6 ms·

Yes, it is. But the important question is, which person is the one standing in front of the bus?

by JoshTriplett 1mo ago

CamperBob2 1mo ago
That would be bigstrat2003. He's not a big fan of updating his priors.
- JoshTriplett 1mo ago
  You seem to be not picking up on the subtext here. Others are, though.
  - CamperBob2 1mo ago
    There is no subtext to bigstrat2003's argument, other than "I'm wrong, and I don't care." If you give persistent, repeatable instructions to a computer, you are programming it. If you disagree, you are gatekeeping. It's that simple. The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. ---------------- Edit, to bcrosby95: Look up the etymology of the word 'computer'. It didn't originally have anything to do with hardware. The first computers were people, who were told what to do ("programmed") without necessarily knowing what they were working on in a big-picture sense.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 27183 1mo ago
      > The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. What are you willing to bet?
      - CamperBob2 1mo ago
        I'm game. Say $1000, donated to a charity of the winner's choice? How do you want to set the bet up, and how do you think it should be decided? To be precise: I will bet that high-level programming languages won't be any less popular as a whole, but the vast majority of code will be written by AI rather than humans, working from specs written in natural language or something very close to it. What we call "source code" today will be thought of as "object code" by 2030. Something that occasionally needs to be inspected by humans, but rarely authored directly. Anyone not writing code this way had better be doing it as a hobby, because almost no one will pay for it.
        MichaelNolan 1mo ago
        Seems like a case for https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won.
        CamperBob2 1mo ago
        Good idea, I know they've been around for a while. I just signed up under the same username in case 27183 is interested.
        27183 1mo ago
        > You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won. That is the hard part. I'm not sure the usage numbers we'd need to decide the outcome are public now, and I can't predict ~4yr out whether any currently available metric will continue to be available. Stack Overflow's popular language thing has been going for a while, that will probably still exist (if SO does) but do we have any reliable metrics to tell us what fraction of code is AI generated?
        CamperBob2 1mo ago
        I think the outcome will be very obvious when the the time comes to settle the bet, but I agree that it's not easy to write those terms today. But speaking of Stack Overflow, that's a good point to examine more closely. Simply looking at Stack Overflow's usage trend [1] should have been a strong clue that a seismic shift was under way. A couple of things could be responsible for it, though: 1) Stack Overflow's movers and shakers have finally assholed themselves into irrelevance. That's possible, and it could potentially explain the secular decline that began around 2015. But it doesn't explain the rate of descent since 2023, given that the core rules haven't changed for years. It also doesn't explain the meteoric rise between 2008-2014. What they were doing clearly worked, right up until it didn't. 2) AI is now answering questions that would previously have been posted to SO. That's the conventional argument. Hard to dispute it. And it leads to... 3) Stack Overflow has not failed its mission, but fulfilled it: most of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. That's an argument I've never seen anyone else propose, likely because it's a really stupid argument that's been made many times before. I think it's true this time, though, at least until genuinely-new hardware paradigms come along. I think it's a big reason why AI will be doing our jobs for us going forward. Programming is a robot's job now. 3a) As a corollary not related to the SO question, I think the math community is starting to wake up to a similar realization: we have all the math we need. Or, rather, we have all the math we can comprehend. The low-hanging fruit is all gone. Mochizuki's work, which requires a large part of multiple peoples' careers to prove or refute, is an example of that phenomenon. Leading mathematicians are coming to recognize that their best shot at contributing to progress in math is to work on AI. The groundwork has been laid, and now we need to find better ways to reuse and recycle what we have. That's how AI will help us reach the next level. It's just crazy to think that our industry will be recognizable in 3-5 more years. 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viznwk/stack_overflow_has_gone_from_a_peak_of_207k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viz...
    - JoshTriplett 1mo ago
      There is subtext to my argument, namely that you're the one standing in front of the bus, and trying to pull the rest of us in front of the bus, while shouting at the people standing safely out of the road. I'll continue to reject the replacement of humanity. (That doesn't mean remaining ignorant of AI as a technology. It means rejecting the idea that we should be thrilled to be replaced by AI.)
    - asdff 1mo ago
      Still getting technical interviews in pure python, specifying you don't use LLM, in late 2026. 4 years now from me having to learn mandarin I guess...
    - Plont 1mo ago
      LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. It's not a straightforward 1 + 1 always equals 2 process. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. You relinquish control of all the details. Calling it gatekeeping is just laughable. That's like saying it's gatekeeping to say that the painter painted their painting, and that the person who commissioned the painting did not paint it. It's wholely absurd. Anybody can pick up a book and learn to actually code themselves. Or you can use an LLM to try to make things without bothering with that. But even if the LLM worked perfectly, pretending these are the same thing is silly. The history of the word computer is obviously irrelevant. Words change, it turns out.
      - CamperBob2 1mo ago
        LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Neither do humans. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. No one cares. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. Exactly.
      - pastel8739 1mo ago
        It isn’t really by their nature that they don’t give repeatable results, right? They’re just a bunch of math, but they perform better with randomness injected so we choose do to so. (I’ve heard about some GPU compute nuance meaning that even without randomness injected they still wouldn’t quite be deterministic, but that’s also not core to their nature)

Yes, it is. But the important question is, which person is the one standing in front of the bus?

CamperBob2 1mo ago

That would be bigstrat2003. He's not a big fan of updating his priors.

JoshTriplett 1mo ago
You seem to be not picking up on the subtext here. Others are, though.
- CamperBob2 1mo ago
  There is no subtext to bigstrat2003's argument, other than "I'm wrong, and I don't care." If you give persistent, repeatable instructions to a computer, you are programming it. If you disagree, you are gatekeeping. It's that simple. The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. ---------------- Edit, to bcrosby95: Look up the etymology of the word 'computer'. It didn't originally have anything to do with hardware. The first computers were people, who were told what to do ("programmed") without necessarily knowing what they were working on in a big-picture sense.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 27183 1mo ago
    > The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. What are you willing to bet?
    - CamperBob2 1mo ago
      I'm game. Say $1000, donated to a charity of the winner's choice? How do you want to set the bet up, and how do you think it should be decided? To be precise: I will bet that high-level programming languages won't be any less popular as a whole, but the vast majority of code will be written by AI rather than humans, working from specs written in natural language or something very close to it. What we call "source code" today will be thought of as "object code" by 2030. Something that occasionally needs to be inspected by humans, but rarely authored directly. Anyone not writing code this way had better be doing it as a hobby, because almost no one will pay for it.
      - MichaelNolan 1mo ago
        Seems like a case for https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won.
        CamperBob2 1mo ago
        Good idea, I know they've been around for a while. I just signed up under the same username in case 27183 is interested.
        27183 1mo ago
        > You and the other poster just need to find some agreeable benchmark so you can decide who won. That is the hard part. I'm not sure the usage numbers we'd need to decide the outcome are public now, and I can't predict ~4yr out whether any currently available metric will continue to be available. Stack Overflow's popular language thing has been going for a while, that will probably still exist (if SO does) but do we have any reliable metrics to tell us what fraction of code is AI generated?
        CamperBob2 1mo ago
        I think the outcome will be very obvious when the the time comes to settle the bet, but I agree that it's not easy to write those terms today. But speaking of Stack Overflow, that's a good point to examine more closely. Simply looking at Stack Overflow's usage trend [1] should have been a strong clue that a seismic shift was under way. A couple of things could be responsible for it, though: 1) Stack Overflow's movers and shakers have finally assholed themselves into irrelevance. That's possible, and it could potentially explain the secular decline that began around 2015. But it doesn't explain the rate of descent since 2023, given that the core rules haven't changed for years. It also doesn't explain the meteoric rise between 2008-2014. What they were doing clearly worked, right up until it didn't. 2) AI is now answering questions that would previously have been posted to SO. That's the conventional argument. Hard to dispute it. And it leads to... 3) Stack Overflow has not failed its mission, but fulfilled it: most of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. That's an argument I've never seen anyone else propose, likely because it's a really stupid argument that's been made many times before. I think it's true this time, though, at least until genuinely-new hardware paradigms come along. I think it's a big reason why AI will be doing our jobs for us going forward. Programming is a robot's job now. 3a) As a corollary not related to the SO question, I think the math community is starting to wake up to a similar realization: we have all the math we need. Or, rather, we have all the math we can comprehend. The low-hanging fruit is all gone. Mochizuki's work, which requires a large part of multiple peoples' careers to prove or refute, is an example of that phenomenon. Leading mathematicians are coming to recognize that their best shot at contributing to progress in math is to work on AI. The groundwork has been laid, and now we need to find better ways to reuse and recycle what we have. That's how AI will help us reach the next level. It's just crazy to think that our industry will be recognizable in 3-5 more years. 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viznwk/stack_overflow_has_gone_from_a_peak_of_207k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1viz...
  - JoshTriplett 1mo ago
    There is subtext to my argument, namely that you're the one standing in front of the bus, and trying to pull the rest of us in front of the bus, while shouting at the people standing safely out of the road. I'll continue to reject the replacement of humanity. (That doesn't mean remaining ignorant of AI as a technology. It means rejecting the idea that we should be thrilled to be replaced by AI.)
  - asdff 1mo ago
    Still getting technical interviews in pure python, specifying you don't use LLM, in late 2026. 4 years now from me having to learn mandarin I guess...
  - Plont 1mo ago
    LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. It's not a straightforward 1 + 1 always equals 2 process. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. You relinquish control of all the details. Calling it gatekeeping is just laughable. That's like saying it's gatekeeping to say that the painter painted their painting, and that the person who commissioned the painting did not paint it. It's wholely absurd. Anybody can pick up a book and learn to actually code themselves. Or you can use an LLM to try to make things without bothering with that. But even if the LLM worked perfectly, pretending these are the same thing is silly. The history of the word computer is obviously irrelevant. Words change, it turns out.
    - CamperBob2 1mo ago
      LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Neither do humans. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. No one cares. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. Exactly.
    - pastel8739 1mo ago
      It isn’t really by their nature that they don’t give repeatable results, right? They’re just a bunch of math, but they perform better with randomness injected so we choose do to so. (I’ve heard about some GPU compute nuance meaning that even without randomness injected they still wouldn’t quite be deterministic, but that’s also not core to their nature)