661–670 of 870 posts
The Slopocalypse - an unexpected variant of Gray Goo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
There may come a point where having a "survivor machine" with auto-update turned off may be a really good idea.
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I read grandparent comment as saying people have been claiming that the sky is falling forever… AI will be both good for learning and development and bad. It’s always up to the individual if it benefits them or atrophies their minds.
I'm not a big fan of LLMs, but while using it for day to day tasks, I get the same feeling I had when I first started the internet (I was lucky to start with broadband internet). That feeling was one of empowerment: I was able to satisfy my curiosity about a lot of topics. LLMs can do the same thing and save me a lot of time. It's basically a super charged Google. For programming it's a super charged auto complete co…
These capabilities simply didn’t exist before the Internet. Apart for the email to Australia (which was possible with a fax machine; but much more expensive), LLMs don‘t give you any new capabilities. It just provides a way for you to do what you already can (and should) do with your brain, without using your brain. It is more like using replacing your social interaction with facebook, then it is to experience an instant message group chat for the first time.
> You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work There has been a lot of research that shows that grit is far more correlated to success than intelligence. This is an interesting way to show something similar. AIs have endless grit (or at least as endless as your budget). They may outperform us simply because they don't ever get tired and give up. Full quote for context: Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch…
I'm not sure AIs have that. Humans do, or at least the good ones do. They don't quit on the problem, but they know when it's time to consider quitting on the approach.
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they…
Thankfully more and more people are seriously considering the effects of technology on true wisdom and getting of the "all technological progress clearly is great, look at all these silly unenlightened naysayers from the past" train.
Interestingly, when you point out this ...
> IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side.
... here on HN [0] you get a bunch of people telling you to get with the times, grandpa.
Really makes me wonder: Who are these people and why are they doing that?
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Writing/reading and AI are so categorically different that the only way you could compare them is if you fundamentally misunderstand how both of them work. And "other people in the past predicted doom about something like this and it didn't happen" is a fallacious non-argument even when the things are comparable.
yes, but people just really like to predict dooms and they also like to be convinced that they live in some special era in human history
It's then quite obvious that the fact that someone, somewhere, predicts a bad thing happening has ~zero bearing on whether it actually happens, and so the claim that "someone predicted doom in the past and it didn't happen then so someone predicting doom now is also wrong" is absurd. Calling that idea "intellectually lazy" is an insult to smart-but-lazy people. This is more like intellectually incapable.
The fact that people will unironically say such a thing in the face of not only widespread personal anecdotes from well-respected figures, but scientific evidence, is depressing. Maybe people who say these things are heavy LLM users?
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
The AI definitely has preferences and attention issues, but there are ways to overcome them.
Defining code styles in a design doc, and setting up initial examples in key files goes a long way. Claude seems pretty happy to follow existing patterns under these conditions unless context is strained.
I have pretty good results using a structured workflow that runs a core loop of steps on each change, with a hook that injects instructions to keep attention focused.
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with these tools, the guy who knows business can now code fairly well. ... until CC doesn't get it quite right and the guy who knows business doesn't know code.
The future of the programmer profession: This AI-generated mess of a codebase does 80% of what I want. Now fix the last 20%, should be easy, right?
> I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. 2026 is just when it picks up - it'll get exponentially worse. I think 2026 is the year of Business Analysts who were unable to code. Now CC et all are good enough that they can realize the vision as long as one knows exactly the requirements (software design not that important)…
It could also be BAs being lazy and not jumping ahead of the train that is coming towards them. It feels like in this race the engineer who is willing to learn business will still have an advantage over the business person who learns tech. At least for a little while.
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Businesses too. For two years it's been "throw everything into AI." But now that shit is getting real, are they really feeling so coy about letting AI run ahead of their engineering team's ability to manage it? How long will it be until we start seeing outages that just don't get resolved because the engineers have lost the plot?
From what I am seeing, no one is feeling coy simply because of the cost savings that management is able to show the higher-ups and shareholders. At that level, there's very little understanding of anything technical and outages or bugs will simply get a "we've asked our technical resources to work on it". But every one understands that spending $50 when you were spending $100 is a great achievement. That's if you sto…