My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise.
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" That people are trying to steer a tank with a speak'n'spell is because we have not made decent bikes." -- if we look at the real-world situation of your metaphor, we see that when "decent bikes" ARE finally here, the establishment begins to gatekeep and legislate against them /because/ they are too effective, at overturning the status quo - ostensibly on the grounds that they are "dangerous" when in the wrong hands.
Wondering if the analogy feeds back in the other direction too.
@wavesculptor @jonathanhogg @dasgrueneblatt
Your analogy will work both ways when people are as eager to pay their own money for AI coding as they are to buy ebikes.
As it is now, giving away AI is like trying to medicate a cat and your analogy push smells like seething cope.
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@lispi314 @jonathanhogg @kirtai I mean we didn't get here unintentionally. It's expensive and self sacrificial to invest a lot of time in infrastructure like programming languages and libraries (wherever you land in the stack) and make it very simple to solve the problems you are solving (and others to solve them too). It's also really hard, because not only is the problem you are solving an engineering problem but now also building the infrastructure to solve the problem. And the limiting factor is exploration not sitting down and hypothesising, researching, and cooking up some crap. Which yes is also part of the process too.@lispi314 @jonathanhogg @kirtai you have to buy into an ideology of doing things this way. And if you're investing a lot of time in e.g. libraries for a given programming language, we already kind of know that our programming languages kinda suck and better be made irrelevant, so it also feels inefficient even when you do buy into it.
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@lispi314 @jonathanhogg @kirtai you have to buy into an ideology of doing things this way. And if you're investing a lot of time in e.g. libraries for a given programming language, we already kind of know that our programming languages kinda suck and better be made irrelevant, so it also feels inefficient even when you do buy into it.@jonathanhogg @kirtai @lispi314 and as someone who's spent a tonne of time investing in a certain stack to make things easier for other people to solve the same problem... things can wind up esoteric and difficult to onboard with (like imagine APL). It would unironically be quicker for them to use boilerplate even if long term that may not be true.
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@wavesculptor @jonathanhogg @dasgrueneblatt
Your analogy will work both ways when people are as eager to pay their own money for AI coding as they are to buy ebikes.
As it is now, giving away AI is like trying to medicate a cat and your analogy push smells like seething cope.
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@wavesculptor @jonathanhogg @dasgrueneblatt
Since you value engagement so much, here you go.
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To me, all these people crowing about having written 10k lines of code in a day are idiots. If you need to write that much code in a day, you are manifestly working at the wrong level of abstraction to solve your problem.
@jonathanhogg these days my programs tend to be 100 lines of logic, and then 10x error handling and input parsing. But I feel like it's always been this way, even before exceptions.
String parsing is another bottomless pit of despair. I once dreamt of modifying Unix tools to all emit xml (before json). Which means ls and stat end up being the same core program. And sls (the printf version of ls) can get folded in too.
TBH, I find typing helpful, and prefer it (I mostly wrangle Python). -
@dasgrueneblatt I have now spent 40 years programming commercially in dozens of different languages; I have taught programming to CS students, art students and little kids and my experience is that most programming is hard because we have made it so. I absolutely understand the frustration of people who know what their problem is, but don't feel equipped to solve it because the tools available to them are too big and confusing. Vibe coding is our own fault
@jonathanhogg @dasgrueneblatt This sums up a lot of my eternal grumbles about "modern software engineering", of which the Javascript "ecosystem" is probably the clearest example.
We have free (speech and beer) browsers with all sorts of built-in APIs that allow anyone with a computer made in the last 15 years to build cool things with nothing more than a text editor.
We have spent those 15 years telling people to use `create-react-app` instead.
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I will say one thing for generative AI: since these tools function by remixing/translating existing information, that vibe programming is so popular demonstrates a colossal failure on the part of our industry in not making this stuff easier. If a giant ball of statistics can mostly knock up a working app in minutes, this shows not that gen-AI is insanely clever, but that most of the work in making an app has always been stupid. We have gatekeeped programming behind vast walls of nonsense.
@jonathanhogg Software remained loose, artist-like, rather than assemblies of discrete objects like engineering. To be fair, most of commerce rewards when stuff is yanked away from standardization; there’s profit in differentiation.
Open source hardware and software keeps winning inroads due to the inherent advantages of standardization, but they’re opposed by greed.
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg Following the anthropological chain here…
bro-ishness and false surprise (you’ve never heard of a monoid?) and gatekeeping and condescension turned off so many would-be programmers that they found alternatives where they could create without being judged or rtfm’d
So the incineration of this planet will be the consequence of programmer bros and lack of inclusivity?
Wow. The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.
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#eBikes -- [and #micromobility generally] --massive take-up, but this could be orders of magnitude more in countries such as UK if they were encouraged to diversify and not continually pushed-back-at as "dangerous toys".
@wavesculptor @wolf480pl @jonathanhogg @dasgrueneblatt
Or look at the Cat'N'Mouse games with legislation around 3d-printing firearms.
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My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.
@jonathanhogg Yea. They are only as intelligent from the content they steal. Once websites begin blocking these bot from scraping their pages LLMs effectively become useless.
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You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.
@jonathanhogg You could make a case that Flash had a similar role in the early 2000s. Lots of wacky things and games that people could throw together with light scripting. But I guess it didn't have the same "code is also shared" vibe that Hypercard had.
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