5 ms·

To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them b

To me it's all abstraction. I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them but I'm happy to work on the new thing that uses what's already there. This is no different than many things. I could grow a tree and cut it into wood but I don't. I could buy wood and nails and brackets and make furniture but I don't. I instead just fill my house/apartment with stuff already made and still feel like it's mine. I made it. I decided what's in it. I didn't have to make it all from scratch. For me, lots of programming is the same. I just want to assemble the pieces > When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. Popular and highly acclaimed games not at crap because they didn't write their own physics engine (Zelda uses Havok) or their own game engine (Plenty of great games use Unreal or Unity)

Krssst 9mo ago
OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.
- refactor_master 9mo ago
  But the code you’re writing is guard railed by your oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking. So whether you’re writing the spec code out by hand or ask an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is considered a means to an end, which is what the post above yours was getting at.
  - skydhash 9mo ago
    Tests and type checking are often highway-wide guardrails when the path you want to take is like a tightrope. Also the code is not a means to an end. It’s going to be run somewhere doing stuff someone wants to do reliably and precisely. The overall goal was ever to invest some programmer time and salary in order to free more time for others. Not for everyone to start babysitting stuff.
- signatoremo 9mo ago
  > They obey a specification developers know Which spec? Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? You can’t even know that for sure if you roll your own code, with no 3rd party libraries. Bugs are by definition issues arise when developers expect they code to do one thing, but it does another thing, because of unforeseen combination of factors. Yet we all are ok with that. That’s why we accept AI code. They work well enough.
  - skydhash 9mo ago
    > Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? There can be. But you’d have to map the libraries to opcodes and then count the cycles. That’s what people do when they care about that particular optimization. They measure and make guaranties.
    - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
      That’s not realistic with any processor that does branch prediction, cache hits vs cache misses etc
      - skydhash 9mo ago
        You can easily compute the worst cases. All the details are in the specs of the processor.
        raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
        Assuming also that you are not running on top of an operating system, running in a VM with “noisy neighbors”… I haven’t counted cycles since programming assembly on a 65C02 where you cooks save a clock cycle by accessing memory in the first page of memory - two opcodes to do LDA $02 instead of LDA $0201
        skydhash 9mo ago
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  Yes but developers don’t have a deterministic interface. I still had to be careful about writing out my specs and make sure they were followed. At least I don’t have to watch my tone when my two mid level ticket taking developers - Claude and Codex - do something stupid. They also do it a lot faster
globular-toast 9mo ago
There are two stages to becoming a decent programmer: first you learn to use abstraction, then you learn when not to use abstraction. Trying to find the right level is the art. Once you learn the tools of the trade and can do abstraction, it's natural to want to abstract everything. Most programmers go through such a phase. But sometimes things really are distinct and trying to find an abstraction that does both will never be satisfactory. When building a house there are generally a few distinct trades that do the work: bricklayers, joiners, plumbers, electricians etc. You could try to abstract them all: it's all just joining stuff together isn't it? But something would be lost. The dangers of working with electricity are completely different to working with bricks. On the other hand, if people were too specialised it wouldn't work either. You wouldn't expect a whole gang of electricians, one who can only do lighting, one who can only do sockets, one who can only do wiring etc. After centuries of experience we've found a few trades that work well together. So, yes, it's all just abstraction, but you can go too far.
- throwaway132448 9mo ago
  Well said, great analogy. Sometimes the level of abstraction feels arbitrary - you have to understand the circumstances that led there to see why it's not.
- knollimar 9mo ago
  In higher end work they do have specialized lighting, branch power, and feeder electricians. And among feeder even special ones for medium voltage etc
- archagon 9mo ago
  AI is not an abstraction.
tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
>I instead just fill my house/apartment with stuff already made and still feel like it's mine. I'm starting to wonder if we lose something in all this convenience. Perhaps my life is better because I cook my own food, wash my own dishes, chop my own firewood, drive my own car, write my own software. Outwardly the results look better the more I outsource but inwardly I'm not so sure. On the subject of furnishing your house the IKEA effect seems to confirm this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
yason 9mo ago
The creative process is not dependent on the abstraction. > For me, lots of programming is the same. I just want to assemble the pieces How did those pieces came to be? By someone assembling other pieces or by someone crafting them together out of nowhere because nobody else had written them by the time? Of course you reuse other parts and abstractions to do whatever things that you're not working on but each time you do something that hasn't been done before you can't but engage the creative process, even if you're sitting on top of 50 years worth of abstractions. In other words, what a programmer essentially has is a playfield. And whether the playfield is a stack of transistors or coding agents, when you program you create something new even if it's defined and built in terms of the playfield.
jstanley 9mo ago
> I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them Maybe, but beware assuming you could do something you haven't actually tried to do. Everything is easy in the abstract.
- uhubgghbb 9mo ago
  [dead]
Hendrikto 9mo ago
> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.
- heliumtera 9mo ago
  And if he did, why would I prefer using his prompt instead of mine? "Write a gangster movie that I like", instead of "...a movie this other guy likes". But because this is not the case, we appreciate Tarantino more than we appreciate gangster movies. It is about the process.
  - dropofwill 9mo ago
    This is exactly the process happening in the music space with Suno. Go to their subreddit, they all talk about how they only listen to ‘their’ songs, for the exact reasons you list. Its bleak out there.
    - heliumtera 9mo ago
      It is very different with music. Music and images fall into "just shit something and I don't care what is is" category. Most people prompting for things in this category will be satisfied with anything, they might not admit, but the degrees of freedom the model has is infinite. Now when you pin the output, let's say a character you generated, and ask for modifications WHILE KEEPING lots of characteristics, you reduce the degrees of freedom from infinite to a small, very constrained, set of states. There are workarounds but natively llms can't really do this. You ask the model to rotate an image, the hair becomes blue and the sword becames an axe. With music this is much more pronounced because most people are musically illiterate, so even the basic mistakes while dragging characteristics over diffs becomes invisible. It's an interesting phenomenon I agree, but it says more about lack of taste and illiteracy of the common individual. But on the point of "thinking hard", with music and artistic production in general, individuals (human with soul, not npc) crave for ideas and perspective. It is the play, the relationship between ideas that are hard to vocalize and describe but can be provocative. Because we cannot describe or understand, we have no choice other than provoke into another a similar contemplation. But make no mistake, nobody is enjoying llm slop. They have fantasies that now they can produce something of value, or delegate this production. If this becomes true, instantly they lose and everyone goes directly to the source. Art is specifically about communicating the inconceivable, cannot be delegated. If the tool is sufficient to produce art, then the expression is of the tool itself, now they ARE.
cowboylowrez 9mo ago
When I read discussions about this sort of thing, I often find that folks look harder for similarities and patterns but once they succeed here, they ignore the differences. AI in particular is so full of this "pattern matching" style of thinking that the really significance of this tech, ie., how absolutely new and different it is, yeah it just sort of goes ignored, or even worse, machines get "pattern matched" into humans and folks argue from that point of view lol witness all the "new musicians" who vibe code disco hits, I'll invariably see the argument that AIs train on existing music just like humans do so whats the big deal? But these arguments and the OP's article do reinforce that AI rots brains. Even my sparing use of googles gemini and my interaction with the bots here have really dinged my ability to do simple math.
Trasmatta 9mo ago
Did you not read the post? You're talking from the space of the Builder while neglecting the Thinker. That's fine for some people, but not for others.
lakatadam 9mo ago
I really appreciate this sentiment. It feels absolutely overwhelming the pace at which new tools and AI protocols are being released, leaving a feeling of constantly falling behind. But approaching from the other end, I can just make things that I do come up with and explore the new protocols only if I can't do the thing with what I've already grasped.
munificent 9mo ago
> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. One of the reasons Barry Lyndon is over 50 years old and still looks like no other movie today is because Kubrick tracked down a few lenses originally designed for NASA and had custom mounts built for them to use with cinema cameras. https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-famous-f0-7-lenses/ https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa... > Popular and highly acclaimed games not at crap because they didn't write their own physics engine (Zelda uses Havok) Super Mario Bros is known for having a surprisingly subtle and complex physics system that enabled the game to feel both challenging and fair even for players very new to consoles. Celeste a newer game also famous for being very difficult yet not feeling punishing does something similar: https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_towerfall_physics/index.html https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_towerfall_p... > or their own game engine (Plenty of great games use Unreal or Unity) And Minecraft doesn't, which is why few other games at the time of its release felt and played like it. You're correct that no one builds everything from scratch all the time. However, if all you ever do is cobble a few pre-made things together, I think you'll discover that nothing you make is ever that interesting or enduring in value. Sure, it can be useful, and satisfying. But the kinds of things that really leave a mark on people, that affect them deeply, always have at least some aspect where the creator got obsessive and went off the deep end and did their own thing from scratch. Further, you'll never learn what a transformative experience it can be to be that creator who gets obsessive about a thing. You'll miss out on discovering the weird parts of your own soul that are more fascinated by some corner of the universe than anyone else is. I have a lot of regrets in my life, but I don't regret the various times I've decided I've deeply dug into some thing and doing it from scratch. Often, that has turned out later to be some of the most long-term useful things I've done even though it seemed like a selfish indulgence at the time. Of course, it's your life. But consider that there may be a hidden cost to always skimming along across the tops of the stacks of things that already exist out there. There is growth in the depths.
- globular-toast 9mo ago
  Great comment. One of the best in the thread. I do hope we can get over this endless derivative phase and see some people digging deeper again.

Krssst 9mo ago

OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.

refactor_master 9mo ago
But the code you’re writing is guard railed by your oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking. So whether you’re writing the spec code out by hand or ask an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is considered a means to an end, which is what the post above yours was getting at.
- skydhash 9mo ago
  Tests and type checking are often highway-wide guardrails when the path you want to take is like a tightrope. Also the code is not a means to an end. It’s going to be run somewhere doing stuff someone wants to do reliably and precisely. The overall goal was ever to invest some programmer time and salary in order to free more time for others. Not for everyone to start babysitting stuff.
signatoremo 9mo ago
> They obey a specification developers know Which spec? Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? You can’t even know that for sure if you roll your own code, with no 3rd party libraries. Bugs are by definition issues arise when developers expect they code to do one thing, but it does another thing, because of unforeseen combination of factors. Yet we all are ok with that. That’s why we accept AI code. They work well enough.
- skydhash 9mo ago
  > Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? There can be. But you’d have to map the libraries to opcodes and then count the cycles. That’s what people do when they care about that particular optimization. They measure and make guaranties.
  - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
    That’s not realistic with any processor that does branch prediction, cache hits vs cache misses etc
    - skydhash 9mo ago
      You can easily compute the worst cases. All the details are in the specs of the processor.
      - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
        Assuming also that you are not running on top of an operating system, running in a VM with “noisy neighbors”… I haven’t counted cycles since programming assembly on a 65C02 where you cooks save a clock cycle by accessing memory in the first page of memory - two opcodes to do LDA $02 instead of LDA $0201
        skydhash 9mo ago
raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
Yes but developers don’t have a deterministic interface. I still had to be careful about writing out my specs and make sure they were followed. At least I don’t have to watch my tone when my two mid level ticket taking developers - Claude and Codex - do something stupid. They also do it a lot faster

globular-toast 9mo ago

There are two stages to becoming a decent programmer: first you learn to use abstraction, then you learn when not to use abstraction. Trying to find the right level is the art. Once you learn the tools of the trade and can do abstraction, it's natural to want to abstract everything. Most programmers go through such a phase. But sometimes things really are distinct and trying to find an abstraction that does both will never be satisfactory. When building a house there are generally a few distinct trades that do the work: bricklayers, joiners, plumbers, electricians etc. You could try to abstract them all: it's all just joining stuff together isn't it? But something would be lost. The dangers of working with electricity are completely different to working with bricks. On the other hand, if people were too specialised it wouldn't work either. You wouldn't expect a whole gang of electricians, one who can only do lighting, one who can only do sockets, one who can only do wiring etc. After centuries of experience we've found a few trades that work well together. So, yes, it's all just abstraction, but you can go too far.

throwaway132448 9mo ago
Well said, great analogy. Sometimes the level of abstraction feels arbitrary - you have to understand the circumstances that led there to see why it's not.
knollimar 9mo ago
In higher end work they do have specialized lighting, branch power, and feeder electricians. And among feeder even special ones for medium voltage etc
archagon 9mo ago
AI is not an abstraction.

tonyedgecombe 9mo ago

>I instead just fill my house/apartment with stuff already made and still feel like it's mine. I'm starting to wonder if we lose something in all this convenience. Perhaps my life is better because I cook my own food, wash my own dishes, chop my own firewood, drive my own car, write my own software. Outwardly the results look better the more I outsource but inwardly I'm not so sure. On the subject of furnishing your house the IKEA effect seems to confirm this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

yason 9mo ago

The creative process is not dependent on the abstraction. > For me, lots of programming is the same. I just want to assemble the pieces How did those pieces came to be? By someone assembling other pieces or by someone crafting them together out of nowhere because nobody else had written them by the time? Of course you reuse other parts and abstractions to do whatever things that you're not working on but each time you do something that hasn't been done before you can't but engage the creative process, even if you're sitting on top of 50 years worth of abstractions. In other words, what a programmer essentially has is a playfield. And whether the playfield is a stack of transistors or coding agents, when you program you create something new even if it's defined and built in terms of the playfield.

jstanley 9mo ago

> I didn't write my own OS. I didn't write my own compiler. I didn't write the standard library. I just use them. I could write them Maybe, but beware assuming you could do something you haven't actually tried to do. Everything is easy in the abstract.

uhubgghbb 9mo ago
[dead]

Hendrikto 9mo ago

> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.

heliumtera 9mo ago
And if he did, why would I prefer using his prompt instead of mine? "Write a gangster movie that I like", instead of "...a movie this other guy likes". But because this is not the case, we appreciate Tarantino more than we appreciate gangster movies. It is about the process.
- dropofwill 9mo ago
  This is exactly the process happening in the music space with Suno. Go to their subreddit, they all talk about how they only listen to ‘their’ songs, for the exact reasons you list. Its bleak out there.
  - heliumtera 9mo ago
    It is very different with music. Music and images fall into "just shit something and I don't care what is is" category. Most people prompting for things in this category will be satisfied with anything, they might not admit, but the degrees of freedom the model has is infinite. Now when you pin the output, let's say a character you generated, and ask for modifications WHILE KEEPING lots of characteristics, you reduce the degrees of freedom from infinite to a small, very constrained, set of states. There are workarounds but natively llms can't really do this. You ask the model to rotate an image, the hair becomes blue and the sword becames an axe. With music this is much more pronounced because most people are musically illiterate, so even the basic mistakes while dragging characteristics over diffs becomes invisible. It's an interesting phenomenon I agree, but it says more about lack of taste and illiteracy of the common individual. But on the point of "thinking hard", with music and artistic production in general, individuals (human with soul, not npc) crave for ideas and perspective. It is the play, the relationship between ideas that are hard to vocalize and describe but can be provocative. Because we cannot describe or understand, we have no choice other than provoke into another a similar contemplation. But make no mistake, nobody is enjoying llm slop. They have fantasies that now they can produce something of value, or delegate this production. If this becomes true, instantly they lose and everyone goes directly to the source. Art is specifically about communicating the inconceivable, cannot be delegated. If the tool is sufficient to produce art, then the expression is of the tool itself, now they ARE.

cowboylowrez 9mo ago

When I read discussions about this sort of thing, I often find that folks look harder for similarities and patterns but once they succeed here, they ignore the differences. AI in particular is so full of this "pattern matching" style of thinking that the really significance of this tech, ie., how absolutely new and different it is, yeah it just sort of goes ignored, or even worse, machines get "pattern matched" into humans and folks argue from that point of view lol witness all the "new musicians" who vibe code disco hits, I'll invariably see the argument that AIs train on existing music just like humans do so whats the big deal? But these arguments and the OP's article do reinforce that AI rots brains. Even my sparing use of googles gemini and my interaction with the bots here have really dinged my ability to do simple math.

Trasmatta 9mo ago

Did you not read the post? You're talking from the space of the Builder while neglecting the Thinker. That's fine for some people, but not for others.

lakatadam 9mo ago

I really appreciate this sentiment. It feels absolutely overwhelming the pace at which new tools and AI protocols are being released, leaving a feeling of constantly falling behind. But approaching from the other end, I can just make things that I do come up with and explore the new protocols only if I can't do the thing with what I've already grasped.

munificent 9mo ago

> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens. One of the reasons Barry Lyndon is over 50 years old and still looks like no other movie today is because Kubrick tracked down a few lenses originally designed for NASA and had custom mounts built for them to use with cinema cameras. https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-famous-f0-7-lenses/ https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa... > Popular and highly acclaimed games not at crap because they didn't write their own physics engine (Zelda uses Havok) Super Mario Bros is known for having a surprisingly subtle and complex physics system that enabled the game to feel both challenging and fair even for players very new to consoles. Celeste a newer game also famous for being very difficult yet not feeling punishing does something similar: https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_towerfall_physics/index.html https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_towerfall_p... > or their own game engine (Plenty of great games use Unreal or Unity) And Minecraft doesn't, which is why few other games at the time of its release felt and played like it. You're correct that no one builds everything from scratch all the time. However, if all you ever do is cobble a few pre-made things together, I think you'll discover that nothing you make is ever that interesting or enduring in value. Sure, it can be useful, and satisfying. But the kinds of things that really leave a mark on people, that affect them deeply, always have at least some aspect where the creator got obsessive and went off the deep end and did their own thing from scratch. Further, you'll never learn what a transformative experience it can be to be that creator who gets obsessive about a thing. You'll miss out on discovering the weird parts of your own soul that are more fascinated by some corner of the universe than anyone else is. I have a lot of regrets in my life, but I don't regret the various times I've decided I've deeply dug into some thing and doing it from scratch. Often, that has turned out later to be some of the most long-term useful things I've done even though it seemed like a selfish indulgence at the time. Of course, it's your life. But consider that there may be a hidden cost to always skimming along across the tops of the stacks of things that already exist out there. There is growth in the depths.

globular-toast 9mo ago
Great comment. One of the best in the thread. I do hope we can get over this endless derivative phase and see some people digging deeper again.