relativeadv
relativeadv on Hacker News
When you do it, its slop. When I do it? Its craftsmanship.
Did those tutors fold and obey the student at the slightest hint of direction?
Several commenters explaining how much more productive they are with ai tools. The study is about reading comprehension. Draw your own conclusion.
> "what’s left are tweeting AI fantasies and vibe-coding Temu Cloudflare"
sick burn. can't say i disagree though.
A buddy of mine is a former car mechanic of over a decade who recently got his first job in software dev, i hired him. It being his first desk job and all, i was asking him if that felt odd at all. He of course mentioned the stuff you'd imagine; boy its nice not being on my knees all day, having AC, etc. But what struck me most was that he said it was nice being around educated people. At his shop, he'd have angry customers, crackheads, and dipshit coworkers. Talking about anything other than some ignorant bullshit was an impossibility because, frankly, many of his coworkers were just dumb.
If you accept Rene Girard's mimetic theory, then _all_ human desire is fundamentally mimetic. We all learn to want what others want. If this is true, then is there any authentic you at all?
Sidenote: An interesting less spoken about part is Rene's idea of the scapegoat. Any good mimetic desire needs a scapegoat for when competition and rivalry ultimately occur as a byproduct of many people wanting the same thing. Is the LLM the scapegoat in this new equation? This article certainly blames it.
for me, the killer feature of the little xteink readers is _no touchscreen_. This is important because you can hold the device as you would a paper book, thumb on the page itself without accidentally turning the page or triggering some menu system.
That sentence was awkward. Maybe even a typo? The following sentences to the one you just quoted ignores that and proceeds to argue FOR blindfolded chess being like programming with LLMs.
The article itself takes several paragraphs to get to the argument it wants to make and then ends having only argued for a few more sentences. No real evidence is provided either.
good to see dave still out there doing his thing
I completely agree. I have vibe coded what i would consider to be some pretty weird things in the name of learning facilitation.
Perhaps the best example has been a native macOS app that is a completely custom text editor with built-in debugger, lsp support, fuzzy finder, etc stuff you'd expect. Inside the same app is a library of books i can read within the app completely formatted and for every chapter/section of each book that is a quiz to take (LLM generated of course), a "recitation" tab where i am asked a question and say outloud my response to the AI to evaluate me on and then finally practice problems to do within the custom text editor (these are usually programming books). The reader also has ai re-write built in.
As neat as this is, and i worked through K&R like this, i have ultimately fallen back on "just read the damn book and go to the AI when you've got questions."
i'd completely forgotten about notes on camp, had to read that in modernist criticism class. good stuff.
i see parallels to zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance as well, who's whole thesis if i can recall is something like, "quality cannot be put into words." Its a pre-rational thing that, try as you might, can't be pinned down.
Bob Martin has built a career on asking the wrong questions. He is doing the same here as well.
Oh boy, my useless art degree is coming in handy here! This is precisely like the authorship debates that occurred when Warhol hit the scene, or Damien Hirst and many others. It goes further back than that. Duchamp and his urinal, renaissance painters and their workshops. On and on, artists making work for other artists and people debating whether the signee is the one who really created it. "Authorship" is the term for this debate.
If you choose to side with the modern art establishment, this has been a settled debate for decades. Managing signs, systems, instructions, and context is itself a creative act.
If you choose to side with the atelier movement (as one example) it would be a resounding "no". This does not count.
i've moved over to
https://www.liftosaur.com/ and its MCP server. It has been so nice to use. Its unfortunately a PWA/Ionic app (dev has a native one coming) but i am more than happy to overlook that with the other features available in it. Dude even wrote his own little DSL for writing programs you can use.
> "Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?"
I know its such a common thing to suggest, but if you haven't, I really would suggest reading Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
tl;dr is that every single medium of communication shapes the message it is trying to deliver. This is unavoidable and once you understand that you begin to see it everywhere (LLMS? yes).
The irony is that while this is all mostly true, the site itself is clearly written with AI. Clearly matters here, because although it can do all of these remarkable things the prose it writes is still completely banal.
I've been writing technical documentation and architecture docs that no one ever reads for years. I now write those same documents using ai in a fraction of the time. No one reads those either but they are memorialized so that no one can bitch about tribal knowledge.
Bravo! Wonderful read.
The comments here are a cesspool unfortunately. People bickering about pronouns used for cats, how many shots it takes for a vase to explode, or whether or not some circa-1993 software was used or mentioned.
this. the meetups i was a part of devolved into product pitches and people looking for jobs
The obviously ai generated dramatic prose. The entire site has the veneer of AI generation as well. The gradient background, the glowing header text, the monospaced fonts, the dots next to the footer subnav items that serve no purpose. If i were writing a blog today i would take comfort knowing it has never been easier to stand out by simply being yourself.
right? I read the kleppman post sometime ago about formal verification taking off but i could never square away who verifies the verifier.
position is one thing. implementation of that position is another.
"Forty years later, in September of 2018, I started working on this version of Space War. It's an animated GUI driven system with a frame rate of 30fps. It is written entirely in Clojure and uses the Quil shim for the Processing GUI framework." - Robert Martin
https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2021/11/28/Spacewar.ht...