3 ms·

This article is just the latest in the long history of lamenting the laziness of the youth

anotherhue 2y ago
> all these are idlers whom the Clouds provide a living for, because they sing them in their verses. The Clouds By Aristophanes Written 419 B.C.E
dartos 2y ago
I don’t think so. Being lazy and never developing foundational knowledge is different. New devs are expected to have experience using AI coding tools. If they’re expected to have that, why wouldn’t they trust it? If you trust a code generator, why dig deeper?
- tombert 2y ago
  People said similar things when C compilers became decent. Turns out that we still have people who know how to write good code, even good assembly code.
  - dartos 2y ago
    I’ve heard this comparison between C compilers and LLMs and I don’t think it’s similar. there’s a direct relationship to C code and the resulting assembly. The C language was specifically designed so that language constructs were converted into the intended assembly anyway. C didn’t obfuscate the problem of writing code, just allowed us to operate at a higher, but still sound, level. LLMs are not an abstraction like C. You aren’t going through a sound, tractable process going from natural language to code. You’re going through a black box. It’s no longer a new abstraction on top of a fundamental idea. There is no understanding of anything being developed. Prompts aren’t even deterministic wrt the output of the LLM, so even how to prompt a given model isn’t something that can be understood or totally predicted. It’s just like SEO hacks.
    - hnfong 2y ago
      While C compilers are technically not "black boxes", if you looked at lawyerly discussions about UB I don't think you can in full conscience say that `gcc -O2` is much better than a LLM.
      - dartos 2y ago
        They’re not black boxes at all. The code is all there and is deterministic. Sorry, but the peculiarities of one optimization level on one implementation of C do not affect my point at all.
        hnfong 2y ago
        I already said they are technically not black boxes. We are not in disagreement here. The fact that code is all there and deterministic isn't sufficient. People use newer versions of compilers and you can't predict what the people who write compilers will do (people are black boxes). The compilers may do something you don't expect but still conform to the spec. The point is that there is no one implementation of C. And the same is true for any other language too (to a lesser extent). Unless you're coding against very specific versions of OS and compiler and runtime environment, you don't have code to inspect. You are not inspecting all the underlying dependencies when you write your code. You just assume they work. It doesn't matter whether they are black boxes if you don't routinely inspect the boxes. Perhaps you do, but for most people they don't. So it doesn't matter as much.
        dartos 2y ago
        > I already said they are technically not black boxes. We are not in disagreement here. I’m saying they are not black boxes at all. Not just “technically” > The point is that there is no one implementation of C. And the same is true for any other language too (to a lesser extent). That doesn’t matter for my argument. > It doesn't matter whether they are black boxes if you don't routinely inspect the boxes. Perhaps you do, but for most people they don't. So it doesn't matter as much. It does matter. That’s my whole point. For two main reasons: First, you have the option to understand how a compiler translates C to assembly. You do NOT have that option with LLMs With a compiler, you are abstracting the underlying machine code, but you’re not hiding it entirely. Secondly, with an LLM there’s no tractable connection between your prompt and your code. That’s a huge issue when it comes to understanding the resulting program. Imagine a world where LLMs turn raw language into assembly (or, more realistically, LLVM IR) How would you reason about your resulting program? You could give the same prompt to the same LLM and get wildly different resulting code, since LLMs are nondeterministic. How would you debug? How would you ensure that small changes to your LLM prompt doesn’t change parts of your resulting code that worked well? How would you even understand what your program is doing? You couldn’t do any of those things, because there’s no deterministic relationship between the prompt and the resulting program.
gjsman-1000 2y ago
While a trope, it is also statistically proven that the youth of this generation are doing worse, by almost every metric, than prior generations; including but not limited to achieving adult milestones years later than normal, record high percentages of medication distribution, and (for what it’s worth) a historically low percentage of young people that could even enter the military if they wanted to, at just 1 in 7.
- GenerocUsername 2y ago
  This. Just because things are always getting worse does not mean things are not literally at their worst
  - copperx 2y ago
    Yes. A point can be both a local and global maximum.
- deeg 2y ago
  Gen Z also has a lower crime rate, less teen birth rates, and less illegal drugs and alcohol consumption when compared to previous generations at the same age.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Yes; but are we silly enough here to believe that it’s because they have some newfound sense of morality that is guiding their actions? No. They are so deep into other things that the old vices have lost their appeal. I argue that what’s really happening is that this is the most introverted generation (lockdowns playing a part). Home is comfortable, safe, entertaining, free of judgement, and has never been less boring; the basement dweller stereotype has never been more real.
    - deeg 2y ago
      I didn't say anything about their morality, just that by some statistics gen z is better than previous generations. They are not better or worse. Just different. Their music sucks, though.
ok_dad 2y ago
I love how ten years ago it was folks complaining about juniors using Google to code, this articles first suggestion was juniors need to Google more. Twenty years ago it was that Python was not as good as learning C or something. Thirty, it was probably folks lamenting juniors can’t code x86 asm.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Nah, they are still whining here, on Hacker News, about how a 91 KB webpage is too large to be considered disciplined. (Literally saw that comment earlier today.)
  - oguz-ismail 2y ago
    > 91 KB webpage If it's all code too large indeed
computerthings 2y ago
Please don't forget to tell us about them in great detail, Socrates and all that. After all that supposed counter-argument to anything and everything only gets brought up every single time when anyone suggests something got worse.
- y1n0 2y ago
  That's because it's true.
  - viccis 2y ago
    It's only true if you are bickering about aesthetics of an argument versus its content.
  - computerthings 2y ago
    It's also true that for every thing that turned out to be horrible, there were people saying "this is gonna be great". Do you then also also dismiss all optimism? Why is this fallacy only employed in one direction? It's not an argument either way, it's just spam, but I wonder why it only ever gets deployed in one direction.
    - y1n0 2y ago
      Look, when you get to my age, you've literally seen it happen through multiple generations. As a kid growing up, parents thought we were the lost generation. Then I started growing up and I thought the next generation was the lost one. Then they grew up and they think the next one is doomed. It's so absurd to see it happening over and over. And everybody always thinks they have the unique and correct perspective.
      - computerthings 2y ago
        I've seen it happen even as a young person, and still saw the fallacy of this "argument". I've been arguing with people twice my age who used it to silence any criticism of trends. And it's totally an online thing, too. It's usually used to dismiss a thing without looking at the thing. Because if you could dismiss the thing by looking at it, you wouldn't need that old chestnut. I don't blame young people for having less to look forward to than previous generations. I don't blame them for being unable to code, and so on. Blaming them for their lot is totally orthogonal to even having a honest look at what that lot is. I never thought of a new generation failing the one's before it, being "lost" -- rather the other way around. We failed them. And by the same token, I also never dismissed people as being old and knowing nothing even when I was 20. I simply never once rolled that way, and I see nothing interesting, much less truthful, coming from it.
rbongers 2y ago
I don't think it's quite the same. We live in an inbetween time - AI is not quite there yet. AI struggles with knowledge from after its training date (so it can't help very well for anything relating to new versions of libraries) and often just generally gets things wrong or comes up with suboptimal answers. It's still only optimized to create answers that look correct, after all. With these problems, someone on the team still needs to understand or be able to figure out what's going on. And dangit if it isn't getting hard to hire for that. And the day that AI can actually replace the work of junior devs is just going to cause more complications for the software industry. Who will get the experience to become senior devs? Who will direct them? And even if those people also get replaced eventually, we will still probably have more awkward inbetween times with their own problems. Can't say it's not convenient, but no use pretending the challenges don't exist.

> all these are idlers whom the Clouds provide a living for, because they sing them in their verses. The Clouds By Aristophanes Written 419 B.C.E

dartos 2y ago

I don’t think so. Being lazy and never developing foundational knowledge is different. New devs are expected to have experience using AI coding tools. If they’re expected to have that, why wouldn’t they trust it? If you trust a code generator, why dig deeper?

tombert 2y ago
People said similar things when C compilers became decent. Turns out that we still have people who know how to write good code, even good assembly code.
- dartos 2y ago
  I’ve heard this comparison between C compilers and LLMs and I don’t think it’s similar. there’s a direct relationship to C code and the resulting assembly. The C language was specifically designed so that language constructs were converted into the intended assembly anyway. C didn’t obfuscate the problem of writing code, just allowed us to operate at a higher, but still sound, level. LLMs are not an abstraction like C. You aren’t going through a sound, tractable process going from natural language to code. You’re going through a black box. It’s no longer a new abstraction on top of a fundamental idea. There is no understanding of anything being developed. Prompts aren’t even deterministic wrt the output of the LLM, so even how to prompt a given model isn’t something that can be understood or totally predicted. It’s just like SEO hacks.
  - hnfong 2y ago
    While C compilers are technically not "black boxes", if you looked at lawyerly discussions about UB I don't think you can in full conscience say that `gcc -O2` is much better than a LLM.
    - dartos 2y ago
      They’re not black boxes at all. The code is all there and is deterministic. Sorry, but the peculiarities of one optimization level on one implementation of C do not affect my point at all.
      - hnfong 2y ago
        I already said they are technically not black boxes. We are not in disagreement here. The fact that code is all there and deterministic isn't sufficient. People use newer versions of compilers and you can't predict what the people who write compilers will do (people are black boxes). The compilers may do something you don't expect but still conform to the spec. The point is that there is no one implementation of C. And the same is true for any other language too (to a lesser extent). Unless you're coding against very specific versions of OS and compiler and runtime environment, you don't have code to inspect. You are not inspecting all the underlying dependencies when you write your code. You just assume they work. It doesn't matter whether they are black boxes if you don't routinely inspect the boxes. Perhaps you do, but for most people they don't. So it doesn't matter as much.
        dartos 2y ago
        > I already said they are technically not black boxes. We are not in disagreement here. I’m saying they are not black boxes at all. Not just “technically” > The point is that there is no one implementation of C. And the same is true for any other language too (to a lesser extent). That doesn’t matter for my argument. > It doesn't matter whether they are black boxes if you don't routinely inspect the boxes. Perhaps you do, but for most people they don't. So it doesn't matter as much. It does matter. That’s my whole point. For two main reasons: First, you have the option to understand how a compiler translates C to assembly. You do NOT have that option with LLMs With a compiler, you are abstracting the underlying machine code, but you’re not hiding it entirely. Secondly, with an LLM there’s no tractable connection between your prompt and your code. That’s a huge issue when it comes to understanding the resulting program. Imagine a world where LLMs turn raw language into assembly (or, more realistically, LLVM IR) How would you reason about your resulting program? You could give the same prompt to the same LLM and get wildly different resulting code, since LLMs are nondeterministic. How would you debug? How would you ensure that small changes to your LLM prompt doesn’t change parts of your resulting code that worked well? How would you even understand what your program is doing? You couldn’t do any of those things, because there’s no deterministic relationship between the prompt and the resulting program.

gjsman-1000 2y ago

While a trope, it is also statistically proven that the youth of this generation are doing worse, by almost every metric, than prior generations; including but not limited to achieving adult milestones years later than normal, record high percentages of medication distribution, and (for what it’s worth) a historically low percentage of young people that could even enter the military if they wanted to, at just 1 in 7.

GenerocUsername 2y ago
This. Just because things are always getting worse does not mean things are not literally at their worst
- copperx 2y ago
  Yes. A point can be both a local and global maximum.
deeg 2y ago
Gen Z also has a lower crime rate, less teen birth rates, and less illegal drugs and alcohol consumption when compared to previous generations at the same age.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Yes; but are we silly enough here to believe that it’s because they have some newfound sense of morality that is guiding their actions? No. They are so deep into other things that the old vices have lost their appeal. I argue that what’s really happening is that this is the most introverted generation (lockdowns playing a part). Home is comfortable, safe, entertaining, free of judgement, and has never been less boring; the basement dweller stereotype has never been more real.
  - deeg 2y ago
    I didn't say anything about their morality, just that by some statistics gen z is better than previous generations. They are not better or worse. Just different. Their music sucks, though.

ok_dad 2y ago

I love how ten years ago it was folks complaining about juniors using Google to code, this articles first suggestion was juniors need to Google more. Twenty years ago it was that Python was not as good as learning C or something. Thirty, it was probably folks lamenting juniors can’t code x86 asm.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
Nah, they are still whining here, on Hacker News, about how a 91 KB webpage is too large to be considered disciplined. (Literally saw that comment earlier today.)
- oguz-ismail 2y ago
  > 91 KB webpage If it's all code too large indeed

computerthings 2y ago

Please don't forget to tell us about them in great detail, Socrates and all that. After all that supposed counter-argument to anything and everything only gets brought up every single time when anyone suggests something got worse.

y1n0 2y ago
That's because it's true.
- viccis 2y ago
  It's only true if you are bickering about aesthetics of an argument versus its content.
- computerthings 2y ago
  It's also true that for every thing that turned out to be horrible, there were people saying "this is gonna be great". Do you then also also dismiss all optimism? Why is this fallacy only employed in one direction? It's not an argument either way, it's just spam, but I wonder why it only ever gets deployed in one direction.
  - y1n0 2y ago
    Look, when you get to my age, you've literally seen it happen through multiple generations. As a kid growing up, parents thought we were the lost generation. Then I started growing up and I thought the next generation was the lost one. Then they grew up and they think the next one is doomed. It's so absurd to see it happening over and over. And everybody always thinks they have the unique and correct perspective.
    - computerthings 2y ago
      I've seen it happen even as a young person, and still saw the fallacy of this "argument". I've been arguing with people twice my age who used it to silence any criticism of trends. And it's totally an online thing, too. It's usually used to dismiss a thing without looking at the thing. Because if you could dismiss the thing by looking at it, you wouldn't need that old chestnut. I don't blame young people for having less to look forward to than previous generations. I don't blame them for being unable to code, and so on. Blaming them for their lot is totally orthogonal to even having a honest look at what that lot is. I never thought of a new generation failing the one's before it, being "lost" -- rather the other way around. We failed them. And by the same token, I also never dismissed people as being old and knowing nothing even when I was 20. I simply never once rolled that way, and I see nothing interesting, much less truthful, coming from it.

rbongers 2y ago

I don't think it's quite the same. We live in an inbetween time - AI is not quite there yet. AI struggles with knowledge from after its training date (so it can't help very well for anything relating to new versions of libraries) and often just generally gets things wrong or comes up with suboptimal answers. It's still only optimized to create answers that look correct, after all. With these problems, someone on the team still needs to understand or be able to figure out what's going on. And dangit if it isn't getting hard to hire for that. And the day that AI can actually replace the work of junior devs is just going to cause more complications for the software industry. Who will get the experience to become senior devs? Who will direct them? And even if those people also get replaced eventually, we will still probably have more awkward inbetween times with their own problems. Can't say it's not convenient, but no use pretending the challenges don't exist.