I truly wish more people would write blogs with this style. Adqeuate length, gets the message across, while still telling a story. What do I find often nowadays? LLM-written AI slop that qualifies as a novel in terms of length. Great work!
Simulacrum of Knowledge Work
91–97 of 97 posts
Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's already out of date because it makes no sense. If it's true that the superficial signals of quality were once somehow good enough to keep the entire economy on the rails (it's not true), surely you can have an LLM look at given piece of work and extract comparably useful signals of quality or effort.
> If it's true that the superficial signals of quality were once somehow good enough to keep the entire economy on the rails (it's not true) It was true. The negative signals (we called them "code smells") weren't the be-all-end-all of reviews, they indicated to the reviewer where to spend more effort. It got us 90% of the benefit of an in-depth review with 10% of the effort. But with LLMs eliminating this, we now ha…
I think it’s true that we were able to establish trust and produce good work without verifying every detail — what I’m suggesting is that signals of that kind were not a very important factor. And code smells still work!
Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work
#93Ultimately to understand a thing is to do the thing. And to not understand (which is ok!) is to trust others to, proxy measures or not. Agreed that the future of work is in a precarious place: doing less and trusting more only works up to a point. `simulacrum` is a great word, gotta add that to my vocabulary.
The idea of Simulacrum comes from Baudrillard. His essay "Simulation and Simulacra" is highly recommended for understanding what is so strange about the modern economy.
Thank you, I'll take a look.
Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
i been telling my coworker this who's only use case he can conjure up with AI is simply "im going to give claude snowflake cortex, our integration code, all our documentation, jira tickets and its gonna make everything so much better. we'll be able to ask him anything and get the answer" and he's just lost the plot because there wasn't much of a plot. Sci-fi's infused him with how great it would be to have something…
I feel the exact same way, it helps speed up development a lot (and eliminates a lot of really annoying grunt work). But I see people I work with doing shit with it that doesn't make any sense, e.g. writing 50k lines of code for a "compiler" when it's really just an interpreter under the hood. Like they never take the time to understand the domain more deeply, they just use claude to sling some shit that barely works…
In a just world, an AI consuming Open Source material for training would itself become Open Source, as any other piece of software. There's an ongoing violation of the social contract of people doing things collaboratively, and it is going to massively bite us all in the ass.
Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work
#95I find AI code usually looks worse than it actually is. It's overly verbose, confusing, and littered with fallbacks that mean that if something goes wrong it falls through a million layers of try/catch and moves the stack trace somewhere completely unrelated to where the error actually happened, but in terms of the actual functionality it works much better than any similar-looking code written by a human would.
Such code as you describe is still bad code, though, because it’s difficult to reason about it, both for humans and LLMs.
It's bad code, but it's not pretending to be better than it is.
Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I had in mind! The whole post is a claim that evaluating knowledge work got more expensive because cheaper measures stopped correlating well with quality. If someone was already evaluating the work output using a metric closer to the underlying quality then it might not have been a big shift for them (other than having much more work to evaluate).
You may have benefited from using the term we already had for the cheaper measures of negative code quality: code smells.
I find misapplication of anti-smell techniques a pretty cheap indicator that I’m looking at LLM garbage. I think they’re not really usefully engaging with that stuff yet.
Re: Simulacrum of Knowledge Work
#97Too true. This is why Rudin's little book, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, normally takes a whole year to cover: one has to work through the proof line by line in order gain enough understanding to do the exercises. Programming gives you the false sense of ease with leaky "interfaces" and quantum-entangled "decoupling". LOL, one microservice in one separate git repo, and tested with mocks and Gherkin syntax BDD. Just LOL, I call this hyperreal programming. With "spec-driven" AI generated code that is reviewed and tested by AI, it is certain that "the programming did not take place". In this "brave new world", "the map has overcome the territory", and "the twelfth camel" was never returned. Programmers certainly don't need "the mythical man-ager" to go delulu and full ouroboros, i.e. "there is no big Other".