601–610 of 1001 posts
Is it really? I scraped all HN comments with the words "Rust" and "LLM" from the last 6 months, put it into Gemini and asked it to surface quotes of people saying they had a good time, versus quotes of the opposite. It was about 60% positive and 40% negative.
Does anyone have recent personal experience with this they can talk about?
When that doesn't work, they start inventing hyper-specific scenarios and graphs with grounding that exists only in their imagination to push the topic further. If the AI can't solve a problem in a domain for you, well, it's that domain that's the problem, not AI. You simply need to re-invent the paradigm around your entire problem - easy stuff.
Finally, when they've failed to convince anyone with a modicum of rationality, they resort to some version of "well, fuck you, it's the future and I'll just be leaving you behind!"
Interestingly, this article has all three.
I agree with the main take in this article: the combination of agents + LLMs with large context windows + a large budget of tokens to iterate on problems can probably already yield some impressive results. I take serious issue with the "but you have no idea what the code is" rebuttal, since it - to me - skims over the single largest issue with applying LLMs anywhere where important decisions will be made based on the…
That may be true for chat aligned LLMs, but coding LLMs are trained w/ RL and rewards for correctness, nowadays. And there are efforts to apply this to the entire stack (i.e. better software glue, automatic guardrails, more extensive tool-use, access to LSP/debuggers/linters, etc).
I think this is the critical point in a lot of these debates that seem to be very popular right now. A lot of people try something and get the wrong impressions about what SotA is. It turns out that often that something is not the best way to do it (i.e. chatting in a web interface for coding), but people don't go the extra mile to actually try what would be best for them (i.e. coding IDEs, terminal agents, etc).
If you are resource constrained this article will make you sad. I do not have unlimited funds to plug in some token and burn a bunch of money when writing code. I am gpu poor. I'm lucky that 8gb vram can run the smallest models. But the output is so poor that I lose out to anyone using a hosted service. If anything this article shows that building great programs is less democratized than it once was.
I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
I'm tired. I'm tired of developers/techies not realizing their active role in creating a net negative in the world. And acting like they are powerless and blameless for it. My past self is not innocent in this; but I'm actively trying to make progress as I make a concerted effort to challenge people to think about it whenever I can.
After countless of times that the tech industry (and developers specifically) have gone from taking an interesting technical challenge that quickly require some sort of ethical or moral tradeoff which ends up absolutely shaping the fabric of society for the worse.
Creating powerful search engines to feed information to all who want it; but we'll need to violate your privacy in an irreversible way to feed the engine. Connecting the world with social media; while stealing your information and mass exposing you to malicious manipulation. Hard problems to solve without the ethical tradeoff? Sure. But every other technical challenge was also hard and solved, why can't we also focus on the social problems?
I'm tired of the word "progress" being used without a qualifier of what kind of progress and at the cost of what. Technical progress at the cost of societal regression is still seen as progress. And I'm just tired of it.
Every time that "AI skeptics" are brought up as a topic; the focus is entirely on the technical challenges. They never mention the "skeptics" that are considered that because they aren't skeptical of what AI is and could be capable. I'm skeptical if the tradeoffs being made will benefit society overall; or just a few. Because at literally every previous turn for as long as I've been alive; the impact is a net negative to the total population, without developer questioning their role in it.
I don't have an answer for how to solve this. I don't have an answer on how to stop the incoming shift in destroying countless lives. But I'd like developers to start being honest in their active role in not just accepting this new status quo; but proactively pushing us us in a regressive manner. And our power to push back on this coming wave.
The argument that I've heard against LLMs for code is that they create bugs that, by design, are very difficult to spot. The LLM has one job, to make code that looks plausible. That's it. There's no logic gone into writing that bit of code. So the bugs often won't be like those a programmer makes. Instead, they can introduce a whole new class of bug that's way harder to debug.
That sounds like a new opportunity for a startup that will collect hundreds of millions a of dollars, brag about how their new AI prototype is so smart that it scares them, and devliver nothing
I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…
> Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale.
Look at common scams. You get those texts from "Jane" who sent you an iMessage from an email address offering you a part time job and asks you to contact them on WhatsApp, right? (Well... Android does a better job at filtering spam) Or calls from "the IRS". Or anything else that's bullshit. This even includes legal scams like charging you for canceling your service or making it hard to cancel your subscription.
There's no skill needed for this. You don't need a brilliant coder. You need the equivalent of a call center in India. You need the equivalent of a poorly worded Nigerian scam email.
Shitty coding LLMs make this shit easier to mass produce. High quality LLMs only make it worse.
Personally, I'm just tired of all the shitty lemons[0] everywhere. I wanna buy a peach, but everything being sold is a lemon. All the lemons have done is make me annoyed and frustrated at all the extra work I have to do.
I now have 4 entries for my GF's birthday because when I merged a duplicated contact it just created more instances. I can't even delete them! Shit like this sounds petty and minor but when you're hitting 20-100 new issues like this daily, it isn't so minor anymore. I can't make any more lemonaid. There are just too many lemons...
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.
> The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show.
So it starts with a humble strawman, and then the author illustrates how dumb they think their fellow developers really are if they have the make different decisions based on different values.
Most developers I interact with who are what you might call 'AI skeptic', are most concerned with how this tech will be used, especially since its creation is rooted in mass scale disregard for ownership of anything.
> "The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site.... They stand up global-scale piracy networks",
IMO the author is here projecting or something, cause I literally never met someone with this opinion, and I've also been in tech/developer circles for over 20 years. Personal use of pirated content is very different from commercial distribution or making money of share sites. Not everyone's values are so rooted in making money with complete disregard to the impact of their actions in doing so.
I get it, the author wants to keep using LLMs are for people to stop trying to make them feel bad but trying to make a case for how their arguments are just dumb. But the author completely missed the 'why' behind the arguments. In the end, LLMs are a tool. Use them or not is up to the individual. But that doesn't give a blanket social license to use them in any way people, or more importantly, companies want.
Curious how he reconciles this: > If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code. In fact, you’ll probably do more than that. You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style. with Joel Spolsky's fundamental maxim: > It’s harder to read code than to write it. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
But I'm sure the author will simply dismiss it as a skill issue too.