721–730 of 918 posts
> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. How many 6-month periods do we have to go through before we can all admit that this isn't actually the case?
Not that many, as the new crop of junior devs grows up not writing and barely reading code.
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Than your younger self that got all excited about the Internet.
Truer words were never spoken. You have imparted wisdom upon me today. :)
I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…
Certainly not. Computers are still magic, but much of that magic is now controlled and being restricted by someone other than you.
Today most people's only computer is a cell phone, which is heavily locked down and designed for media consumption and to collect and give away every scrap of their personal/private data. Most people's desktop computers aren't much better. They are continuously used by others against the interests of the people who paid for them, sometimes explicitly keeping them from doing things they want or limiting what they can install.
People are increasingly ignorant of how computers work in ways that were never possible when you had to understand them to use them. SoCs mean that users, and even the operating system they use, aren't fully aware of what the devices are doing.
People have lost control of the computers they paid for and their own data. They now have to beg a small number of companies for anything they want (including their own data on the cloud). We're heading toward a future where you'll need a submit to a retinal scan just to view a website.
Computing today is more adversarial, restricted, opaque, centralized, controlled, and monitored than it has been in a very long time. "My computer talks to me" is not making up for that.
I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…
> We're on the precipice of something incredible. Total dependence on a service?
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I guide the AI. If I see it produce stuff that I think can be done better, I either just do it myself or point it in the right direction. It definitely doesn't do a good job of spotting areas ripe of building abstractions, but that is our job. This thing does the boring parts, and I get to use my creativity thinking how to make the code more elegant, which is the part I love. As far as I can tell, what's not to love…
If you’re repeatedly prompting, I will defer to my usual retort when it comes to LLM coding: programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language. It’s generally much faster for me to write the terse language directly than play a game of telephone with an intermediary in the verbose language for it to (maybe) translate my intentions into the terse l…
That doesn't seem realistic to me.
I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…
Computers did feel like magic... until I read code, think about it, understood it, and could control it. I feel we're stepping away from that, and moving to a place of less control, less thinking. I liked programming, it was fun, and I understood it. Now it's gone.
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8 years is not that long, if it can still compile in say 20 years then sure but 8 years in this industry isn't that long at all (unless you're into self flagellation by working on the web).
If they change the syntax sure but you can always use today's compiler if necessary. I generally find the go binaries to have even fewer external dependencies than a C/Cpp project.
They can not. They can make some average code. On Friday one suggested an NSI installer script that would never bundle some needed files in the actual installer. I can only imagine that a lot of people have made the same mistake (used CopyFiles instead of File) and posted that mistake on the internet. The true disaster of that being that then testing out that installer on the developer's PC, where that CopyFiles may well work fine since the needed files happen to be sitting on that PC, would then lead on to think it was some weird bug that only failed on the end user's PC. I bet a lot of people posted it with comments like "this worked fine when I tried it," and here we are a decade later feeding that to an LLM.
These tools can write average code. That's what they've mostly been fed; that's what they're aiming for when they do their number crunching. The more specifically one prompts, I expect, then the more acceptable that average code will be. In some cases, average appears to be shockingly bad (actually, based on a couple of decades' experience in the game, average is generally pretty bad - I surely must have been churning out some average, bad code twenty years ago). If I want better than average, I'm going to have to do it myself.
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My comparison was today's local AI to today's SOTA commercial AI. Both have improved, no argument. It's more cost effective for someone to pay $20 to $100 month for a Claude subscription compared to buying a 512 gig Mac Studio for $10K. We won't discuss the cost of the NVidia rig. I mess around with local AI all the time. It's a fun hobby, but the quality is still night and day.
The original pithy comment I was replying to was arguing that we’ll become dependent to a service run by another company. I don’t see that being true for two reasons: 1. You are not forced to use the AI in the first place. 2. If you want to use one, you can self host it one of the open models. That at any moment in time the open models are not equivalent in capabilities to the SOTA paid models is beside the point .
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> Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)
Your comment does not align with my experience. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
Which is why we shouldn't be surprised when AI, trained on the collective wisdom of facebook posts and youtube comments, keeping lying to us.