MantisShrimp90

Projects like this are great because open source versions need to figure out the right way to do things, rather than the hacky, closed, proprietary alternatives that pop up first and are just trying to consume as many users as possible to get a most quickly.

In that case, a shitty, closed system is good actually because it's another thing your users will need to "give up" if they move to an alternative. By contrast, an open ide like void will hopefully make headway on an open interface between ides and the llm agents in such a way that it can be adapted by neovim people like me or anyone else for that matter

Unless you are someone that has chores to do like say... Most people? Yes we could technically leave our dirty dishes on the sink while we do art but that decision bites you next time you want to cook lol.

Obviously we mean we want to use that time of doing dish towards art instead, like how automation has always worked?

I mean I guess In this obtuse, maybe someone's joy In life is doing dishes and that is their art, then idk maybe but not even then.

First, this just misunderstands what is being said here. For most people, chores like the dishes is a menial task that we will be happy for any reduction in time/effort. In addition, dishes and laundry are considered necessary for modern life.

By contrast, art like music and visual mediums is often associated with joy and the creative act of building something out of making art rather than getting a task done.

To misunderstand this contrast is to misunderstand why we automate things in the first place, to minimize the unnecessary toil and maximize human flourishing. This does the opposite frankly.

It took a minute to setup, but using a combination of rsync and timers to backup system files has done wonders to decrease my anxiety around upgrades on arch

The only real answer here.

The writer is speaking from the perspective of the traditional philosophical understanding of a thinking being.

No, LLMs are not thinking beings with internal state. Even these "reasoning" models are just prompting the same LLM over and over again which is not true "logic" the way you and I think when we are presented with a new problem.

The key difference is they do not have actual logic, they rely on statistical calculations and heuristics to come up with the next set of words. This works surprisingly well if the thing has seen all text written, but there will always be new scenarios, new ideas it has not encountered and no these are not better than a human at those tasks and likely never will be.

However, what is happening is that our understanding of intelligence is being expanded, and our belief that we are going to be the only intelligent beings ever is under threat and that makes us fundamentally anxious.

I think as you go on it becomes a out being sure that you are solving problems in the simplest way possible. Chances are even with the simplest solution possible you will still need to do some creative stuff.

However, too many programmers in my experience (including myself) can frett about using tools and features that are cool little puzzles, but don't really contribute to the core solution and can in the worst case even make less manageable code.

As in all things, it's about finding the balance for the context. Let your personal projects be where you play with new tools while you keep solutions for your job dead simple due to all the job-related reasons to do that.

This is great for situations where you need to edit code within an app ecosystem that won't let you dev locally.

My use-case is ServiceNow which forces us into their crappy proprietary editor.

But you do need to get good at calibrating which sites get set off by it because as others have said you don't want it going off an every little text prompt you get most likely

I fundamentally disagree. Or atleast, LLMs are a development tool that will fit right in with LSPs, databases, and any other piece of infrastructure. A tool that you learn to apply where possible, but those with wisdom will use better tools to solve more precise problems.

LLMs can't reason, and they never will be able to. Don't buy into the AI hype wagon it's just a bunch of grifters selling a future that will never happen.

What LLMs do Is accelerate the speed for your wisdom. If you know how to make a full-stack application already, it can turn a 4 hour job into a 1 hour job yes. But if you didn't know how to make one in the first place, the LLM will get you 80% of the way there but that last 20% will be impossible for you because you lack the skill to implement the actual work.

That's not going away and anybody who thinks it is is living in a fantasy land that stops us from focusing on real problems that could actually put the LLMs to use in their proper context and setting

It's night and day. Vscode was never meant for the workflow, so even small things like moving to the sidebars and interacting with them using the keyboard is a pain in the ass.

Setting up custom hotkeys is an exercise in patience, and you are constantly fighting with native hotkeys that try to do the same thing.

I tried making vim mode work for years and I always go back to the original because it's where I'm at home

Okay fine yes. The proper and disciplined answer spoken by someone who appreciates the act of conducting science.

To make the point much more precise. From a philosophical perspective, while reaffirming existing knowledge is good and necessary for the continued advancement of scientific inquiry and the strengthening of knowledge of course, I would rather argue that the scope of the knowledge is too small.

Scientists are so terrified of being accused of going out of bounds of what can easily and reproducibly be quantified, that they end up proving near tautology and it leaves one questioning if this was worth all the time and money for research.

I guess I'm becoming a pragmatist as I age and feel a necessary part of knowledge is application. If scientific knowledge is not being used to improve the world, im not sure if it was worth the time and money.

I know this isn't how universities see it. But I feel that while the authorities on knowledge have become ever-more timid in what they are willing to prove and say, grifters and intellectual charlatans take advantage of the gap and tell people all forms of pseudo-science and dogma which is eaten up by the public because there isn't really an authoritative story to counter many times.

An interesting point. Allot of ink has been spilled around whether or not we are inherently drawn to negative news or if the ecosystems themselves condition us to seek negative news.

You're correct that if negative news was less profitable then they would push less. But that is exactly the problem is that the content itself just seems to attract more eyeballs and even those outlets that want to be better are stuck in the same engagement arms race as all the rest.

Walk that thought through to the end. Because it's become a popular sentiment even on this platform which is interesting. If what you're saying is true, the internet itself is toxic to mental health, and the only sane thing to do is to keep away from it at all costs, as you suggest.

However, we are on a hacker news, an overwhelmingly technical message board. Are we all just modern poison pushers then? Is the very nature of what we do somehow toxic to the flourishing of human life?

I don't think so. I want to see a more critical analysis of what in particular is driving mental health outcomes down. Don't mistake this for me saying there is nothing to do. I was in support of the ban on social media in schools for example. But as modern people who use technology regularly to live our lives, surely atleast we understand it is more nuanced than just "use the computer less"

It's.... A nuanced and good point.

What you are suggesting is that there is a locality dimension here which is interesting and probably points to an important consideration.

Even the follow up insight about agency and that the problem is we feel less able to solve these things is good.

But I think that an over-emphasis on local events makes one less able to understand and deal with the things in their own lives as well. It leads to a sort of purposeful ignorance where we don't want to learn what is going on in the world so we are surprised when the consequences become relevant to us.

If you don't know whats going on in Ukraine, you're going to be confused when your local Ukrainian friend is upset because a family member got killed

I mean, fair enough, I'll give you the point.

Your point about the horror movies is a good perspective as well and as a philosophy graduate I love your reframing.

But I also think we both know how most people are going to take this so it feels hard to revel in these fun, but small little questions.

Idk what the point of research like is. I mean like, duh? I would be surprised if they claimed negative news DIDNT affect mental health struggles.

Instead the far more interesting questions seems to be: in a world where negative news is becoming more common and prevalent, how do we face the reality of the world without destroying our own mental health in the process.

The naive takeaway from this article would be "just stay away from negative news" which is even reinforced by this little plugin they made. But this simply accelerates the fragmentation we have seen in society, for how can you ever have empathy with others if you refuse to appreciate the suffering of anybody but yourself and what immediately affects you?

Maybe instead of sticking our heads in the sand, we should be taking this as a wakeup call that us trying to solve these problems will help not just our planet, but our own mental health and will be necessary to have a healthy populace going into the future.

The longer I program the more I agree with this take. I have seen too much power and dominance from people who wield it as a cudgel against everyone else in the room who doesn't care enough to double-check the practice.

Put another way, knowledge is knowing best-practices, but wisdom is knowing where and when to apply them. Unfortunately, most building software have only the knowledge and there is too little consideration for the fact that structure is not free, and considerations must be made for when velocity is the primary objective vs safety and adherence to best-practices.

It all comes down to architecture design in the end.

This.

Not only can I corroborate this experience already in my workplace, even in my personal projects I can feel the effect.

The most striking example was I was learning a new language (fennel) and wanted to translate some existing code (Lua) as an initial exercise. It got the first few files fine, and I did feel like a double-checked them to make sure I understood, but only when it failed to make a conversion that worked properly did I realize I hadn't been learning really and still had no idea how to fix the code. I just had to write it by hand to really get it in my head and that 1 hand-written file have me more insight than 10 ai translated ones.

O, it looked better, had better design too because the ai just took the style of the existing file and transposed in whereas I was able to rethink the other files using the strengths of the new language instead

I think Rich Hickeys advice of not breaking people applies here.

The anger from this potential change is that really all you are doing is taking something away that was working, and now people will need to review their code or keep python on a previous version which sucks.

I think that people who propose these kinds of changes don't appreciate the importance of the programming language being at the bottom of the stack so there's really never a good reason to break people even if you think it's nicer as you really can't appreciate how much work you are creating for people.

As somebody who just did job interviews, tech like this is why the job market has somehow become even worse in the LLM age.

You want to know why people are using AI to read your resume? Because tools like this are clogging job inboxes with hundreds of submissions per day.

Also, don't think this makes you special, we can tell when something is written by AI. Not only do you not look smart, you look like the 100s of the people who thought they could get one over but instead your resumes all read the same and say a whole lot of nothing.

This isn't a criticism of the tool or the people using it. More a rumination on how an already horrible process has someone become so bad that tools like this feel like a good idea to people.

I never really understand this reasoning of "regex is hard to reason about, so we just use an LLM we custom made instead!" I get it's trendy but reasoning about LLMs is impossible for many devs the idea that this makes it more maintainable is pretty hilarious.

As someone writing a neovim plugin using treesitter thank you! Languages like this help leverage treesitter in more interesting ways whereas current apis are still a bit low-level

I think it's funny how much emotional energy gets invested into any (neo)vim posts. But the energy is mostly people that never learned vim and feel super insecure about it.

I'm not going to make the same mistake of judging this. If you are someone who has always hated vim and never want to touch it, go for it, this might make your day easier on some machine if you can load this repo really quick (although as others have noted you would need to ftp the repo onto a machine over ssh to make this work).

As someone who is a neovim enjoyer, you are allowed to not like (neo)vim, I don't want to hear you bitch about the editor you don't want to use. If you're a vim user who has this bad habit of shaming people for their editor choice, STOP! It gives us all a bad name whenever you judge people just because they don't enjoy the vim life, just like emacs it's closer to a lifestyle than a tool and if people don't want to invest the time they have the right to make that choice.

The world is no longer dominated by vim and it really has become an optional skill for new programmers.

This doesn't resonate with me because I grew up with mouse and gesture support and I left for a reason.

Now I guess I need to say this, if you find yourself intimidated or put-off by keyboard-centric workflows THATS FINE. I think the real problem is we assume that keyboard workflows are necessary for mastery, especially when we first start, and so people get all defensive about not jumping into vim/emacs. On the flip side, if you did embrace this way of life and actually do look down on people who don't, stop, you're making it harder for everyone and giving us keyboard warriors a bad name.

I got the bug after years of playing sc2. It gave me an innate sense for how to do a series of actions quickly and mechanically while leaving my mind free to do more strategic thinking. I just can't get enough of this mindset which is why I try to cram it into every app I can.

But I'm having to come to terms with the fact that new generations of programmers don't know how to touch type, let alone adopt emacs or neovim. Hell, people are starting to use chatgpt to just yell at their computer to create code with their damn voice, which would make keyboard-centric workflows akin to writing in cursive, an overly-specialized skill that will be seen as increasingly obsolete as new forms of communication overtake them.

I won't lie, that makes me sad on a level, but it would be unrealistic of me to expect others to go through the same training I did when it simply isn't as relevant to their lives.

Idk who this is for. Unless you really like mechanical keyboards but can't use them either due to other coworkers or a lack of funds, but something like this would make me kinda sad as someone who actually likes mechanical keyboards.

This seems like an app that people who don't like mechanical keyboards wish that people who do like keyboards would use. But that's a laughable sentiment because it fundamentally misunderstands why people use mechanical keyboards.

The apple keyboard is shit, and the lack of sound wasn't the problem. If people in your life use a loud keyboard ask them to get a mechanical keyboard with silent switches, you can make them sound quieter than a laptop.

I guess this is for people that don't use Neovim but never want to leave the terminal? Just kinda seems like the worst of both worlds to me. Less powerful than neovim while still using the same configuration language, yet less ubiquitous than even vscode at this point which does have many easy download options.

You can also use nvim-dap if you use Neovim