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Ape Coding [fiction]

rsaksida.com

71–80 of 154 posts

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#71

If everything is C why not generate the entire bootloader to kernel stack with programs specifically tailored to the user.

Tokens cost money; bugs get created and have to be found and fixed. Mature software has been more valuable than new software since 1946.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#72
post #70

Anyone else bothered by ape being overwhelmingly derogatorily slang for black people? Seems like it's a doubly offensive term. Are there better terms, less encumbered by bigotry, while still covering the "meat space" quality to this development approach?

[flagged]

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#73
post #24

It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them. The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages. We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require…

> It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages.

No. We have programming languages because reading and writing binary/hexadecimal is extremely painful to nigh on impossible for humans. And over the years we got better and better languages, from Assembly to C to Python, etc. Natural language was always the implicit ultimate goal of creating programming languages, and each step toward it was primarily hindered by the need to ensure correctness. We still aren't quite there yet, but this is pretty close.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#74
post #24

It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them. The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages. We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require…

This is why I never use a calculator. Since my school days I have the skill to do long division. Why hit the sin button when I have the skill to write out a Taylor series expansion? For many other purposes I have the skill to use Newton Raphson methods to calculate values that mostly work. Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.

Meanwhile those who use a calculator merely hit that sin button and get on with the actual problem at hand, and life in general.

Strongly suspect this is sarcasm, but if it isn't, I applaud your... gusto? Or whatever it is you have going on here.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#75
post #24

It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them. The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages. We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require…

It's funny that you mention music and notation: sheet music is very compact for musical absolutes like pitch/rhythm/harmony, but a huge part of what we care about with music is nuance, which doesn't reduce cleanly to symbols. Hence there are plenty of words in musical notation that try to describe the desired characteristics of performance, that can't be otherwise encoded into that notation. For example, "with feeling".

That reminds me of an argument on here a while back: where I said I wished Spotify let you filter tracks by presence of pitch-correction or autotune. This wasn't because I thought autotune was 'bad' or modern artists were 'fake', but because sometimes I wanted to listen to vocals as a raw performance - intonation, stability, phrasing - I wanted the option of listening to recordings that let me appreciate the _skill_ possessed by the artists that recorded them.

I got _absolutely destroyed_ in that comments section, with people insisting i'm a snob, that I'm disrespectful, bigoted towards modern artists, there's no way i can actually hear the difference, and if i cant why does it even matter, and anyway everyone uses it now because studio time is expensive and it's so much cheaper than trying to get that perfect take. People got so angry, I got a couple of DMs on Twitter even. All the while I struggled to articulate or justify why I personally value the _skill_ of exceptional raw vocal performance - what I considered to be performance "with feeling".

But, I had to come to terms with the fact that anyone can sing now - no-one can tell the difference, so the skill generally isn't valued any more. Oh, you spent your entire life learning to sing? You studied it? Because you loved music? Sorry dude, I dunno what to say. I guess you'll have to find another way to stand out. You could try losing some weight. Maybe show some skin.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#77
post #24

It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them. The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages. We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require…

This is why I never use a calculator. Since my school days I have the skill to do long division. Why hit the sin button when I have the skill to write out a Taylor series expansion? For many other purposes I have the skill to use Newton Raphson methods to calculate values that mostly work. Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.

Bad analogy. The things I delegate to a calculator, I'm absolutely sure I understand well (and could debug if need be). These are also very legible skills that are easy to remind myself by re-reading the recipe -- so I'm not too worried about skills "atrophying".

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fiction. I did not use AI to write it. On whether it's worthy of people's time... well, I'm not presumptuous enough to say. :)

Who knows? 5 people? 10? Only those who actually read it, and still not sure. Did they read it? Or did they also believe it's written by AI? I tried to believe it's written by a human when noticed its footer's note. It was hard to believe knowing my fear of today's trends, where many read is an empty dark where human time is voided. Yet, what is the main idea behind it then, nowadays, when just a few will actually re…

Yes, I understand what you're saying perfectly. And I had similar thoughts while I was writing this. I do not want to talk too much about the process of writing it, or the content itself, because I feel it's not right for me (the author) to talk about it. But I'd like to make it clear that I wrote this myself, and that many of the questions and points people have raised here have also been in my mind, and it was my intention to elicit this type of thinking. Thank you and all others for the comments - I really appreciate it, even the very negative ones. This is the first time I published something online and I'm very happy that it resonated with people.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#80
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably also don't use a calculator because it uses a scary language called arabic numerals. Why write 123,456 when you could write out in english: One Hundred Twenty-Three Thousand Four Hundred Fifty-Six? English is your programming language and also your math language, right?

I hope this comment is sarcastic. LLMs are able to ingest numbers. And not just Arabic numerals; Did you know that there are other kinds of number systems? Believe it or not, they also ingest multimedia. You don't need the English language to talk to a language model. Anything can be a language; you can communicate using only images. And for that matter, modern LLMs are great at abstract math (and like anything else…

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