jordwest

For me the biggest gaps in LLM code are:

- it adds superfluous logic that is assumed but isn’t necessary

- as a result the code is more complex, verbose, harder to follow

- it doesn’t quite match the domain because it makes a bunch of assumptions that aren’t true in this particular domain

They’re things that can often be missed in a first pass look at the code but end up adding a lot of accidental complexity that bites you later.

When reading an unfamiliar code base we tend to assume that a certain bit of logic is there for a good reason, and that helps you understand what the system is trying to do. With generative codebases we can’t really assume that anymore unless the code has been thoroughly audited/reviewed/rewritten, at which point I find it’s easier to just write the code myself.

> it’d be wasteful for evolution to only use the brain for computation

Even what we consciously experience as the brain is really only a tiny part of the brain.

The little language centre and the capacity to imagine are only a tiny subset of a multitude of brain functions and yet we believe that those two functions make up “me”. Actually it’s just those two functions telling a story that they are me.

A common trick is that the first click on the X will go to the ad, but if you return and click the X again it will close, gaslighting you into thinking you just misclicked the first time.

Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad

> Every previous job I've had has a similar pattern. The engineer is not supposed to engage directly with the customer.

Chiming in to say I’ve experienced the same.

A coworker who became a good friend ended up on a PIP and subsequently fired for “not performing” soon after he helped build a non technical team a small tool that really helped them do their job quicker. He wasn’t doing exactly as he was told and I guess that’s considered not performing.

Coincidentally the person who pushed for him to be fired was an ex-Google middle manager.

I’ve also seen so commonly this weird stigma around engineers as if we’re considered a bit unintelligent when it comes to what users want.

Maybe there is something to higher ups having some more knowledge of the business processes and the bigger picture, but I’m not convinced that it isn’t also largely because of insecurity and power issues.

If you do something successful that your manager didn’t think of and your manager is insecure about their own abilities, good chance they’ll feel threatened.

> but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs

But if they don’t use web tech it would be too expensive to build the start menu in a way that works cross platform!

Oh wait

Don't get me wrong, I don't think humans are inherently evil. In fact in times of crisis (like the one you mention) we do tend to come together and I think that's evidence that the belief is incorrect.

I just had a discussion the other day with somebody who outright told me that they think humans are inherently evil and must be managed under a system to keep in order. I don't think it's an uncommon belief and nor do I think it's a bleak world because that belief exists, it's just a mistaken belief.

I would argue that you see the belief raise its head far more when people are interacting with others who they don't consider in their "in-group".

> - this argument may well be stuck in the collective unconscious of lots of people (albeit in the religious context)

Another example of such a belief is that "humans are inherently evil" which seems to have been planted in Western society by the concept of original sin. Interestingly the idea that sin was about our inherent badness didn't really arise until the struggle against Gnosticism [1] hundreds of years after Jesus died.

Now the belief is pervasive in secular society thanks to stories like "Lord of the Flies".

It's fascinating how even though we can call ourselves non religious we can still carry these beliefs around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

Same, I think there's an idealistic belief in people who write those tickets that something can be perfectly specified upfront.

Maybe for the most mundane, repetitive tasks that's true.

But I'd argue that the code is the full specification, so if you're going to fully specify it you might as well just write the code and then you'll actually have to be confronted with your mistaken assumptions.

I first saw this about 15 years ago and it had a profound impact on me. It's stuck with me ever since

"Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts."

Spoken 85 years ago and even more relevant today

I like this future, the Meta-verse has found its target market

> I suspect the wealthy think they can shield themselves by exerting control over

Agreed and I think this is a result of a naive belief that we humans tend to have that controlling thoughts can control reality. Politicians still live by this belief but eventually reality and lived experience does catch up. By that time all trust is long gone.

True, in terms of share of the pie for sure

Yeah I know it's an unrealistic ideal but it's fun to think about.

That said my theory about power and privilege is that it's actually just a symptom of a deep fear of death. The reason gaining more money/power/status never lets up is because there's no amount of money/power/status that can satiate that fear, but somehow naively there's a belief that it can. I wouldn't be surprised if most people who have any amount of wealth has a terrible fear of losing it all, and to somebody whose identity is tied to that wealth, that's as good as death.

I think the idea of dollars as purely a trading medium where absolute prices don't matter wouldn't be such an issue if wages weren't always the last thing to rise with inflation.

As it is now anyone with assets is only barely affected by inflation while those who earn a living from wages have their livelihood eroded over time covertly.

It would be kinda funny if not so tragic how economists will argue both "[productive improvement] will make things cheaper" and then in the next breath "deflation is bad and must be avoided at all costs"

Yeah, from the perspective of the ultra-wealthy us humans are already pretty worthless and they'll be glad to get rid of us.

But from the perspective of a human being, an animal, and the environment that needs love, connection, mutual generosity and care, another human being who can provide those is priceless.

I propose we break away and create our own new economy and the ultra-wealthy can stay in their fully optimised machine dominated bunkers.

Sure maybe we'll need to throw a few food rations and bags of youthful blood down there for them every once in a while, but otherwise we could live in an economy that works for humanity instead.

> Perhaps there is some sort of failure of SWE's to understand that businesses don't care

I think it's an engineer's nature to want to improve things and make them better, but then we naively assume that everybody else also wants to improve things.

I know I personally went through a pretty rough disillusionment phase where I realised most of the work I was asked to do wasn't actually to make anything better, but rather to achieve some very specific metrics that actually made everything but that metric worse.

Thanks to the human tendency to fixate on narratives, we can (for a while) trick ourselves into believing a nice story about what we're doing even if it's complete bunk. I think that false narrative is at the core of mission statements and why they intuitively feel fake (mission statement is often more gaslighting than guideline - it's the identity a company wants to present, not the reality it does present).

AI is eager to please and doesn't have to deal with that cognitive dissonance, so it's a metric chaser's dream.

The tendency to push and pull on sensations has significantly fallen away for me, although I wouldn't say it's "gone" I might be able to add something here.

I would agree with Shinzen Young that almost all suffering is caused by this tendency. Not pain or emotional states, but certainly the suffering associated with them.

> I don’t think tanha has 1000 contributing factors; I think it has one crisp, isolatable factor.

I think this is a good intuition. I would suggest if you want to get to the root of it you might like to explore it experientially first. Everyone reading this has direct access to this mechanism in subjective experience, without the need for any neuroimaging equipment or meditating for lifetimes in a cave. Additionally, when you see it for what it is, it begins to unwind.

If I were to put it down to one thing, it would be the tendency to reflect on reality and then to believe that that reflection is actually reality. It sounds simple, and it is, but the tendency runs so deep and there are a multitude of beliefs that get in the way of actually seeing things clearly. If you're willing to question every single one of those beliefs right down to the places you never thought to question or that seem scary to question, then it's available to you.

Edit: A great resource for anyone interested in exploring these beliefs is Kevin Schanilec's interpretation of the 10 fetters at simplytheseen.com. Just a word of warning though, explore this only if you're willing to have your perception of reality turned upside down (and not just intellectually).

Thank you for saying this. This drove me up the wall everywhere I worked that had those arbitrary ~300 line rules as all that happened was code review devolved into "I don't like this code pattern, use another code pattern". While the larger architectural ideas that actually became problematic were rarely reviewed since they weren't obvious when split across 5 PRs often with different reviewers.

Honestly I think it would be far more effective to just review a paragraph and maybe a diagram that explains "here's how I think I'm going to tackle this problem" and forget about line-by-line code review entirely. Other than for training juniors, I don't think there's much long term value in "I think you should use an anonymous function here instead of a named function".

The kinds of things that are usually brought up in code review are not what contributes to real long term technical debt, because a function name or code formatting can be changed in an instant, while larger architectural decisions cannot.

The other thing I noticed is that even when an architectural issue is obvious, there's a tendency to not want to change it because so much of the work has already been done in preparing the PR for review. If you point out a flaw in an architectural decision, it's not unusual for the person to reasonably say "I've just put together a chain of 5 PRs and now you're asking me to rewrite everything?"

Daniel Mackler has a whole YouTube channel about this

https://youtu.be/eBRNIvK3HqA

My experience matches very much with this thread. After years of therapy I hit a limit to what conventional psychology could explain or understand or “treat”, and the only thing that worked after that was going deeper into my own psyche with meditation.

The whole psyche is available for exploration when you stop believing that you are made of thoughts. It becomes extremely clear where all the anxiety and depression and addiction comes from, and that almost all conventional approaches merely treat the symptoms.

I also took some intro psych at university and remember that in general Freud’s was sort of accepted by mainstream psych as the de facto most “correct” and logical view of psychotherapy while Jung was considered a bit of a weirdo, and I accepted this at the time. However through my own experiences now I think Jung was much closer to the truth, particularly around what he calls the “shadow”.

I guess there is a convergence of ideas going on here because I've actually been tinkering on something like this, a Notion-database-like that just uses flat CSV files (and internally reads it into an in-memory SQLite for filtering, grouping and displaying) then schema files for interpreting the data and displaying it nicely.

Here's a little demo of what I've got working: https://youtu.be/LCR9pAc_xn0.

It's currently still very rough and I'm just using it myself but hoping to open source it at some point.

I can only speak for myself, but what I discovered internally were a few mechanisms of my mind:

1. A fear of the unknown. The mind tries to construct a knowable future in order to feel safe and prepared. It doesn’t matter how accurate it is, it just chooses what’s comfortable.

2. A desire to fit in, be accepted or loved. If our beliefs are reflected by others, it means we are accepted. If the beliefs are attacked, it’s not just a challenge to a belief system but it’s an attack on me and my validity as a person.

I think both of these seem to combine and play out online as we find groups of people who have acceptable beliefs to us. For some people, total pessimism is actually the comfortable perspective (that was me for sure) and for others maybe a blind optimism makes them feel safe.

When both of these fell away I realised how distorting they had been to my world view and my ability to actually engage with changes.

I could go on with a list of ways I think technology has been good too - the internet allowing people to connect across the world almost for free, less estrangement from other cultures, new artistic mediums and ways to share art with other people, enabling indie writers, artists, and engineers to sell their work to the whole world and make a living from it. Those are things I think most people would be happy to see more of.

I agree though that (particularly in the last decade) tech advancements have been more heavily weighed towards exploitative than helpful.

Ahh perhaps it’s because Japan is such a high trust society. One of the few places where you can typically expect your lost wallet returned with all the cash inside.

Here in Australia, several Coles supermarkets have installed exit gates that track you on camera as you walk through the self checkout area, and if the machine decides you didn’t pay, it will physically close the gate and flash red.

Woolworths also have cameras in front and above each self checkout, and when the machine inevitably decides that the weight of your reusable grocery bag is an attempt to steal something, it will replay the footage from above to the assistant.

I have actually noticed I’m hassled far less by the Aldi self checkouts, they seem to need a lot less operator intervention so I tend to shop there more nowadays.

I love that parable. It stands in such contrast to a world where we all feel a pressure to know what’s right and wrong, how things will go etc. The reality is none of us do.

Great article, I also have no doubt we're in for some serious changes in society. But I disagree with the conclusion. I think the ideal place to be is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but neutral. A conviction that the future is bright isn't enough to actually make the future bright.

I was optimistic when Facebook first came out, and it turned into a dystopian nightmare. I was optimistic when self checkouts appeared, and now I feel like I'm a criminal by default every time I get groceries. I was optimistic about more people being online, and now we all feel like we can't get off it. I've become increasingly cynical about tech because of these and a thousand other disappointments about the utopia that was promised turning into not much more than an efficient means of extracting money from all of us.

I don't think it's ever a good idea to be totally optimistic or pessimistic about a new technology, because then we're liable to ignore anything that goes against our narrative. Really, we don't know, and we can't know what's best for ourselves, usually until it's too late.

I don't share your optimism, I think as long as there are truly great games being made and the developers earning well from them, the business people are going to be looking at them and saying "we could do that". What those studios lack in creativity or passion they more than make up for in marketing, sales, and sometimes manipulative money extraction game mechanics.

I agree for the most part, feeling the anger is a very important step to understanding where it comes from inside and the analogy of it being a guest is a great one. But (and this could just be the limitations of language so we may be saying the same thing) I disagree that expressing anger is always harmful.

I think the conventional idea about anger is that the only way to express it is to shout, yell or worse, physically assault somebody. To me that's just an unhealthy form of expression, that seems to come about due to fear or repression.

Imagine a friend punches you jokingly in the arm every time you see them and you find it uncomfortable. It's unhealthy to scream at them, sure, but IMO it's also unhealthy to just sit there and feel the anger mindfully while continuing to let them do it. The middle way is to tell them assertively to stop it. It doesn't have to be unkind - just like we wouldn't consider a cat unkind when it nips at you for invading its personal space for patting it too much. The cat is using the only expression it has to warn you about its boundaries, but most cats don't go off the rails and start tearing you apart because it was slighted.

Personally I never had a healthy example of anger growing up -- only dysfunctional examples -- so I believed that the conventional expression was the only way to express it. The conventional expression felt scary, so I avoided it at all costs. It took me years to realise that I was so afraid of the emotion and expression of anger that I was even using meditation and mindfulness to continue to repress it.

The more I began to express anger in these healthier ways, the less that heightened state of arousal comes up to the point where it's very rare that anger sticks around for more than a few moments now, and is far less intense in the body.

Yes, narcissism combined with aggression is a dangerous combo.

In my experience though almost every one of these aggressive angry people is quietly ashamed of their anger. They may not even be aware of it themselves, but that shame is what keeps it held together. They can never approach their anger because it feels so deeply to them as if their identity is that aggressive angry person, and so attacking their anger only makes their very identity feel threatened (even if it's not an identity they want). Attacking people is actually a way of protecting themselves.

I've had this experience multiple times in my life with bullies. Somehow trying to understand them even in the face of their anger allows them to relax and let down the offensive (although that of course does not mean letting them cross my boundaries).

People who've learned that form of interacting with other people have almost certainly had difficult lives. That doesn't mean to excuse them and allow them to run riot over everyone else, but the thing is attacking them is counterproductive and only puts up their defenses.

The bully-victim dynamic happens because one person is used to crossing boundaries (even if it feels bad) and the other person is used to allowing their boundaries be crossed (even if it feels bad). The bully explicitly seeks out those who have (through no fault of their own) been taught to allow their boundaries to be crossed. In both cases the mistaken belief is the same - that crossing boundaries is normal.

If you're interested in this more I highly recommend the 2017 documentary The Work:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5836866/

As an anger repressor, I believed anger was a problem that should be set aside at all costs. Now that I'm a lot more in contact with anger, it's clear that that was counterproductive.

Anger has a legitimate biological purpose - that is to set boundaries. Look at any animal [1], if you push their boundaries they will bite, scratch or bark at you. But they will also very quickly let it go once the boundary has been set.

We humans tend to be taught to let our boundaries be pushed, weakened or outright crossed in order to do what others think is right. We are taught to repress our very biological instinct because we are bad, because we believe our primal instincts are just violent. But the body knows that our boundaries are being violated, millions of years of evolution aren't irrelevant. To me, this explains why we hold onto anger so much today and see outbursts of it online.

What we think of as primal instincts to harm people is actually our own repression of our primal instincts. Lord of the Flies is a propaganda film - perhaps even the secularization of original sin. Research has shown time and again that humans left alone in a group tend to work together, not kill each other [2].

When I see people deeply angry at society, at politicians, or at me, I see somebody who has had their boundaries crossed, again and again, and has been taught that they are not allowed to set them. This energy has to go somewhere.

Personally, the more I've allowed my own anger and set personal boundaries, the less angry I am at the world. The less my anger seems to manifest in harmful outbursts. Anger comes, and if expressed, it passes very quickly in a way that may be assertive but that doesn't harm others.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99tkJbKFa4k

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acali