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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#871

Post by z500 »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #768
manmal wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models you can run on your own (expensive) computer are just a year behind the SOTA. Linux exists. Why are you so pessimistic?

Typical HN comment. They’re so in the weeds of edge case 1% concerns they can’t see the golden age around them. Most people living through golden ages might not know it. Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages. Many in the Roman Empire were enslaved or impoverished. That doesn’t mean history doesn’t see these as golden ages, where golden age is defined loosely as a broad period of enhanc…

You're right, this right here is the typical HN comment.

Re: We mourn our craft

#872

Post by waffletower »

I am at the tail-end of my career and I do not feel that option to ignore AI. Thankfully I am soberly fascinated with these developments. Also, I often find it is easier to articulate my coding desire with actual code, than with a descriptive prompt. And I have definitely seen AI fail in difficult scenarios. I am often needed.

Re: We mourn our craft

#873

Post by waffletower »

mcdeltat wrote: post #808
chickensong wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying might be true, but it's also a choice to delegate responsibility to someone other than yourself. I'm not saying that the adversarial state of computing is ok, just that most people don't care, or don't like the alternatives. Even as someone concerned with the issues you mention, the shift happening now feels pretty magical to me. I can only imagine how non-technical people must feel.

Sure it's technically always a choice, but because society exists, some options are dramatically more plausible than others. For example, say phones become more and more locked down and invasive. Technically you can choose not to have a phone, but how are you meant to function in today's society without a phone? Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone. Technically you could make your own phone, I…

Its not a boolean choice. How often, and how you use a phone matters as well. While I am no stranger to screen time, my phone sees very limited and specialized use. I look at the weather, I talk to my car, I text when I am away from my desks. I am not using my phone now.

Re: We mourn our craft

#874

Post by waffletower »

mcdeltat wrote: post #808
chickensong wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying might be true, but it's also a choice to delegate responsibility to someone other than yourself. I'm not saying that the adversarial state of computing is ok, just that most people don't care, or don't like the alternatives. Even as someone concerned with the issues you mention, the shift happening now feels pretty magical to me. I can only imagine how non-technical people must feel.

Sure it's technically always a choice, but because society exists, some options are dramatically more plausible than others. For example, say phones become more and more locked down and invasive. Technically you can choose not to have a phone, but how are you meant to function in today's society without a phone? Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone. Technically you could make your own phone, I…

"Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone" -- this is far from the truth in my world. It seems that how one uses a modern smartphone shapes one's world view of what's valued and what's possible.

Re: We mourn our craft

#875

Post by throwdbaaway »

nubg wrote: post #151

To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries? This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher. I'm 100% honestly looking forward to findin…

As mentioned by the sibling comment from godelski, it is about the lack of precision, not the lack of determinism. After all, we already got https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in..., which is not even an issue for single user local inference.

Question: Have you tried using LLM as a compiler?

Well, I sort of did, as a fun exercise. I came up with a very elaborate ~5000 tokens prompt, such that when fed with a ~500 tokens function, I will get back a ~600 tokens rewritten function.

The prompt contains 10+ examples, such that the model will learn the steps from the context. Then, it will start by going through a series of yes/no questions, to decide what's the correct rewrite pattern to apply. The tricky part here is the lack of precision, such that the "else" clause has to be reserved for the condition that is the hardest to communicate clearly in English. Then it will extract the part that needs to be rewritten and introspect the formatting, again with a series of simple questions. Lastly, it will proceed, confidently, with the rewrite.

With this, I did some testing with 50+ randomly chosen functions, and I could get back the exact same rewritten functions, from about 20 models that are good in coding, down to the newlines and indentations. With a strong model, there might only be 1~2 output tokens in the whole test where the probability was less than 80%, so the lack of batch invariance wasn't even a problem. (temperature=0 usually messes up logprobs, go with top_k=1 or top_p=0.01)

So input + English = output, works for multiple models from multiple companies.

But what's the point of writing so much English, in hope that it leaves no room for ambiguity? For now, I will stick with mitchellh's style of (occasional) LLM assisted programming, jumping in to write the code when precision is needed.

Re: We mourn our craft

#876

Post by m463 »

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

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…

They used to call it the Personal Computer, and I think that name encompassed the "magic" I felt in the 80's.

But computing is increasingly not-for-you. Your phone will do what apple allows you to do. Your online activity is tracked and used to form a profile of your actions and behaviors. And the checks and balances - if any - are weak and compromised because of the commercial or government interest that want things that way.

the simplest example might be computer games. In the 80's it was private. In 2026 it is routinely a psychological cash register and a surveillance system.

I really like that linux with all its imperfections seems to counteract a lot of this.

Re: We mourn our craft

#877

Post by funkyfiddler369 »

the robot does to programming what the wall street did to thievery.

the police knew what's up. the law knew what's up. people knew what's up. you could be vigilant and prepared and reimbursed if the police managed to catch the thief. then came wall street and thieves (mostly) mourned their craft.

the law has no idea. the police has no idea. the people have no idea. it's all fraud. no honor, no skill, no chance to reimburse those who are defrauded.

jobs? demand creates jobs. doing things the right way creates jobs. not greedy, fuzzy business logic. that killed more jobs and SMEs than it created. killed more agency than it created opportunities. we know, it's just logic. but the law, the police, engineers looked the other way and worse, supported wall street. it's fun, I'm sure.

but don't think the world doesn't know what role programmers played. mourn all you want.

programmers had the chance to fight shady corporations and bad business practices and the darkest of dark patterns but they shat on teens and their attention and blamed the individual and worked for facebook and wall street and played key roles in expanding fraud, bad business practices and implemented more and more dark patterns and ways to hijack parents and teens minds, and to stress parents and kill agency and attention and care and vigilance.

they had a chance. now they mourn their craft.

I'm exaggerating. Relax. Y'all be fine. Others won't.

Re: We mourn our craft

#878

Post by JohnMakin »

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

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…

Perhaps, if you will, try to empathize with people who are not approaching the end of their careers, and are mid-career - too late to pivot to anything new, but in danger of being swept away, and you'll understand a bit more the perspective of the blog post.

Re: We mourn our craft

#880

Post by chickensong »

franga2000 wrote: post #835
chickensong wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying might be true, but it's also a choice to delegate responsibility to someone other than yourself. I'm not saying that the adversarial state of computing is ok, just that most people don't care, or don't like the alternatives. Even as someone concerned with the issues you mention, the shift happening now feels pretty magical to me. I can only imagine how non-technical people must feel.

People definitely care about things that a more open platform brings you, but today's open platforms have really bad downsides. The thing is, those downsides are artificial. They were manufactured by the corporations that prefer to be in control of our devices. It's not the natural state of things. I often get asked by friends and family "can I get rid of annoyance X" or "can I have feature Y" on their Android phones…

> People definitely care

Sure people will care about things on paper or in conversation, but my point is that most don't care enough to do anything about it.

> There is no reason it should be like that

Most businesses exist primarily to make money, so they have all the reasons for their bad designs and behavior.

> They prefer working to non-working

Of course, but TANSTAAFL. We keep rewarding the providers with our money and data, so the beatings will continue if you want to keep up with the Joneses.

I hear the point you're making with the comparison to transportation, but you can't just build a road or a railway, while you can absolutely build software.

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