7 ms·

Luckily for anyone in the software writing profession, writing the actual code is the easy part. Anyone who watches the video in its entirety will be made painf

Luckily for anyone in the software writing profession, writing the actual code is the easy part. Anyone who watches the video in its entirety will be made painfully aware of this. That aside - what I'd actually prefer is something that does the opposite of this. Rather than write code, I'd rather it actually help decide what I should be doing, not give me how it's implemented. Example: > "Make twitter" - "OK. Do you mean a short message sending service like "Twitter.com" when you say 'twitter'? > "Yes" - "OK" - "How many users are you thinking this will have?" > "20 million" - "Alright, where are these users located?" > "All over the world?" - "Will they all be on simultaneously?" > "Yes" - "OK, what are your latency requirements?" > ... The end of this discussion could be a fully architected design in the abstract, with recommendations on specific technologies to use, the tradeoffs and the costs, if applicable. A plus if said architecture could be specified in a way that makes it easy to deploy. This logic could be used for high level implementation designs, and even UI/UX.

dgb23 5y ago
I love designing programs, programming and everything around it, it's my job. I constantly jumping back and forth between being worried that I won't be able to do this in the foreseeable future and realizing that these systems don't solve the problems I'm solving.
- 37ef_ced3 5y ago
  These systems don't solve the problems you're solving? Not yet, but give it a couple years. You will join the taxi drivers, and so will I.
  - quonn 5y ago
    Yawn. Seriously, don‘t worry about it.
    - 37ef_ced3 5y ago
      First they came for Lee Sedol, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a professional game player. Then they came for the taxi drivers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a taxi driver. Then they came for the frontend programmers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a frontend programmer. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
      - pvaldes 5y ago
        > they came for me They tried, but there was not any taxi on sight
  - ResearchCode 5y ago
    Mind that those taxis were all supposed to drive themselves since 2018.
    - ctdonath 5y ago
      Self driving cars have been in development for ~30 years. We’re remarkably close to taxis driving themselves.
      - cmoscoso 5y ago
        Give it a few decades.
        zzzbra 5y ago
        the correct timeline
      - na85 5y ago
        In California maybe. We're a lot farther off from self driving taxis in places where it snows, like Toronto or Chicago.
  - bumby 5y ago
    "insert a Russian book at one end and come out with an English book at the other," Doctor Dostert predicted that "five, perhaps three years hence, interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process in important functional areas of several languages may well be an accomplished fact."[1] -IBM Press Release 1954 regarding the 701 translator Predicting the problem will be solved in a few short years is the easy part. Execution to realize those predictions is much harder. [1] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_translator.html https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_translator....
    - BizarroLand 5y ago
      It would be easy to translate any book into any other book (if every language was a one-to-one variant of each other with no differences in slang or metaphor or cultural backdrop that converts simple turns of phrases into a medley of aphorisms each deserving of their own short stories.) Other than that all you need is a camera, a computer and a dictionary.
      - bumby 5y ago
        If that were true, we should expect to be able to feed that initial quote through multiple translations with minimal meaning loss. Here is the result of translating that entire phrase from English -> Greek -> Serbian -> Creole -> English with a popular translating tool: "put a Russian book at one end and an English book at the other, ”predicted Dr. Dostert." It completely loses its original meaning not to mention the latter half of the quote. I think the constraint of "if every language was a one-to-one variant" is too constricting to be of use in the real world. The reason why this is hard is because that rule rarely holds true. Language is more about communicating concepts than just words. Translating one-to-one concepts is much harder because you need to understand context.
        BizarroLand 5y ago
        Ok, I didn't think I was subtle but I was exceedingly sarcastic in my reply. I don't think any language is 1 to 1 with any other language, and expecting to be able to directly translate with a simple dictionary is patently absurd.
  - qualudeheart 5y ago
    Neither of you is going to be a taxi driver because taxi driving is easier to automate than software engineering. Part of me is pessimistic about AI programming tools, part of me thinks they’ll only enhance the agency of existing programmers. Either way taxi driving is probably easier to automate and only requires modifications to Tesla’s self driving tech.
    - commandlinefan 5y ago
      > pessimistic about AI programming tools I suspect that these tools (if they do anything at all, anyway) will just make it harder to learn programming as a newcomer - just as all the advances in programming that have come about in my lifetime have. IDE's are great, until they do something you didn't expect, and then you have to understand what it is they're automating in order to figure out how to get them to do what it is you really want. Try explaining a Java classpath or dependency problem to somebody who's never opened a command-line terminal before. Docker is great - until it expects to find something that you happen to not have installed. What will probably happen here is that you and I will be fine, because we'll be able to effortlessly wield these new tools as they're just doing quickly what we used to do slowly, but new students to programming will have an even steeper hill to climb than we did.
  - brundolf 5y ago
    The taxi drivers haven't been replaced by computers yet either.
  - handrous 5y ago
    You mean we'll become taxi drivers, or we'll join them in unemployment due to self-driving cars? If the latter, that's great because it means I'm good for at least 20 more years of this career.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    There are two things that I want to address here. For one I still call a Taxi when I need one. Happy to pay a bit of extra to get a professional driver. I don't want to bash on people using other services or people providing those, but it's not for me. Similarly my clients call me and my colleagues because they have a problem that needs solving, we solve it partly with programming because that is how we can solve it exactly, reliably and freely. We don't typically use low-code tools because they can trap us and they don't scale with our ability and understanding, and the productivity they promise is true for narrow uses. Our clients don't use them because it will and has taken them too much time to learn and use them with mediocre to (really) bad results, they want the problem to be taken care of and are willing to make a trade. The second point is that I simply refuse to stop adapting and learning. I'm happily adopting technology into my repertoire when the tradeoff is worth it. Analyzing and understanding those tradeoffs is part of the job. Expanding knowledge is part of the job. And this was always true for anyone who works in software related fields, our community always has had to adapt, adopt and evolve, balancing pragmatism and curiosity.
mLuby 5y ago
aicoder< What is a User? nocoder> a User registers with a unique email and a password of more than 16 characters, but not the weird ones just the normal ones. Oh, and on registration give the user a unique id. aicoder< So, email the user their unique id? nocoder> No, no, it's our little secret. aicoder< Would you like to design the registration form now? nocoder> God no, just make a standard form. With client-side validation. And server-side validation too, just to be safe. And give it some flair, we're a cool company after all. aicoder< (I don't get paid enough for this shit.) nocoder> Wait, what? aicoder< Would you like to add the flair now?
- habibur 5y ago
  That's Clippy, not AI.
  - kongin 5y ago
    There isn't a difference.
- tcmart14 5y ago
  aicoder< Time to go on strike.
postalrat 5y ago
I have an idea and all the details. Are you available to do the easy part?
- endisneigh 5y ago
  maybe - what's your idea and the details? If your details leave any room for ambiguity then we'll have to call off the engagement :)
- dkersten 5y ago
  Just because its easy (relative to everything else, also it depends on what you mean by "all the details"), doesn't mean it doesn't take time and therefore money. You might argue, "well then generating the code is still a win" and it might be, but its a micro-optimization. If the AI can do the easy part but not the hard part, its akin to shaving seconds from an operation that takes hours. Its focusing on the wrong thing. If the AI could instead do the hard part, you would save a lot lot more effort and therefore money. Once that's done, by all means, automate the easy part too, but until then, the priorities are off. You might still say that this is worth it, saving those seconds still means you don't have to pay for them, even if the majority of the cost is still there. This is possibly true and all well and good. I don't really care, because I'll still have a job doing the hard part. The issue is that when these AI's are mentioned, the "hard part" is always glossed over, the AI is sold as this thing that will automate all development, where it really should be sold as a thing that shaves a little off the total cost of development, but that the hard and therefore expensive parts are still there. Sure, there are some development tasks that are fairly trivial and some companies that do mainly these might go out of business, but you still have the stories of oracle selling a website to the government agency for $100 million, because it has to interact with a slew of legacy systems, deal with ambiguous tax codes/regulations/requirements. There's a lot of tech out there that has these complexities and that's not going to be automated by these AI's for now, until they tackle "the hard part". A note on "all the details": if you truly have all the details (refined unambiguous requirements, detailed architecture with all the use cases and edge cases outlined and documented, technology tradeoffs investigated and documented etc etc) then great, it would be quick, easy and cheap to implement then. Unfortunately, what is more common, is that a non-developer will say this and "all the details" really isn't all the details at all and just the tip of the iceberg.
coding123 5y ago
Wouldn't it be easier to just have people open source a generic architected 20 million simultaneous user system with low latency and kubernetes/helm charts as a github project?
- enobrev 5y ago
  That's an interesting use of the word "easy".
thesz 5y ago
What you describe is an interpolation. It is a solution for what already exists. You can interpolate this long, bisecting various axis ranges that specify a problem (short messages using text, using emojis only, using pictures, using videos, using...). This is exactly the stuff NN are good for - after all, they are universal approximators for functions with bounded domain and bounded codomain. At some point of time you will need to extrapolate. Twitter was an extrapolation, Google was an extrapolation as well. Can a system trained to provide you with system design of a Twitter clone let you help with the design of, say, Medium?
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Twitter was an extrapolation, Google was an extrapolation as well. Were they? Twitter: "an absolutely minimal MySpace clone. Let users write posts to feed using SMS." Google: "Like AltaVista, but without all the bullshit - just the search box. For weighting, have it use this funny algorithm we figured out the other day." I'm not denying both were innovative - I just think the innovation, the "extrapolation", didn't happen at the technical/tactical level we're discussing here. All the pieces were already there, and used for similar things. The innovation was in figuring out that this particular shape of service is something people might want to use, and that it could make money.
  - thesz 5y ago
    The extrapolations there are "limit on the post size" and "this funny algorithm". That "just the search box" thing would not go anywhere without that algorithm. I guess the "search box only" design decision was a kind of thing that happened to ARM: its' founder said that ARM was able to give its' chip developers the thing that neither Intel nor IBM was able to give - the absence of money.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > The extrapolations there are "limit on the post size" and "this funny algorithm". I disagree. "Limit on the post size" was not arbitrary, it was a technical limitation - Twitter was created as "a social network, but for SMS". SMS was a well-known technology back then. As for "this funny algorithm", in context of the dialogue 'endisneigh posted, the algorithm is just an input. "Hey, AI, use that thing as a ranking function". The "extrapolative" work would be the invention of the algorithm itself.
DonHopkins 5y ago
It could even design all the dark UI patterns and dopamine feedback loops and freemium economics and user segmentations and privacy invasions and personal data exploitations and penis-swastika logos for you!
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Why does it have to be penis swastikas? And furthermore, why has no one investigated the possibility of vagina swastikas? Aren't we being a bit sexist in the midst of all of this hyper-racist fascist ideology?
  - Mirioron 5y ago
    People like drawing penises and swastikas. I think it's because they're simple shapes, but also taboo. A bot might very well imitate that.
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      Slack's new logo is a penis swastika https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playdoh.html https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playd... How Slack’s New Logo Became a Lightning Rod For Everything Bad On The Internet https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-logo-design-backlash https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-... The Penis Swastika Mistake https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Penis%20Swastika%20Mistake https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Penis%... >The rookie mistake of trying too hard when designing a logo and you end up making one that has either a penis, a swastika, or both, included in your design. ...Or one swastika and four penises.
  - unicornmama 5y ago
    Well Tesla’s logo is based off an IUD…
- aasasd 5y ago
  > penis-swastika Well, my curiosity quickly led to the discovery that penises and swastikas have a large overlap with furries, by the way of the Rule34 site. Which finally made me realize that furries are probably the catch-all category on Rule34: making another ‘rule 34’ pic? well just slap furries on it, and you got that audience covered at almost no additional cost. The same way as incest titles are everywhere in porn, since it costs nothing to phrase every single title that way regardless of actual content.
gremloni 5y ago
I don’t agree that writing code is the easy part. Making changes to and maintaining a huge code base is no joke.
- shados 5y ago
  That kind of makes the point. Writing the code is the easy part. Designing a system that's easy to maintain is hard. But a lot of that is decided before you write your first line.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  That's a perfect example! There is such a huge code case, because writing the code was easy to do.
- habibur 5y ago
  Good point. AI not only has to write the code, but also has to understand what existing code does, and then change it on request. If it doesn't understand its own code -- some human has to do that stuff. And maintenance is 90% of the work.
- gregjor 5y ago
  It’s no joke, but writing the code is not the hard part. Reading the code, understanding it, thinking through the states and control flow — those are the hard parts of software maintenance. I do it for a living. 80% of my billable time is reading and testing code. Once I know what to write I’ve got to the easy part.
pasquinelli 5y ago
what if, instead of make twitter, you asked it to make money? let the computer decide what to make, and collect the profit.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  "Computer, please conquer Australia for me by dinnertime."
Areading314 5y ago
This is a really interesting idea. It would be very useful to be able to lego together some components and get a rough estimate of how it would scale and what the technical performance would be (to first order).
elforce002 5y ago
Now this I'll pay money to use. What will happen to software architects though?
xwdv 5y ago
Jokes still on you, because that’s still the easy part. The hard part is still running the service, dealing with scalability problems, security, bugs, customer support, new features, content moderation at scale, legal compliance, meeting service level agreements, supporting multiple platforms, etc… If only architecting the platform and writing the code was all we needed to do… every developer would be doing it.
Nursie 5y ago
This is circling towards what we do as computer programmers - specify system behaviour in minute detail. You can move it to a higher level, and there are usually tradeoffs there, and perhaps AI can help mitigate some of those. But in the end, you need a way to specify the system behaviour in explicit detail. Which is where software developers come in. That's not going to go away because AI comes along, AFAICT, though it may (as it already has many times) change form or grammar here and there. That interactive prompt system is going to get boring fast, so we'll script it. And then build on that and ...
systemvoltage 5y ago
> "Make yourself" Would this violate something in computer science theory?
dpq 5y ago
That's what folks at hyperc.com are aiming to solve.
bserge 5y ago
Yeah, an AI boss, coworker/partner, friend or all in one would be great.
8eye 5y ago
we’re going towards hive processing, everything in the room will communicate in an unrealistic way, the room will load balance the processing, routing and prioritizing what gets done when. IoT but on steroids. we’re not even a fraction of where we can go. i def think something like what you are talking about will be a thing some day, programmers will be people who know how to explain things really well so an AI can do exactly what the summoner wants. anyways, it’ll happen. not sure when but it will happen within my lifetime

dgb23 5y ago

I love designing programs, programming and everything around it, it's my job. I constantly jumping back and forth between being worried that I won't be able to do this in the foreseeable future and realizing that these systems don't solve the problems I'm solving.

37ef_ced3 5y ago
These systems don't solve the problems you're solving? Not yet, but give it a couple years. You will join the taxi drivers, and so will I.
- quonn 5y ago
  Yawn. Seriously, don‘t worry about it.
  - 37ef_ced3 5y ago
    First they came for Lee Sedol, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a professional game player. Then they came for the taxi drivers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a taxi driver. Then they came for the frontend programmers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a frontend programmer. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      > they came for me They tried, but there was not any taxi on sight
- ResearchCode 5y ago
  Mind that those taxis were all supposed to drive themselves since 2018.
  - ctdonath 5y ago
    Self driving cars have been in development for ~30 years. We’re remarkably close to taxis driving themselves.
    - cmoscoso 5y ago
      Give it a few decades.
      - zzzbra 5y ago
        the correct timeline
    - na85 5y ago
      In California maybe. We're a lot farther off from self driving taxis in places where it snows, like Toronto or Chicago.
- bumby 5y ago
  "insert a Russian book at one end and come out with an English book at the other," Doctor Dostert predicted that "five, perhaps three years hence, interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process in important functional areas of several languages may well be an accomplished fact."[1] -IBM Press Release 1954 regarding the 701 translator Predicting the problem will be solved in a few short years is the easy part. Execution to realize those predictions is much harder. [1] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_translator.html https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_translator....
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    It would be easy to translate any book into any other book (if every language was a one-to-one variant of each other with no differences in slang or metaphor or cultural backdrop that converts simple turns of phrases into a medley of aphorisms each deserving of their own short stories.) Other than that all you need is a camera, a computer and a dictionary.
    - bumby 5y ago
      If that were true, we should expect to be able to feed that initial quote through multiple translations with minimal meaning loss. Here is the result of translating that entire phrase from English -> Greek -> Serbian -> Creole -> English with a popular translating tool: "put a Russian book at one end and an English book at the other, ”predicted Dr. Dostert." It completely loses its original meaning not to mention the latter half of the quote. I think the constraint of "if every language was a one-to-one variant" is too constricting to be of use in the real world. The reason why this is hard is because that rule rarely holds true. Language is more about communicating concepts than just words. Translating one-to-one concepts is much harder because you need to understand context.
      - BizarroLand 5y ago
        Ok, I didn't think I was subtle but I was exceedingly sarcastic in my reply. I don't think any language is 1 to 1 with any other language, and expecting to be able to directly translate with a simple dictionary is patently absurd.
- qualudeheart 5y ago
  Neither of you is going to be a taxi driver because taxi driving is easier to automate than software engineering. Part of me is pessimistic about AI programming tools, part of me thinks they’ll only enhance the agency of existing programmers. Either way taxi driving is probably easier to automate and only requires modifications to Tesla’s self driving tech.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    > pessimistic about AI programming tools I suspect that these tools (if they do anything at all, anyway) will just make it harder to learn programming as a newcomer - just as all the advances in programming that have come about in my lifetime have. IDE's are great, until they do something you didn't expect, and then you have to understand what it is they're automating in order to figure out how to get them to do what it is you really want. Try explaining a Java classpath or dependency problem to somebody who's never opened a command-line terminal before. Docker is great - until it expects to find something that you happen to not have installed. What will probably happen here is that you and I will be fine, because we'll be able to effortlessly wield these new tools as they're just doing quickly what we used to do slowly, but new students to programming will have an even steeper hill to climb than we did.
- brundolf 5y ago
  The taxi drivers haven't been replaced by computers yet either.
- handrous 5y ago
  You mean we'll become taxi drivers, or we'll join them in unemployment due to self-driving cars? If the latter, that's great because it means I'm good for at least 20 more years of this career.
- dgb23 5y ago
  There are two things that I want to address here. For one I still call a Taxi when I need one. Happy to pay a bit of extra to get a professional driver. I don't want to bash on people using other services or people providing those, but it's not for me. Similarly my clients call me and my colleagues because they have a problem that needs solving, we solve it partly with programming because that is how we can solve it exactly, reliably and freely. We don't typically use low-code tools because they can trap us and they don't scale with our ability and understanding, and the productivity they promise is true for narrow uses. Our clients don't use them because it will and has taken them too much time to learn and use them with mediocre to (really) bad results, they want the problem to be taken care of and are willing to make a trade. The second point is that I simply refuse to stop adapting and learning. I'm happily adopting technology into my repertoire when the tradeoff is worth it. Analyzing and understanding those tradeoffs is part of the job. Expanding knowledge is part of the job. And this was always true for anyone who works in software related fields, our community always has had to adapt, adopt and evolve, balancing pragmatism and curiosity.

mLuby 5y ago

aicoder< What is a User? nocoder> a User registers with a unique email and a password of more than 16 characters, but not the weird ones just the normal ones. Oh, and on registration give the user a unique id. aicoder< So, email the user their unique id? nocoder> No, no, it's our little secret. aicoder< Would you like to design the registration form now? nocoder> God no, just make a standard form. With client-side validation. And server-side validation too, just to be safe. And give it some flair, we're a cool company after all. aicoder< (I don't get paid enough for this shit.) nocoder> Wait, what? aicoder< Would you like to add the flair now?

habibur 5y ago
That's Clippy, not AI.
- kongin 5y ago
  There isn't a difference.
tcmart14 5y ago
aicoder< Time to go on strike.

postalrat 5y ago

I have an idea and all the details. Are you available to do the easy part?

endisneigh 5y ago
maybe - what's your idea and the details? If your details leave any room for ambiguity then we'll have to call off the engagement :)
dkersten 5y ago
Just because its easy (relative to everything else, also it depends on what you mean by "all the details"), doesn't mean it doesn't take time and therefore money. You might argue, "well then generating the code is still a win" and it might be, but its a micro-optimization. If the AI can do the easy part but not the hard part, its akin to shaving seconds from an operation that takes hours. Its focusing on the wrong thing. If the AI could instead do the hard part, you would save a lot lot more effort and therefore money. Once that's done, by all means, automate the easy part too, but until then, the priorities are off. You might still say that this is worth it, saving those seconds still means you don't have to pay for them, even if the majority of the cost is still there. This is possibly true and all well and good. I don't really care, because I'll still have a job doing the hard part. The issue is that when these AI's are mentioned, the "hard part" is always glossed over, the AI is sold as this thing that will automate all development, where it really should be sold as a thing that shaves a little off the total cost of development, but that the hard and therefore expensive parts are still there. Sure, there are some development tasks that are fairly trivial and some companies that do mainly these might go out of business, but you still have the stories of oracle selling a website to the government agency for $100 million, because it has to interact with a slew of legacy systems, deal with ambiguous tax codes/regulations/requirements. There's a lot of tech out there that has these complexities and that's not going to be automated by these AI's for now, until they tackle "the hard part". A note on "all the details": if you truly have all the details (refined unambiguous requirements, detailed architecture with all the use cases and edge cases outlined and documented, technology tradeoffs investigated and documented etc etc) then great, it would be quick, easy and cheap to implement then. Unfortunately, what is more common, is that a non-developer will say this and "all the details" really isn't all the details at all and just the tip of the iceberg.

coding123 5y ago

Wouldn't it be easier to just have people open source a generic architected 20 million simultaneous user system with low latency and kubernetes/helm charts as a github project?

enobrev 5y ago
That's an interesting use of the word "easy".

thesz 5y ago

What you describe is an interpolation. It is a solution for what already exists. You can interpolate this long, bisecting various axis ranges that specify a problem (short messages using text, using emojis only, using pictures, using videos, using...). This is exactly the stuff NN are good for - after all, they are universal approximators for functions with bounded domain and bounded codomain. At some point of time you will need to extrapolate. Twitter was an extrapolation, Google was an extrapolation as well. Can a system trained to provide you with system design of a Twitter clone let you help with the design of, say, Medium?

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Twitter was an extrapolation, Google was an extrapolation as well. Were they? Twitter: "an absolutely minimal MySpace clone. Let users write posts to feed using SMS." Google: "Like AltaVista, but without all the bullshit - just the search box. For weighting, have it use this funny algorithm we figured out the other day." I'm not denying both were innovative - I just think the innovation, the "extrapolation", didn't happen at the technical/tactical level we're discussing here. All the pieces were already there, and used for similar things. The innovation was in figuring out that this particular shape of service is something people might want to use, and that it could make money.
- thesz 5y ago
  The extrapolations there are "limit on the post size" and "this funny algorithm". That "just the search box" thing would not go anywhere without that algorithm. I guess the "search box only" design decision was a kind of thing that happened to ARM: its' founder said that ARM was able to give its' chip developers the thing that neither Intel nor IBM was able to give - the absence of money.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > The extrapolations there are "limit on the post size" and "this funny algorithm". I disagree. "Limit on the post size" was not arbitrary, it was a technical limitation - Twitter was created as "a social network, but for SMS". SMS was a well-known technology back then. As for "this funny algorithm", in context of the dialogue 'endisneigh posted, the algorithm is just an input. "Hey, AI, use that thing as a ranking function". The "extrapolative" work would be the invention of the algorithm itself.

DonHopkins 5y ago

It could even design all the dark UI patterns and dopamine feedback loops and freemium economics and user segmentations and privacy invasions and personal data exploitations and penis-swastika logos for you!

BizarroLand 5y ago
Why does it have to be penis swastikas? And furthermore, why has no one investigated the possibility of vagina swastikas? Aren't we being a bit sexist in the midst of all of this hyper-racist fascist ideology?
- Mirioron 5y ago
  People like drawing penises and swastikas. I think it's because they're simple shapes, but also taboo. A bot might very well imitate that.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Slack's new logo is a penis swastika https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playdoh.html https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playd... How Slack’s New Logo Became a Lightning Rod For Everything Bad On The Internet https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-logo-design-backlash https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-... The Penis Swastika Mistake https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Penis%20Swastika%20Mistake https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Penis%... >The rookie mistake of trying too hard when designing a logo and you end up making one that has either a penis, a swastika, or both, included in your design. ...Or one swastika and four penises.
- unicornmama 5y ago
  Well Tesla’s logo is based off an IUD…
aasasd 5y ago
> penis-swastika Well, my curiosity quickly led to the discovery that penises and swastikas have a large overlap with furries, by the way of the Rule34 site. Which finally made me realize that furries are probably the catch-all category on Rule34: making another ‘rule 34’ pic? well just slap furries on it, and you got that audience covered at almost no additional cost. The same way as incest titles are everywhere in porn, since it costs nothing to phrase every single title that way regardless of actual content.

gremloni 5y ago

I don’t agree that writing code is the easy part. Making changes to and maintaining a huge code base is no joke.

shados 5y ago
That kind of makes the point. Writing the code is the easy part. Designing a system that's easy to maintain is hard. But a lot of that is decided before you write your first line.
IncRnd 5y ago
That's a perfect example! There is such a huge code case, because writing the code was easy to do.
habibur 5y ago
Good point. AI not only has to write the code, but also has to understand what existing code does, and then change it on request. If it doesn't understand its own code -- some human has to do that stuff. And maintenance is 90% of the work.
gregjor 5y ago
It’s no joke, but writing the code is not the hard part. Reading the code, understanding it, thinking through the states and control flow — those are the hard parts of software maintenance. I do it for a living. 80% of my billable time is reading and testing code. Once I know what to write I’ve got to the easy part.

pasquinelli 5y ago

what if, instead of make twitter, you asked it to make money? let the computer decide what to make, and collect the profit.

AlexCoventry 5y ago
"Computer, please conquer Australia for me by dinnertime."

Areading314 5y ago

This is a really interesting idea. It would be very useful to be able to lego together some components and get a rough estimate of how it would scale and what the technical performance would be (to first order).

elforce002 5y ago

Now this I'll pay money to use. What will happen to software architects though?

xwdv 5y ago

Jokes still on you, because that’s still the easy part. The hard part is still running the service, dealing with scalability problems, security, bugs, customer support, new features, content moderation at scale, legal compliance, meeting service level agreements, supporting multiple platforms, etc… If only architecting the platform and writing the code was all we needed to do… every developer would be doing it.

Nursie 5y ago

This is circling towards what we do as computer programmers - specify system behaviour in minute detail. You can move it to a higher level, and there are usually tradeoffs there, and perhaps AI can help mitigate some of those. But in the end, you need a way to specify the system behaviour in explicit detail. Which is where software developers come in. That's not going to go away because AI comes along, AFAICT, though it may (as it already has many times) change form or grammar here and there. That interactive prompt system is going to get boring fast, so we'll script it. And then build on that and ...

systemvoltage 5y ago

> "Make yourself" Would this violate something in computer science theory?

dpq 5y ago

That's what folks at hyperc.com are aiming to solve.

bserge 5y ago

Yeah, an AI boss, coworker/partner, friend or all in one would be great.

8eye 5y ago

we’re going towards hive processing, everything in the room will communicate in an unrealistic way, the room will load balance the processing, routing and prioritizing what gets done when. IoT but on steroids. we’re not even a fraction of where we can go. i def think something like what you are talking about will be a thing some day, programmers will be people who know how to explain things really well so an AI can do exactly what the summoner wants. anyways, it’ll happen. not sure when but it will happen within my lifetime