3 ms·

> I weep for the juniors that will be absolutely crushed by this garbage. This is the real danger of this sort of thing. When your Copilot or whatever are good

> I weep for the juniors that will be absolutely crushed by this garbage. This is the real danger of this sort of thing. When your Copilot or whatever are good enough that they replace what is vastly superior for purely economic reasons. I wrote about this trend applied to the unfortunately inevitable doom of the voice acting industry in favour of text-to-speech models a couple of months ago, using my favourite examples of typesetting, book binding and music engraving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38491203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38491203. But when it’s development itself that gets hollowed out like this, I’m not sure what the end state is, because it’s the developers who led past instances of supplanting. Some form of societal decline and fall doesn’t feel implausible. (That sentence really warrants expansion into multiple paragraphs, but I’m not going to. It’s a big topic.)

m3047 3y ago
Yes, like desktop publishing compared to traditional printing. Its output is comparatively shitty but average people will settle for it on account of its democratization. My context was feature factory web dev versus low / no code rather than autocomplete versus solo author. By democratization, I mean that it enables one-one where previously there was only one-many: instead of the inversion of experience where the same unique app experience is shared by millions, a technology allows the interface to be tailored for an audience of one or dozens: missing toes and fingers, color blindness, particularly difficult and unique operating conditions, etc. Given those unique constraints the mediocrity provides at least some preferable solution. The downside of this is that it sets the floor a lot lower, and people who would never have even tried or contemplated trying typesetting will dabble with desktop publishing to achieve their ends. Somebody on here gifted me with the word "procrustean" and I've taken it and put it in my Minsky fish tank. There are many reasons to eschew the trusted experts model: somebody who has made heads for pins for twenty years is incontrovertably an expert, but who cares? Our uncanny valley appears to be only a local minimum. [PS, nobody understood my point but I thank them for the honest feedback.]
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  On your P.S.: I contemplated your point being “I can cope with this stuff and know when to correct it or give up on it, but what chance does a beginner have?” which I think is what you actually meant, but ended up deciding to write what I wrote anyway, because it ends up feeling fairly connected to me, though from a slightly different angle. I’m in India at present, and a number of 18–25 year-olds ask me about learning to code (commonly because their college or University is teaching C/C++ and they have no idea). Somehow, they have more access to a computer than ever before, because most of them carry one on their person all day, and more information about this task than ever before, yet their computer, a phone, has been dumbed-down and locked-up in such a way that they can’t really use it to learn to code, because that’s something you do on Computers, and those are just on the campus or your laptop, Chris, or things like that. Easier for the simple tasks, so that the more complex tasks that enough in a previous generation used to work for just don’t get reached, leaving over time perhaps a chasm, and fewer really skilled people in a society that may depend on them more than previously. The lower floor helps some who wouldn’t have got started before, but discourages others by making things too easy so they never find the challenge they seek.

m3047 3y ago

Yes, like desktop publishing compared to traditional printing. Its output is comparatively shitty but average people will settle for it on account of its democratization. My context was feature factory web dev versus low / no code rather than autocomplete versus solo author. By democratization, I mean that it enables one-one where previously there was only one-many: instead of the inversion of experience where the same unique app experience is shared by millions, a technology allows the interface to be tailored for an audience of one or dozens: missing toes and fingers, color blindness, particularly difficult and unique operating conditions, etc. Given those unique constraints the mediocrity provides at least some preferable solution. The downside of this is that it sets the floor a lot lower, and people who would never have even tried or contemplated trying typesetting will dabble with desktop publishing to achieve their ends. Somebody on here gifted me with the word "procrustean" and I've taken it and put it in my Minsky fish tank. There are many reasons to eschew the trusted experts model: somebody who has made heads for pins for twenty years is incontrovertably an expert, but who cares? Our uncanny valley appears to be only a local minimum. [PS, nobody understood my point but I thank them for the honest feedback.]

chrismorgan 3y ago
On your P.S.: I contemplated your point being “I can cope with this stuff and know when to correct it or give up on it, but what chance does a beginner have?” which I think is what you actually meant, but ended up deciding to write what I wrote anyway, because it ends up feeling fairly connected to me, though from a slightly different angle. I’m in India at present, and a number of 18–25 year-olds ask me about learning to code (commonly because their college or University is teaching C/C++ and they have no idea). Somehow, they have more access to a computer than ever before, because most of them carry one on their person all day, and more information about this task than ever before, yet their computer, a phone, has been dumbed-down and locked-up in such a way that they can’t really use it to learn to code, because that’s something you do on Computers, and those are just on the campus or your laptop, Chris, or things like that. Easier for the simple tasks, so that the more complex tasks that enough in a previous generation used to work for just don’t get reached, leaving over time perhaps a chasm, and fewer really skilled people in a society that may depend on them more than previously. The lower floor helps some who wouldn’t have got started before, but discourages others by making things too easy so they never find the challenge they seek.