618 karma · joined November 9, 2020
Planning on being out a full day under the summer sun as a very pale north European? Slob on all the sunscreen that you can and hide in the shade when possible.
A day out in mid September / mid March when the sun is not looking to murder you? Revel in it. Soak it up. Be a plant.
A missing fringe feature won't drive fans of the eco system away.
I've been at a company that mandated innovation by having a mandatory annual innovation day, and full productivity for the rest of the year. "Be innovative for 8 hours, damn it!". That never worked. Not once. Never ever. Innovation was limited to evolution, and evolution was so slow that our customers had started implementing what we provided in house instead. Stagnation, as you call it.
I've also been at a company where people got... bored (didn't have enough to do). A guy single handedly re-wrote the firmware for a neat little hardware box that ended up saving the company an absolute ridiculous amount of money as they no longer needed to buy another much, much more expensive proprietary box.
So in my opinion having bored engineers around could very well be a sign of great success.
Do you trust yourself enough to not break existing code while maintaining or adding features to it? What would be the consequence of you screwing up? Where would your screw up get noticed? Is it a scary person or group of people who will chase you down to fix it?
I've worked long enough to not trust myself at all anymore, regardless if it's old code or new. Then I evaluate according to above. Usually I land firmly in "yeah, better test it"-territory.
Usually what complainers complain about has nothing to do with why they are unhappy. Way too often frustration with people is pointed at circumstance rather than trying to productively sort out the conflicts between the individuals.
And here is where management usually fails. A person complains about unrealistic time plans or how crappy a product will be, so management jumps into action and invent over elaborate processes around securing deadlines and quality, rather than splitting up the dysfunctional team that can't / refuses to cooperate and therefore is always late and produces sub-par quality. And the team will still be late and produce bad quality, and the complainers will still complain.
It’s like any other tool. If I wanted to chop wood and noticed how my axe had gone dull, the likelihood of me going “ah f*ck it” and instead go fishing increases dramatically. I want to chop wood. I don’t want to go to the neighbor and borrow his axe, or sharpen my axe and then chop wood.
That’s what has happened with ChatGPT in a sense - it has gone dull. I know it used to work “better” and the way that it works now doesn’t resonate with me in the same way, so I’m less likely to pursue work that I would want to use ChatGPT as an extrinsic motivator for.
Of course if the intrinsic motivation is large enough I wouldn’t let a tool make the decision for me. If it’s mid October and the temperature is barely above freezing and I have no wood, I’ll gnaw through it with my teeth if necessary. I’ll go full beaver. But in early September when it’s 25C outside on a Friday? If the axe isn’t perfect, I’ll have a beer and go fishing.
If my potato peeler told me "Why bother? Order pizza instead." I'd be obese.
An LLM can directly influence your willingness to pursue an idea by how it responds to it. Interest and excitement, even if simulated, is more likely to make you pursue the idea than "ok cool".
I get it - we don't want LLMs to be reinforces of bad ideas, but sometimes you need a little positivity to get past a mental barrier and do something that you want to do, even if what you want to do logically doesn't make much sense.
An "ok cool" answer is PERFECT for me to decide not to code something stupid (and learn something useful), and instead go and play video games (and learn nothing).
Microtransactions were supposed to finance free to play or "live service" games where they paid for new content over several years, but (of course) they've found themselves into what's solidly not... that.
If you're not and they're still allowing your planes to fly through their airspace then this is a great way to ensure that they lock your (and your friends') planes out.
It used to be that the poor performers (dangerous hip-shootin' code commitin' cowpokes) were limited in the amount of code that they could produce per time unit, leaving enough time for others to correct course. Now the cowpokes are producing ridiculous amount of code that you just can't keep up with.
But I guess the real bug and its outcome was more in line with the (often disappointing) reality that we all share.
There's a reason why projects like Homebrew exist for Mac.
But I wouldn't compare the experience to a Mac Mini, and I wouldn't call a raspberry pi a "consumer computer". It solidly falls into the amateur dev board category. Heck, it doesn't even have a power button.
I'm an engineer through and through. I can ask an LLM to generate images just fine, but for a given target audience for a certain purpose? I would have no clue. None what so ever. Ask me to generate an image to use in advertisement for Nuka Cola, targeting tired parents? I genuinely have no idea of where to even start. I have absolutely no understanding of the advertisement domain, and I don't know what tired parents find visually pleasing, or what they would "vibe" with.
My feeble attempts would be absolute trash compared to a professional artist who uses AI to express their vision. The artist would be able to prompt so much more effectively and correct the things that they know from experience will not work.
It's the exact same as with coding with an AI - it will be trash unless you understand the hows and the whys.
What LLMs are good at and their main value I'd argue, is nudging you along and removing the need to implement things that "just take time".
Like some days back I needed to construct a string with some information for a log entry, and the LLM that we have suggested a solution that was both elegant and provided a nicer formatted string than what I had in mind. Instead of spending 10-15 minutes on it, I spent 30 seconds and got something that was nicer than what I would have done.
It's these little things that add up and create value, in my opinion.
The older I get, the less I care about career progression and the more I allow myself to just use code to explore thoughts or ideas.
It doesn't matter if you communicate with a compiler or an LLM - you still need to express your thoughts and ideas with no ambiguity for it to produce the wanted behavior. What makes "vibe coding" with an LLM both easier and more challenging at the same time is that is will guess what you mean and give you results that "kind of " work even when you express yourself unclearly. For someone who can code, the "kind of work" results can be used as a starting point to evolve into something useful. For someone who can't code, it's an inevitable dead end.
I find that those who struggle with programming have the exact same type of struggles when trying to do it with LLMs - no structured plan on how to approach a problem and difficulties to understand the context in which they are working.
I guess hobby robotics, for example, could get you an entry to it if you choose to write the hardware interfacing parts yourself.
Technically it was interesting and challenging, but in terms of stress just not worth it. You could pay me twice my current salary and I still would not go back to it. Now I try to place myself as far away from paying customers as technically possible.
Wait long enough and there will be situations where you did something in the past that works really well, but you can't remember anymore what you did or why you did it. An AI doesn't really help you then.
If you're silent with the intent of remaining hidden, then that behavior must have been learned. Either you evolved from a prey type of species, or a non-apex predator.
It would be strange of humanity is the only apex-ish predator intelligent-ish life form in the universe that blasts signals into space without consideration of who might hear them.
I currently AI-coma / tab-complete C++17 with decent results for stuff ridiculously far away from frontend, but I do wonder who is providing the training data for C++23 and onwards as there isn't wide adaptation yet.
On a somewhat related note, due to a head injury I suffered now many years ago, I started developing small-ish blind spots "once in a while" that remain anywhere from a few minutes up to a few months.
The spots are very noticeable when they first appear, grabbing the attention all the time. The ones that persist long tend to "disappear" when my brain filters out the broken (?) signal of where the blind spot appeared, and the spot mainly becomes noticeable again if it hides or interrupts a known pattern that I'm looking at.
It's as if the brain fills the spot with the average color around it (blue sky - blue spot, white wall - white spot etc), which works well for single color surfaces and such but not great for repeating and predictable patterns. And the hiding "lags" which means if I quickly shift between colors then the spot will momentarily be visible as the old color shows up on the new color.
So the brain does "imagine" things, but when it does, it isn't perfect.