Verdex

English is my first language. I have always found this discrepancy deeply unsettling. A personal problem on my part I'm sure.

I think the issue is that there are rules but they're really complicated. So nobody learns them. And then they teach kids by cultural taboo violation.

"The letter 'c' makes two sounds. An 's' sound and a 'k' sound."

Atlantic osean.

"Wrong! It's Atlantic oshean! Why are you wrong!"

Then iterate for 20 years.

YouTube videos talking about linguistics and history have been a significant eye opener about the source for half a lifetime of frustration.

> Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't a unique skill

My employer moved out of the "accept spec; produce code" space back in the early aughts. It was clear that early that this was going to be a bad space to operate in. (Although not for LLM reasons, obviously)

Yeah, I primarily use rust because it's got algebraic data types, pattern matching, and cargo.

If ocaml had a cargo like experience, then I would migrate there.

I feel like the weather app makes a lot of sense from a corporate politics point of view.

A 1mb weather app would have a significantly less impressive pie chart associated with it come "here are our improvements" presentation.

Also if times get tough and you're told to reduce headcount by 10%, who do you want to get rid of. Sally who knows the USB driver end to end or Todd who wrote the bloated 1gb weather app. (Don't feel bad for Todd, he knew what he was getting himself into.)

A quick search suggests that the most expensive education in the world is something like $100k.

So like you spend a million times more than that and you still think you're not going to see some results?

Don't the children of the wealthy famously have a tendency to be successful? Or have I badly misinterpreted the last several thousand years of human history.

To really drill down into that I would think you would need to figure out how many millionair children get tutored vs how many get spoiled.

I couldn't do any of those, but then ~$10k of education later I was able to accomplish one of those things.

I think LLMs are really impressive, but I suspect that we might have overpaid just a bit.

I would be willing to bet that any human for which we spend $100billion - $3 trillion (depending if you want to count single corporations or global totals) on in an attempt to make them as capable as possible would be able to reach all of those levels.

To be sure I don't like the phrase. But more importantly I also don't like the outcomes when improper abstractions are setup and vital details ignored.

Clearly I misspoke. But it looks like you've got the gist of what I was trying to say.

I don't believe that AI is the 'higher level of abstraction[1]' that it is often claimed to be. However I wonder if it's possible to work with a codebase when other developers are treating AI as a higher level of abstraction.

Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler?

[1] - Do higher levels of abstractions even exist? By my way of thinking that's called not an abstraction. C isn't a higher level of abstraction; it's a different abstraction implemented by assembly. There are more powerful abstractions and more ergonomic abstractions, but that doesn't make them 'higher level'.

Meanwhile I'm sure there's people out there baffled that anyone finds dwarf fortress challenging to get into.

I'm old enough that I've had the pleasure of handholding software engineers through their first anonymous function usage. Effect system, refinement types, totality checker? The best I get is blank stares before they go back to C# and JavaScript. These days I'm just glad they tolerate linq expressions and typescript.

It matters where you're standing for what feels incomprehensible. But then again, you can say the same thing about dwarf fortress.

Fearmonger? Me? Well I never.

Also

> if you've worked with other proof oriented languages.

That's doing a lot of heavy lifting.

To borrow your video game analogy. F* is the dwarf fortress of programming languages. Screenshots are only going to confuse anyone who isn't ready to take a significant mental journey.

It has to be done by next week.

Here it is. It is done.

Great, now we put it on a shelf and ignore it for 6 months.

From my perspective, every time.

Edit: the last time this happened to me, they later revealed that it was going to be shelved for a year.

Today we see someone being arrested because they used a software feature. Next year we'll see someone being arrested because they played a cutesy trick and got the LEO to enter in the self destruct code.

The engineers and techies involved have so far shown themselves to have poor intuition for understanding how the law is going to react. I think it behooves anyone still listening to their advice to also check in with someone who has a good intuition for how the law will react to this new idea.

This is an interesting idea, but was that GrapheneOS person a lawyer giving legal advice?

At least for me, the technical chops to be able to program a computer was always just table stakes for software engineering.

The majority of my job more or less reduces to mitigating the consequences of having all the stakeholders dreams come true. Most normal people consider rules as run by people. They expect them to ignore rules that don't make sense, apply rule of thumb, get the gist, and do what it takes to achieve success.

When you take these sorts of rules and try to put them into silicon, the end result is often an undesirable result despite all the rules being successful implemented.

The law are these sorts of rules. They're designed to be "executed" by people using judgement. Part of the reason why the law works is specifically because we don't have a bunch of computers watching everyone all the time. Secure in your person and papers is literally right there in the constitution. Like they didn't know about computer surveillance when they added that amendment but they knew that without privacy the law doesn't work as intended.

Which seems a bit off to me. Can they even ipo right now due to the apple business?

Although I don't think you're wrong. The number of "organic" social media posts I've seen in the past few weeks of the form: 'Wow, Anthropic users are ugly losers...nothing like those handsome openai tiger blood winner sages' is simply too high in my mind for anything other than an ipo prelude.

[Also are altman and musk really fighting on x? Like, that's got to be a sign of some sort of internal stressors right?]

This isn't a great comparison.

Im not that familiar with elixir, but erlang is hands down the best dynamic language to build systems in. It feels like they made only right decisions. I can only assume that elixir has made improvements on that.

Meanwhile java and kotlin have the least useful types I've encountered in my career. Scala has some pretty powerful stuff, but it's like the c++ of powerful types. The ergonomics aren't great. Finally, typescript has a lot of impressive typing constructs but it really falls down on the runtime side (because javascript).

The real comparison to make would be erlang/elixir vs rust or ocaml.

My first web search (data blades) turned up harbor freight woodworking tools.

Then I made a second web search: data blades database.

That turned up some ibm database software module technology which I assume is what's being discussed.

I created a personal philosophy of code awfulness because back in 2012 I worked in a code base that was so bad it completely baffled all my attempts to categorize it.

This and thus is why code is bad. Oh wait a second. They're doing something terrible that's completely orthogonal to the sum total of awfulness encounter so far.

The best (worst?) one was a demonstration mode that the product had. Functions would call functions, one after the other until like 50 calls deep you would wind up where you started. Why didn't the stack blow up? Because they would at seemingly random launch a new thread and abandon the existing stack. This was the main loop.

Simply describing the mess was enough to convince the client to let us rewrite the feature wholesale.

Anyway the point is the same as yours. Slop code is a thing long before our current scenario.

Okay ..

However given the history of mathematics that's not really out of order. There's a lot of mysticism intertwined with early mathematics and it's only relatively recently that mathematics has taken the beads out of her hair, put on a business suit, and gotten to work.

I mean even Galileo's, the patron saint of skepticism, job was observing the stars so that he could write horoscopes.

And we see the attitude repeated even today. I work in a technical field and whenever I mention that I think type theory is kind of cool the response more often then not is for them to give me the ol' "Thank goodness for people like you, I'm just not a math person."

The way I look at it, the absurd complexity that rule systems can get into is a check and punishment for the arrogant and the tyrannical. 'Look I designed these rules myself just follow them and everything will be fine.' Ah but what about this edge case. 'Hm, I guess we can add a few more rules.' Bam, next thing you know it's a Byzantine bureaucratic nightmare any your empire refuses to grow anymore.

Meanwhile, if you put honorable people in charge and trust them to do the right thing, they can figure things out ad hoc.

Unfortunately, mathematics suffers as a bystander. But the good news is that the muggles will always want to keep the eggheads around because they would rather die than think about the negative consequences of having their dreams come true exactly like they wanted.

Cheaper is skipping a step.

Code duplication and 'wrong' abstractions both count themselves amongst the other foibles of programming. But they don't directly produce a cost which can be cheap or expensive.

They produce some other high dimensional intermediate value which can then produce highly variable cost dependent on the domain, goals, and scenario.

As ever, it depends.

The depends is quantifiable, but it doesn't fit in a blog post. Think more along the lines of war and peace.

No it's not.

Also read the link. This is apache 2 licensed. Even in whatever imaginary world where there is such a social contract, there is thankfully a legal contract that includes disclaimer of warranty.

Chimp isn't, but at the end of freeze frame Sunday addresses one who she thinks is. [Not sure if that was the original intent in this thread, though]

> AI is completely different.

Okay?

> existential angst

I don't know, maybe there's just too many juniors on social media posing as senors spreading existential angst? I mean if GC was introduced in a time where there was an engagement AI spreading dread far and wide then I suspect we could have had the same thing.

I certainly wish people would be less sad, but I'm not sure that means that things are meaningfully different on a technical level.

It is?

Covid overhiring, no more 0% interest rates, that one accounting change, and companies needing a "growth" sounding way to announce layoffs. Maybe that's bringing actual layoffs in the name of AI?

This here.

Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again.

The 90s and 00s had this wave of "object oriented programming changes everything". Hey we're doing this thing that's been done successfully 100s of times before, but now it's OO. Writing some code in involving an airplane? Just purchase this omni-airplane object that does everything for airplanes (an actual thing I was told in college).

That's weird OO isn't the be all end all? Code gen, get this Ruby on rails running. Look at me building this website in two seconds. Code gen everywhere.

Huh, that's going to a funny place... TDD. If you aren't TDDing then you're such a bad engineer that you should be locked in prison (real conversation I observed). Oh wait, not TDD, BDD. That fixes it.

Lean, no Agile, no agile like with a small a ... but it was first, no scrum, no xml wait that was last decade, json, and finally SAFe.

Hey, have you seen this chat bot thingy?

Every iteration brings good stuff if you're paying attention. But it also brings a lot of hype and anxiety. Experiment and learn.

The one thing that's remained constant for me is that nearly everyone would rather die than to think carefully about the consequences of their dreams coming true. And as long as that remains true they'll continue to pay for someone else to ride the hype dragon on their behalf.