Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

I know I have already written a (long!) piece on this, so I don't want to expand too much here -- but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM. More than anything, it reinforced something that I think many of us believe: the future is especially uncertain right now, and will contain many surprises!

View on HN

> […] but this really was a very odd experience, to be talking with (understandably!) anxious parents of young adults about the peril of dehumanization while at the same time having this intensely human experience very much enabled by an LLM.

While it just came out, are you planning on reading Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas?

* https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnifica_Humanitas

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206

it is really very long. I was trying to read it on monday evening and an eyebrow was raised when, after some time, I saw CHAPTER ONE and realised that up until that point I had been reading the foreword!

Well, they are tools, aren't they? They aren't inherently good or bad, what people are doubtful of who will get to reap the benefits of the tools.

For the past few decades, slowly but surely, the recipients of the benefits of technologies have increasingly been corporations. Of course people are worried that this will move even more wealth out of their hand and into CEOs' coffers.

We really are living in technofeudalism, and we need to figure out how to stop it.

Perhaps the uncertainty is more to do with the public being able to see this new tech; think what's happened in those 30 years, some of which you as a techie would have been well aware of but most people were clueless about. Those of us using PDAs at the time, most of the public didn't imagine constant wireless connectivity and powerful computers in their pockets. Networked games, neat tricks bunches of geeks ran at the time; today everywhere. Is AI really that much of an outlier other than public knowledge?

AI is absurdly, massively centralized though.

You don't own it. You can't own it. Access can be removed at any time.

This situation may not persist but it's not like traditional pillars of society have demonstrated any incentive or even a perception of obligation to act in the public interest lately.

Local LLMs are getting pretty darn good.

True, but presumably they weren't trained locally.

you mean just like the Document editors or email systems these days? (or cloudflare etc etc)

It was great to see you, Adam, and others at the reunion.

I've done some tool-assisted ports (including without original source), the work you already did is probably 1/4 of the way to a web-hosted Rust BattleTris.

I'm curious whether you have any insights into why high quality LLM-assisted (or enabled?) projects seem so relatively rare? Instead it seems like the preponderant contribution is a deluge of low quality slop.

You didn't share yours and Adam's prompts in the post, so I'm left wondering how much of the success of this project is attributable to your collective ability and experience (both with this particular project and software in general) vs the capability of the model and harness itself? On that note, do you anticipate releasing LLMs at Oxide[1] (linked from RFD 0576)?

Personally I find credible success stories like yours interesting, if a little jarring. If they were commonplace, shouldn't software be generally getting a lot better?

[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/meta/tree/master/engineerin...

There exist a great many people in the world who think that the only important thing is having a good enough idea, and everything else is almost valueless by comparison. You've probably met them, people who say things like "I just need someone to code it, can you sign this NDA, what do you mean you want to be paid, it's just coding?"

They exist in other formats too - blogs in the vein of "for exposure" cover the same premise, mostly.

Vibe coding has allowed them all to try and show everyone how right they were.

Right, but most of them don't already work as software engineers, at least it hasn't been my experience of my colleagues. However, companies that are aggressively adopting AI coding tools aren't (at least nobody has shown it) getting better by any metric. So, what gives? Why, generally, isn't this kind of success story common?

Because most tasks aren't "refresh this code from 10-20 years ago"?

If you needed an old piece of code at $WORK, you probably already paid the tax of refreshing it or replacing it.

This sort of task is similar in nature to something like "I have a 25yo unmaintained Linux driver, let's refresh it for modern Linux" - a great demonstration of the efficacy of these tools if you have the right-shaped task, but not a task that comes up repeatedly in most people's days.

That's a good point, this does seem qualitatively different. Like dialect translation. In that case the specification is really precise, it's just the old code. Building something new or adding functionality to existing software the spec is almost guaranteed to be more vague.

EDIT: this specificity seems important for language models but the harder I think about it the less sure I am that it's the right intuition..

My intuition is that what makes them well suited is that the transformations on the input desired are well-defined and frequent tasks - e.g. any other software that migrated from, say, SDL1 to SDL2, or had to move from gcc 3 to 4, or Sun cc to gcc, had to have these transformations in their source history.

IOW, "there is probably very little stopping you except time from having written Coccinelle patches to mechanically do most of these transformations".

for the same reason that there is so much bad writing online? you'd think that making it much easier to make large projects would mean a great many more people would make large projects - this will inevitably reduce quality.

The number of people with the time and dilligence, the people who previously would have been making them previously, is much fewer. They hide themselves away to find likeminded people anyway, but now its even harder to find them amongst all the deafening slop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com