rafterydj

The sentiment behind this post is, I fear, felt by too many normal people in the world today and not enough leaders. This is usually due to the network graph of leaders (above a certain scale threshold) being correlated with the most out of touch and wealthy - they are the last to hear about the insurance rates for campgrounds.

That said, the keyword used more than once in this post is "impotent". There is simply nothing the majority of us can do. And that worries me for obvious reasons.

> They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.

I understand exactly what you mean by this, and you are wrong. If they did not copy them, it would not be possible to extricate copyrighted works out of the model like Harry Potter. You can argue against the copyright system, but don't pretend that what they've done is essentially an advanced form of copying. The data is in the weights.

I agree with the OP; this technology does not seem an appropriate fit for survival equipment. By definition survival scenarios can be life and death. Even one "You're absolutely right!" level mistake from an LLM could give a user bad information, leading to John Doe eating a mushroom he really should not have eaten.

Yeah I'm just gonna say you're dead wrong and leave it at that.

A landfill with a hard drive full of Bitcoin is still a landfill.

Sorry to hear that. So disappointed in the AI companies for making no serious efforts towards transparency for the citation of works and prior art.

Not antagonizing but curious: how else would you do it?

Just wanted to chime in and say that is a very good talk, and I recommend people give it the time.

I'm part of the skeptic camp, and I'd argue that we are never going to have LLMs solving all problems. Therefore, we need humans to know and understand how to solve problems. Unfortunately, when "the genie is out of the bottle" and most (but not all!) problems are solved, it becomes very very hard to argue for doing things the hard way.

Furthermore, it becomes practically impossible to argue for doing things the hard way for all of the solved problems, which were and are necessary for being able to learn the craft deeply. At the very least, deeply "enough" to advance the state of the art.

In short: 1) Humans are necessary. 2) Knowledge and experience are necessary. 3) Humans need time and practice to gain knowledge and experience.

When one side argues that one or all of the above points are false, I don't believe them.

Realistically, we are seeing people even in the most pro-AI groups begrudgingly concede #1 and #2, while expecting #3 to just sort itself out.

How many programmers have made anything culturally significant??

You are on an online forum geared towards programmers, using the world wide web created by a programmer. The concept of a video game did not exist before they were being programmed.

You think the world just appeared as it is and everyone only does things for money? Never because, unlike people who use every shortcut possible, they actually care about the details?

You have my sympathy. I can't offer you any advice, but I was just thinking earlier about how awful I feel for younger people working in this industry, and that didn't even include being Ukrainian.

I don't know, this does not feel like the message hit OpenAI where it needed to hit, if this is their primary response.

Hieronymus Bosch is such an interesting case, and I like your point in comparing oil painting to photography. Unfortunately I also share your concern about software's criticality. Therac-25 comes to mind as a case study taught to us in computer science university courses, that have haunted me in recent times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25?wprov=sfla1

I upvoted you because I think your point is well said, but I do disagree. Primarily because the fundamental shift you mention is not just the coding layer, nor the architecture, nor even the "human vision" component - it is and will continue to be a funnel for slop.

Skilled programmers may continue to be able to work with it, but only while their understanding of what the software is holds out. In my opinion there is no learning to be had with these tools beyond familiarizing someone with the beginner stages of what programming arts can produce. Things like version control, explanation of fundamental data structures, easily understood scripts, etc.

But when the "sloppification" creeps in on large projects (which happened before AI but is much faster these days), the opacity of the codebase increases an order of magnitude faster than it's transparency. Thus far LLMs are not immune to confusion or mistakes, and so it stands to reason, it will not be possible to build ever new complex software with this technology.

Because of that, it's trivial to see that the skills involved are still required, but with much less incentive to learn them. Not only is it far, far easier to take shortcuts with Claude than it is a Commodore 64, it also rewards shortcuts with faster results at the expense of true understanding. This means that the next generation using these tools won't be filtered out by determination and troubleshooting to the same degree as the last. The Commodore 64 produced a generation of programmers; Claude Code will produce a generation of administrative software users.

While I'm being critical, I do want to state that administrative software users are absolutely needed in society. It's just not the same thing as what you and I call programming, the main difference being the expectation of creating or at least the capacity to create something new. That is, not another clone of an existing project, or a new integration of an existing plugin architecture. I'm not saying we won't progress as a society, but it's my belief that LLMs won't "democratize" software - they will drown it.

That's one of the reasons my new side project is using C99. No idea if it will work, but I'm hoping that once I get comfortable working with it I won't need to get help from Google/forums/LLMs as much, and I can have an actual good day again.

That, or become violent. I'm not saying that in a supportive way, moreso thinking of uprisings historically arising from people with no other option. Although, that was before facial recognition technology...

That doesn't help foster meaningful discussion. It's very relevant to discuss what we understand.

This is only tangentially related but I often wonder about the nature of software and whether we made a mistake "standardizing" as much as we have.

I say this not because you're wrong - I'm sure that using built-in modules for .zip parsing is faster and easier! - but rather because I don't know whether or not it's worth knowing how to do that. In the AI days right now there's argument being had about whether learning any coding at all is valuable. My gut says it is, but I've also spent years learning before AI, so maybe it's a sunk cost fallacy.

Regardless, my feeling is that we haven't found the balance between what's worth making every programmer learn/implement themselves, and what's worth abstracting away. Maybe implementing a .zip parser gives you some kind of secret wisdom that makes your future work better?

I mean this sincerely; the arrogance of calling yourself a 100X programmer is astounding. I don't know how you managed a 40 year career with that kind of attitude.

The drama of authenticity is only a veil over the problem of trusting other people. If you cannot trust other people, why even post a comment, or for that matter contribute to society?

If you can trust people, then knowing when and how to trust them matters, and thus authenticity is a concern.

Not even US-centric, Silicon Valley centric. (I am a non-Valley US worker)

AI does not fundamentally turn that around, with "that" being as you say the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day and that a single person could only accomplish so much.

Your mistake is one I see everywhere these days, and that is the belief that a given problem with which YOU do not want to waste your time, are actually problems which are not worth doing by anyone. When examined I think this idea is obviously wrong, and misanthropic at heart. People prioritizing different things are still valuable.

The reason free software has progressed up until AI has been a combination of economic conditions and unrivalled passion on the part of the developers. The SQLite project has taken 20 years to optimize, and the creator still says there is work to be done.

Contrast that career spanning work with a pattern AI encourages of builders: offload the difficult or boring parts, get something barely functional, move on to the next thing. Building like this leaves you with no more experience than you already had to begin with.

As another commenter said, there is undeniable and very exciting utility in that being an option! The class of "easy pickings" in projects has widened tremendously in size. I agree with you when you say that it has the power to let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you. Software configurability is going to be a major priority!

However, and I think you'd agree since we both feel free software was and is inherently complicated, configurability of software is only useful with the knowledge of how to put it to best use, like any other tool. If we were to give a laptop with Claude to a technical layperson, would they not immediately attempt to build without taking the time to understand (for example) what a database is? And when encountering problems beyond their understanding and only expecting the AI "to fix it", would they not be turned away from the tool entirely?

These problems may not matter to one who DOES understand the nature of software, but they do matter overall.

Wait a minute, are onions just condiments to people? You can cook a ton of different dishes with onions, I was thinking about the many recipes I've tried for onion soup.

No disagreements on things not working right on Mac/Linux, it's definitely a frustration!

I would argue against the idea that it's the default for most enterprise dev. What you refer to as creative/web culture I would refer to as a newer generation of enterprise dev written in (I know) JS, TS, Electron etc. There is a lot of cross platform stuff out there, at least for clients, and Linux has taken up a lot of ground in the server market as well.

With CAD and GPU programming you have a point - proprietary drivers written for Windows has more technical sticking power.

I guess my feeling is that, especially with all the headlines saying European countries will move away from American software giants, Windows seems less attractive as a long term target for investing my time. Not to mention it's buggy and slow these days.

Why is it that the derisive "oh you just disagree" statement usually speaks to a missing "...and therefore aren't serious"?

What are you actually saying constructively here, if anything at all? I, for one, happen to agree that fundamental reform is clearly necessary. What that looks like exactly is where I'm sure the problems lie.

When it is not the mandated option, under what circumstances is Windows the best choice for software dev? The only domain I can think of is gaming, and Valve is seemingly coming up fast to eat Microsoft's lunch in the next few years.

Wow. Only enough reserves to be measured in decades? Once it's gone it's gone. Genuine Carboniferous coal, one day a thousand years from now, might be a rare museum item!

I have a habit of thinking about history in very long terms, and that just does not sit right with me. That kind of thinking (oh we have enough for decades, let it rip!) happens, and the decades pass, and time inevitably is less kind to the descendants of such decision makers.

I don't know, that just seems like a category error that breaks apart when you get closer to any individual project. Use-after-free is still possible in Rust with unsafe. Assuming nobody _can_ write memory safe C is a good assumption for things like security modelling, regardless of how unlikely those issues actually come up.

Securing code you/your org did not write and programming for yourself/your org are just fundamentally different jobs.

This I think is a medium-term path/window only. Eventually the low hanging fruit of "whatever we can do a small release quickly to get $1M ARR" will be relatively picked clean. Sort of like how the App Store boom had things like flashlight apps make a large number of sales, when realistically it made the most sense for it to be a first-party application.

With AI tooling, I think things like "quickly generated dashboard" will fall under this category, which is unfortunate because the only way to tell a well-thought UI from a poorly thought out one is by using it a lot. I suspect we are going to see a wave (already seeing really) of people launching small companies with barely functional products, which will burn user trust (low bar for software already).

For startups, this means the AI-code gold rush may ebb and most users will flock to larger corporate products that "just work". In this way, it follows the VC's with the most money to burn will be able to stay competitive after a few years of drought.

What I'm really interested in that this time they'll need to compete not just with each other, but with other institutions (assuming the software engineer's market rate stabilizes). It's not the 1990's anymore, every business and government knows how valuable software is (even if they don't have experience making it). How will they adapt the lower barrier to entry allowed by AI tools?

On the one hand, sad day for the rest and vest crowd, as well as founders. On the other hand, wouldn't it be interesting to see university or government managed Linux distros?

Do you utilize RSS? I've been trying to find a good RSS reader that incorporates some of the ideas his advocates, but I prefer Linux. Right now I'm using Thunderbird for it, but I'd love a good recommendation!