Honest question, what are the advantages of an integrated system? These three things are kind of the whole game for me, but I also don't have a very sophisticated taste when it comes to cars.
3,936 karma · joined April 24, 2010
Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.
"Be wowed by the convenience and speed", or merely "take advantage of the mere availability"? What most people find to be damning about expert advice is that they simply can't get it anywhere, at any cost that they can afford.
What makes this intuitive? The foundation of the asker’s question is that it seems intuitive that kinetic energy would increase linearly with speed, but that turns out to be wrong.
I feel like the whole point of all the experimentation with AI right now is determining whether any of these things actually matter to the end result, over various timeframes.
In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.
A) a newly-receptive audience - engineers who have discovered that they very much enjoy and appreciate the tradeoff of proximity to the code for amplified velocity and impact, now that it's possible to achieve without being a manager of messy human teams.
B) an ecosystem in which it's grown nearly impossible to connect a functional description of something to how much bespoke construction and effort was involved, partially because of marketing and partially because of how much software already exists to be built on top of. It's impossible to tell from a few paragraphs of functional description whether something was built in a weekend or took a team 4 years to ship, so volume of code is the natural fallback for describing complexity.
> So I think partly it's an ego defence mechanism.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that it’s a folk belief, or that it has to do with ego.
I don’t think anyone truly believes “the user doesn’t care” is sufficient justification for anything. It’s about accountability. “The user doesn’t care” is shorthand for “On this team, we’re held accountable for not delivering, not for the results of decisions that only materialize a month or two down the road. We don’t pay attention to how we got to where we are, we fight fires as they pop up.”
--force-with-lease exists for the scenario where you are sure, but wrong.
I think of it like a power thesaurus. Thesauruses get a bad rap for people just using them to look for ten-dollar words, but they're super useful for finding ways to articulate things differently, which can sometimes lead to bigger insights or ideas about restructuring the content.
It's on the author to look at what's suggested by the LLM and decide whether or not to use it, and there's an inherent danger in having one's voice overridden by simply accepting too many of the recommendations as-is. But that's between the author and the tool. I won't make any comment here on the article author's prose or how they maybe did or didn't use LLMs.
It's because it's a pretty safe bet that the prompt either implicitly or explicitly says "I don't really care," and the act of using AI to generate the response is almost entirely an effort to conceal that.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I would also argue that there's art in a lot of that output, in the form of intent, decision making and communication. But I admit that the value of those really depends on the eye of the beholder and the situation.
The water doesn't actually travel through the handle, and the handle is not connected to the spout, they just visually align.
Yes, yes, thank you, sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
The industry and overall developer ecosystem has become absolutely mesmerized by the act of creating and popularizing little bits of protocol and machinery to dress up the act of inserting text into the machine. Yes, they're useful and provide some consistency, but I'm convinced that the main reason people like them so much is because they put a thin "I'm still a programmer wielding complicated tools that laypeople don't understand" coating over the fact that we're all just asking the AI nicely to do a thing.
EDIT: whoa, I used "way of the future" as a reference to Howard Hughes in "The Aviator", not this Way of the Future religious organization thing I just stumbled on; no intended reference there.
One of my strongest-held opinions is that children need to be taught, explicitly and by example, that there is nothing you see on the screen that simply "comes with" the computer, and that of all the fascinating/distracting/useful things on the web, none of it just "appeared." It is all the result of people making creative decisions and doing creative, technical, intellectual work to bring ideas to life.
Lots of stimulating books and messaging for children focus on how things in society and in the physical world come to be. Holes are dug, resources are gathered and processed, smart people create complex things including machines that create even more complex things. People perform hard labor to achieve amazing things. People gather, form consensus, and create social structures and government. People have ideas and create art. People observe problems and create solutions.
Children internalize this messaging and develop an appreciation and understanding of how effort, creativity and intelligence result in amazing things that make everyone's lives better, but (in my opinion) that messaging was never sufficiently updated to ensure that that appreciation and understanding extends to software, which increasingly runs our world. We don't put enough effort into showing children that their favorite games, all the stuff in all the menus on our phones, all the software they use to learn or communicate or play, all of it is made by people who had ideas, made design decisions, and then made them real through accumulated wisdom and great intellectual effort.
Not every kid needs to "learn to code", but they should all learn that everything they look at and tap on their screens was made by people who did, and who wanted to make things to solve problems and make life better.
It's unfortunate that the rise of AI slop has complicated this message; that's all I'll say about that.
> I'd prefer
This is exactly my point. To some people, direct communication, especially "no", is extremely rude. To some people, a head bob (easily confused for a "yes" in other cultures) merely means acknowledgement, or "maybe". To some people, extended silence indicates deep consideration or respect.
Globalization resulted in a need to tolerate these differences, and in my experience, trying to "fix" them is considered rude (I suppose that's also a cultural norm!). I just think it's interesting to observe that there is such immediate intolerance of this new behavior. Of course I understand it, and I don't even entirely disagree, I just think it's worth reflecting on, there are probably so many ways of considering it.
In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."
For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem.
Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.