers right now. How about other skills? For example, now seems like a good opportunity to start developing deep knowledge in a particular domain, so that when you build AI assisted software in that space, you’re competent enough to know if it’s doing the right thing. Or, develop a better understanding of a range of disciplines, so that when you go to solve…

> The combination is what Valve calls a T-shaped employee I believe

For what it's worth, I've heard this at jobs before, and I've never worked at Valve (or as far as I'm aware with anyone who worked at Valve previously). I think it's probably more common than just something they say.

Re: Now is the best time to write code by hand

#58
post #48
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Assembly is deterministic (barring severe hardware bugs). But that's the point. People are no longer writing Assembly.

Sure, it's less common that people are writing full-fledged applications in nothing but assembly. However, I would strongly disagree that people are no longer writing/using assembly. I was writing a bit of assembly the other day, for example. Come on over to the game emulation, reverse engineering, exploitation writing, CTF, malware analysis, etc. hobby spaces. Knowledge of assembly is absolutely mandatory to do esse…

Great examples, those.

Here's another:

https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp/blob/main/sectorlisp.S

Given this, you might write less asm.

Re: Now is the best time to write code by hand

#59
post #48
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Assembly is deterministic (barring severe hardware bugs). But that's the point. People are no longer writing Assembly.

Sure, it's less common that people are writing full-fledged applications in nothing but assembly. However, I would strongly disagree that people are no longer writing/using assembly. I was writing a bit of assembly the other day, for example. Come on over to the game emulation, reverse engineering, exploitation writing, CTF, malware analysis, etc. hobby spaces. Knowledge of assembly is absolutely mandatory to do esse…

My point is that the coding LLMs are another point on the reliability / ease of use spectrum. We already mostly moved to another point with HLL compilers from machine language. This is another leap where the transform is unreliable but it's very easy to use (and it could preserve output edits, to some indeterminate extent).
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