whyowhy3484939

Very strange if you ask me and disturbing. I don't know if I'd let such a dev touch a database. Of course nowadays we just vibe code and YOLO everything, but still. This is making me feel old.

I'm shocked, shocked to find out capitalism's tricks are going on here.

Yet we keep praying at its altars. Delta are just playing the game. It might not be the nicest thing to do, but it is honest at least. All entrepreneurs are pounding their collective fists on their skulls to think of ways to extract as much value from the market as possible. Let's blame the game instead of the players.

That's assuming there is a substrate that can be disturbed. That's where the parent's analogy breaks down.

As an example of an alternative analogy: think of how many bombs need to explode in your dreams before the "substrate" is "rippled". How big do the bombs need to be? How fast does the "matter" have to "move"? I think "reality" is more along those lines. If there is a substrate - and that's a big if - IMO it's more likely to be something pliable like "consciousness". Not in the least "disturbed" by anything moving in it.

Ah, I met my match it seems.

I confess I might be showing signs of unlawful thought patterns. I will correct that, fellowniusmonk. Thanks for pointing that out.

I am in the "code is not an asset, it's a liability"-camp and our recently acquired ability to swiftly defecate metric tons of it is not something I am particularly thrilled about. In fact, I find "senior" engineers using LoC as a productivity metric highly suspect - at best. I thought we passed that phase a decade or two ago. Not saying you are one, but in the spirit of talking past each other I thought it prudent to put up a good straw man.

All in all to be completely honest I find it hard to parse your original point so I concur I wasn't engaging properly. To be fair you opened with "in terms of code output" so that's what triggered me I guess.

Once they start making deals with the relevant organizations, book rooms, handle insurance, replacement hotels, etc, then they'll replace travel agents. These guys don't just Google a bunch of tickets you know.

There is this interesting thing called the Paradox of Automation where increasing automation increases the importance of human intervention. We are trying this out on a societal level. It will be.. interesting, to say the least.

Also, congratulations on becoming a team. I sure hope you have the mental bandwidth to check all that output carefully. If so, doubly congrats, because you might be the smartest human that ever lived.

I realize I came across as harsh and I surely don't want to judge you personally on your skills as A) that's not necessary for my point to make sense and B) uncalled for. I'm sure you are a capable C developer and I'm sorry for being an asshole - but I am one so it's hard for me to pretend otherwise...

Being able to program in C is something I can also do, but it sure as heck does not make me proficient Rust developer if I cobble some shit from a LLM together and call it a day.

I can appreciate how "businesses" think this is a valuable, but - and this is often forgotten by salaried developers - as I am not a business owner I have neither the position nor the intention of doing any "business". I am in a position to do "engineering". Business is for someone else to worry about. Shipping "valuable features" is not something I care about. Shipping working and correct features is something I worry about. Perhaps modern developers should call themselves business analysts or something if they wish to stop engineering.

LLMs are souped up Stack Overflows and I can't believe my ears if I hear a fellow developer say someone on Stack Overflow ported some of their code to Rust on request and that this feature of SO now makes them a proficient Rust developer because they can vaguely follow the code and can now "ship" valuable features.

This is like being able to vaguely follow Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which is something any amateur can do, compared to being able to engage with it academically and rigorously. I deeply worry about the competence of the next generation - and thus my own safety - if they believe superficial understanding is equivalent to deep mastery.

Edit: interesting side note: I am writing this as a dyed in the wool generalist. Now ain't that something? I don't care if expertise dies off professionally, because I never was an "expert" in something. I always like using whatever works and all systems more or less feel equal to me yet I can also tell that this approach is deeply flawed. In many important ways deep mastery really matters and I was hoping the rest of society would keep that up and now they are all becoming generalists who don't know shit and it worries me..

You did not and you are not proficient. LLMs and AI in general cater to your insecurities. An actual good human mentor will wipe the floor with your arrogance and you'll be better for it.

Yes, this is definitely missing a /s, I hope.

Please for the love of god tell me this is a joke.

I'm nearing forty and I have a sneaky suspicion it's a weird cultural thing. A bit like the Romans lamenting the fall of their culture right at the start of their golden age and they never stopped doing that. Always looking back saying shit sucks now and how in the old days everything centered on competence and morality. Men were actual men back then. That sort of thing. Some parts of it might have made a tad kind of sense, but a lot of it was baloney.

I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that. There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.

I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk with some fresh ideas.

By experiencing the sheer existential horror that Nietzsche and others spoke of and coming out of it knowing the only way out is through. There is nothing to lean on. You decide you start caring and it will happen.

I think this is reasonable. Came to the same conclusion. I need to at least pretend to myself that I care, but I will not allow it to bleed into my PL. If it does I check out and chill for a bit.

I find there is middle ground between "who the fuck cares" and "I got to fight for what is righteous". Do the job best you can. Accept resources, including skilled human beings, are what they are and unless you own the place there is very little you can do about it. Try to do the best work you can with the resources you are given is all I can say. It does give pleasure to at least try to do a good job.

Yes, I am saying you should be cleaning the decks of the Titanic with all the care you can muster but without being obsessive or neurotic about it. Don't do it for the Titanic, don't do it for all the people who are about to die. Just do it for you.

Notice I included interaction with people, but you're right. I think just using books is about equal to just using apps. Both won't get you there but books will get you further along the way.

False.

Those are all things books will give and people as well and often better.

Can it be a tutor? Sure, if you squint. But "tutoring" you on some question you have is not the same as "learning a language".

That's bad news for the millions that had to do just that and learned fine in fact better. I'm not saying you should read the Upanishads in the original, I'm saying a proper intro textbook is fine and some teacher-figure ("human") to actually use your body and read theirs.

Heck, Latin even has a Latin-only method: LLPSI. "Roma in Italia est", you'll figure it out quickly enough.

The heavy, thick irony of these people running their own platform on as little technology as possible and depending heavily on human input.

It's like they know somewhere deep inside that "mo tech" is not helping anyone.

Oh, right. I think whatever works best for your personality but in general doing some exercises and/or interacting with people has been working for a couple .. ten thousands years at least. Hard to go wrong. I never heard someone make the believable claim that they interacted with too many people and it hampered their language learning.

My take is that basically anything can be made to work if you are properly motivated. Tech is - at best - a secondary concern.

What introductory German class does not use books and does not talk to people?

> Thoughts?

On what? If I understand you correctly you learned through people and practice and community.

Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago.

This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Claude". I suggest we really, really get our acts together and stop trusting tech to solve our non-tech problems.[2]

“It is actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” [3]

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad...

[2] https://archive.is/zCxBl (The Atlantic: the elite college students who can't read books)

[3] https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 (Financial Times: are we becoming a post-literate society?)

LLMs cannot "teach you a language". They make for cool demos to show off. They can perhaps be a building block of a proper language learning experience.

Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.

> My sisters played around with Dall-E and are now able to do simiiliar things.

This is no way shape or form in any actual productive way similar to being skilled at Photoshop. There is absolutely no way these people can mask, crop, tweak color precisely, etc. There are hundreds of these sub-tasks. It's not just "making cool images". No amount of LLMing will make you skilled and no amount of delegation will make you able to ask these specific questions in a skillful way to the LLM.

There is a very real fundamental problem here. To be able to state the right questions you have to have a base of competence that ya'll are so happy about throwing into the wind. The next generation will not even know what a "mask" is, let alone ask an LLM for details. Education is dropping worldwide and these things are not going to help. They are going to accelerate this bullshit.

> liberating knowledge through accessability

Because the thing is, availability of knowledge never was the issue. The existence of ridiculous amounts of copyright free educational material and the hundreds of gigs of books on Project Gutenberg are testament to that.

Even in my youth (90s) there were plenty of books and easy to access resources to learn, say, calculus. Did I peruse them? Hell no. Did my friends? You bet your ass they were busy wasting time doing bullshit as well. Let's just be honest about this.

These problems are not technical and no amount of technology is going to solve them. If anything, it'll make things worse. Good education is everything, focus on that. Drop the AI bullshit, drop the tech bullshit. Read books, solve problems. Focus on good teachers.

You can read in Kernighans History of Unix that really good managers - "enlightened management" IIRC - were involved and not just involved, some of them were absolutely crucial or Unix won't have existed. It's not like you can just let loose a couple of big brains and things will work out fine. They won't (and didn't).

> We finally have a system which encodes not just basic things but high level concepts

That's the thing I'm trying to convey: it's in fact not encoding anything you'll recognize and if it is, it's certainly not "concepts" as you understand them. Not saying it cannot correlate text that includes what you call "high level concepts" or do what you imagine to be useful work in that general direction. Again not making claims it's not useful, just saying that it becomes kind of meh once you factor in all costs and not just the hypothetical imaginary future productivity gains. AKA building literal nuclear reactors to do something that basically amounts to filling in React templates or whatever BS needs doing.

If it was reasoning it could start with a small set of bootstrap data and infer/deduce the rest from experience. It cannot. We are not even close as in there is not even theory to get us there forget about the engineering. It's not a subtle issue. We need to throw literally all data we have at it to get it to acceptable levels. At some point you have to retrace some steps and think over some decisions, but I guess I'm a skeptic.

In short it's a correlation engine which, again, is very useful and will go ways to improve our lives somewhat - I hope - but I'm not holding my breath for anything more. A lot of correlation does not causation make. No reasoning can take place until you establish ontology, causality and the whole shebang.

I get the idea, but I'm not quite sold on it. Being intelligent on vast scales is something an individual cannot do, but I'm not sure the "species" is more intelligent than any individual agent. I'm actually a bit more sure of the opposite. It's like LLM agents where just adding more doesn't improve the quality it just introduces more room for bullshit.

To allocate capital on vast scales and make decisions on industry etc, sure, that's a level of intelligence quite beyond any one of us but this feels like cheating the definition of intelligence. It's not the quantity of it that matters, it's the quality. It's like flying I guess. A large bird and a small bird are both flying and the big bird is not doing "more" of it. A group of birds is doing something an individual is incapable of (forming a swarm), sure, but it's not an improvement on flying. It's just something else. That something else can be useful, but I don't particularly like applying that same move to "intelligence".

If the species was so goddamn intelligent it could solve unreasonable IQ tests and it cannot. If we want to solve something really, really hard we use Edward Witten not "the species". That's because there is no "species", there is only a bunch of individuals and if they all score bad, the aggregate will score bad as well. We just coast because a bunch of us are extraordinarily clever.

> Just last week i asked for a script to do image segmentation with a basic UI and claude just generated that for me in under 1 Minute.

Thing is we just see that it's copy pasting stack overflow, but now in a fancy way so this is sounding like "I asked Google for a nearby restaurant and it found it in like 500ms, my C64 couldn't do that". It sounds impressive (and it is) because it sounds like "it learned about navigating in the real world and it can now solve everything related to that" but what it actually solved is "fancy lookup in a GIS database". It's useful, damn sure it is, but once the novelty wears off you start seeing it for what it is instead of what you imagine it is.

Edit: to drive the point home.

> claude just generated that

What you think happened is AI is "thinking" and building a ontology over which it reasoned and came to the logical conclusion that this script was the right output. What actually happened is your input correlates to this output according to the trillion examples it saw. There is no ontology. There is no reasoning. There is nothing. Of course this is still impressive and useful as hell, but the novelty will wear off in time. The limitations are obvious by this point.

It's high paying?

It's actually not. My job description does not say "deliver value" and nobody talks about my work like that so I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

> without sacrificing quality

Right..

> it's your responsibility to use that tool

Again, it's actually not. It's my responsibility to do my job, not to make my boss' - or his boss' - car nicer. I know that's what we all know will create "job security" but let's not conflate these things. My job is to do my end of the bargain. My boss' job is paying me for doing that. If he deems it necessary to force me to use AI bullshit, I will of course, but it is definitely not my responsibility to do so autonomously.

> build much larger castles, much faster

See that never was the purpose.. going bigger and faster, towards what exactly? Chaos? By the way we never managed to fully tackle manual software development by trained professionals and we now expect Shangri-La by throwing everything and the kitchen sink into giant inscrutable matrices. This time by amateurs as well. I'm sure this will all turn out very well and very, very productive.