henry_bone

It's simple enough: If you don't use it, you lose it.

The more you have, the more there is to lose and the longer it may take. But skills and knowledge fade, just as easily as fitness, or a tan.

It's an insidious rule too. Insidious in the sense that you may not realise you're not exercising a skill. You may think that your just doing it slightly differently, but you will adapt. In whatever way you made your life easier, that's where you'll pay, in strength, fluency, depth, whatever.

From that link:-

"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."

They are post-modernist, collectivist, marxist. I couldn't get behind that.

That ideology is arguably the most destructive in human history.

With the use of quotes there, you've put those words in my mouth. I didn't say that.

What I am trying to express with the statement you refer to is that zig appeals to me on an aesthetic level. It suits my tastes.

I mentioned liberty because I appreciate that zig allows me to have complete control of memory allocations, and gives me quite a deal of control over the metal. I like this and I like that I don't have to appease a borrow checker. Zig's compiler and type system is strict enough to guide me to correctness, but the experience, broadly, is not so onerous that programming becomes tedious and frustrating.

These qualities, I suspect, resonate with my individualistic tendencies.

I'll bite. The first language I could "just write" in was C. I had internalised the language and its standard lib and didn't need the internet to work with it.

Rust is pushed by many as the replacement to C, because of the memory safety guarantees. I'm sympathetic. I worked with Haskell for a time, so I get it. But Rust seems quite complex. There are so many language features that there's memes about it. There's also the friction and learning curve.

So, for fun, I choose zig because, like C, I can hold most of the language in my head and "just write." I choose zig because it does a great deal to help me write correct and highly performant code. I can use arena allocators and defer and cure my code of many memory issues. Then there's the various language rules around pointers (optionals, slices, etc) that help me write correct code. There's the built in testing and the test allocator. I love that comptime and the build system are not special cases, but rather are just garden variety zig. I love the simplicity and elegance of it all.

I also choose zig because I prefer the liberty it affords me. I am responsible for each and every allocation. It appeals to my libertarian sensiblities.

Yeah, nah. Not so sure about that. I love zig, and I appreciate the rigour, care and thought that goes into the language and it's libs. What Andrew Kelley and the team are doing is excellent work, creating a useful, simple language with which to write efficient, correct programs.

His politics don't matter to me. Hell, if the politics of technologists dictated whether I used their products, I'd have to go live in the wilds, without any tech. :-)

Yeah, I'm aware. MitchellH posts about it quite a bit, most recently about AI "psychosis". Also, much of ghostty was created without the use of AI, I think. More recently, they've been using it to find bugs, improve performance, and generally refine and enhance ghostty and libghostty.

The LLM is the finishing tool, not the architect or core developer.

Yeah, there was a good article on here the other day where the author suggested going slower with AI and using it to help produce higher quality output. I think the idea is to be quite "hands on", coding much in the old way, but to use AI to help with, for example, test coverage, error mode detection and handling, refinement of the solution/feature, etc.

At least that's how I read it. :-) I'm learning that there's a place for the LLM but it's the sandpaper, not the chisel.

Yeah, maybe it's rose coloured glasses on my behalf. Those examples you mentioned, I would 100% agree with. It's some of the best software out there. And yeah, there's probably always been rubbish about.

I guess I hope that the good stuff keeps coming and the dross falls away. More signal, less noise.

It's not particularly revelatory to point out that this project has been generated largely by LLM (claude most likely, given the CLAUDE.md in the repo).

Also looks like a bit of introspection has happened ... https://github.com/duanebester/gooey/blob/main/docs/architec...

I wonder if this is just what we get now: low quality code, expressed rapidly. We are excited by the promise only to be disappointed by the reality of the implementation.

There are still a few new things around that are carefully and thoughtfully developed and put out into the world. zig itself. MitchellH's ghostty. And there's still all the older foundations of really wonderful, robust, software created by people like Linus Torvalds and couple of generations of open source devs, that applied great skill, ingenuity and hard work to produce the very best software.

But I fear that I'm in for a period of lamentation as we get wave after wave of promising sounding developments, but where the reality is low quality, LLM generated crap that you really shouldn't use if you want secure, stable performant, production-ready software.

Seems like perhaps we've been through a golden age of really great software and that now it's coming to a close.

(edited to fix spelling)

"I’m a huge fan of the author Jack Vance;"

I've enjoyed his work too. Particularly the "Dying Earth" stories. I also read "Planet of Adventure".

My goodness did that man have an enormous vocab. I needed a dictionary with me to read his work. Great stories though.

That sounds expensive.

Hmm, Thanks HAL. :-)

Nice. HAL, from "A Space Odyssey", right?

From this, can we infer you're not exactly "all in" on coding via LLM Walter?

I, for one, am not. I've gone on the record with my thoughts in prior LLM related comment threads. They will make us dumb.

Let me add to the chorus of admiration for this piece of writing. Poignant, accurate, appropriately cynical.

On the other hand, I have quite the visceral reaction to the name because of the influence Hegel had on Marx, and subsequent 20th century critical theorists.

100%. Seems there's a whole class of us. If I'd been old enough at the time to by an early VCR, I'd have chosen betamax.

The industry and the wider world are full steam ahead with AI, but the following takes (from the article) are the ones that resonate with me. I don't use AI directly in my work for reasons similar to those expressed here[1].

For the record, I'll use it as a better web search or intro to a set of ideas or topic. But i no longer use it to generate code or solutions.

1. https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-project-perspectives-on-...

Oh, well good then.

"Thinking (as a SWE) is still very much the most important skill in SWE, and relying on AI has limitations."

I'd go further and say the thinking is humanity's fur and claws and teeth. It's our strong muscles. It's the only thing that has kept us alive in a natural world that would have us extinct long, long ago.

But now we're building machine with the very purpose of thinking, or at least of producing the results of thinking. And we use it. Boy, do we use it. We use it to think of birthday presents (it's the thought that counts) and greeting card messages. We use it for education coursework (against the rules, but still). We use it, as programmers, to come up with solutions and to find bugs.

If AI (of any stripe, LLM or some later invention) represents an existential threat, it is not because it will rise up and destroy us. Its threat lies solely in the fact that it is in our nature to take the path of least resistance. AI is the ultimate such path, and it does weaken our minds.

My challenge to anyone who thinks it's harmless: use it for a while. Figure out what it's good at and lean on it. Then, after some months, or years, drop it and try working on your own like in the before times. I would bet that one will discover that significant amounts of fluency will be lost.

LLMs are not for me. My position is that the advantage we humans have over the rest of the natural world, is our minds. Our ability to think, create and express ideas is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Once we give that over to "thinking" machines, we weaken ourselves, both individually and as a species.

That said, I've given it a go. I used zed, which I think is a pretty great tool. I bought a pro subscription and used the built in agent with Claude Sonnet 4.x and Opus. I'm a Rails developer in my day job, and, like MitchellH and many others, found out fairly quickly that tasks for the LLM need to be quite specific and discrete. The agent is great a renames and minor refactors, but my preferred use of the agent was to get it to write RSpec tests once I'd written something like a controller or service object.

And generally, the LLM agent does a pretty great job of this.

But here's the rub: I found that I was losing the ability to write rspec.

I went to do it manually and found myself trying to remember API calls and approaches required to write some specs. The feeling of skill leaving me was quite sobering and marked my abandonment of LLMs and Zed, and my return to neovim, agent-free.

The thing is, this is a common experience generally. If you don't use it, you lose it. It applies to all things: fitness, language (natural or otherwise), skills of all kinds. Why should it not apply to thinking itself.

Now you may write me and my experience off as that of a lesser mind, and that you won't have such a problem. You've been doing it so long that it's "hard-wired in" by now. Perhaps.

It's in our nature to take the path of least resistance, to seek ease and convenience at every turn. We've certainly given away our privacy and anonymity so that we can pay for things with our phones and send email for "free".

LLMs are the ultimate convenience. A peer or slave mind that we can use to do our thinking and our work for us. Some believe that the LLM represents a local maxima, that the approach can't get much better. I dunno, but as AI improves, we will hand over more and more thinking and work to it. To do otherwise would be to go against our very nature and every other choice we've made so far.

But it's not for me. I'm no MitchellH, and I'm probably better off performing the mundane activities of my work, as well as the creative ones, so as to preserve my hard-won knowledge and skills.

YMMV

I'll leave off with the quote that resonates the most with me as I contemplate AI:-

"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about." -- Agent Smith "The Matrix"

This is backwards. He's still 50 cent, but to have the buying power he had in '94, he'd need to $1.09. But he's still 50 cent, so really, in today's money he's more like 23 cent.

The opening line:- "The traditional wisdom says resting meat keeps it juicy. But when we put that idea to the test, we found a different reason to rest—one that has nothing to do with juice."

I don't rest meat to keep it juicy. I rest it to finish the cook. It's not quite ready when it comes off the heat.

Now I'll read the rest. :-)

I had this idea years ago when I was moving house and redirecting my post. I'm probably not alone in that. Kudos to Japan Post for implementing it.

That's a 'sperg dunk. "We wear gold" Not for warmth or protection we don't. It's not essential to us.

"make weapons out of iron" Do you? I certainly can't refine the ore, or forge and machine the barrel of a rifle.

All you've done here is increase the cost of my communication. You know what I was saying, but true to nerd nature, you chose to make a "technically correct" (the worst kind of correct) point (sort of).

Bitcoin has value for the reasons I said and it will continue to have value for as long as we have access to global computer network.

That's true of everything we use as money, including precious metals. You can't eat them, live in them, use them as weapons, walk down the street in them. They have value bacause we all agree that they do and we all agree to use them as a means to exchange that value. Also, and this is important and I should have said it first, they have value because their supply is restricted.

The same is true for crypto. It's fungible, private, and limited in supply. It's also independent of governments although they are doing their level best to correct that.

I wonder a lot about this argument of private health care vs state funded health care. I have libertarian leanings and so would prefer a truly free market, because I would like to believe it would lead to affordable levels of health care for everyone.

But I don't know that it's true. My questions regarding the US system and health insurance: Is it a truly free market or does the state regulate in ways that make it difficult for competition?

In Australia we have heavily subsidized healthcare, but it's not great. If you've got something life threatening then you'll be OK. If it's not life threatening, but just really difficult to live with then you'll wait. Sometimes years. No choice of specialist or hospital either. So many of us get private health insurance of one level or another, in order to have more choice and better, more prompt care.

So, how free is the US system?

Also, here's an X post from a guy called Devon Eriksen on the topic of socialized healthcare and free markets.

[https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1865932424376377833]

PS: Devon wrote a great debut Sci Fi novel called "Theft Of Fire" (Orbital Space #1). It's a great read, with endorsements from John Carmack, "Uncle" Bob Martin and ESR, among others.

I wonder if it's correct right down to the errata. Was there undocumented instructions on the 6502? If so, I wonder if it supports those.

My father has had both hips replaced in the fast few years. Both surgeries were very successful and he has retained full hip joint function. He no longer has pain in his hips.

His surgeon used an approach that minimised damage to the muscles in the area. If I recall correctly, this meant he gain access to the hip joint via the posterior side of dad's upper leg, and went between muscle and tendon, rather than needing to cut muscle to get to the joint.

I don't know if I'm remembering correctly, but dad healed up pretty quickly.

Malthusian nonsense. As societies develop and become richer, birth rates drop. Also, over time, our ability to produce more food has always risen to the challenge.

"dbeel" sounds like the Russian word for (approx.) moron.