doug_durham

5 ms·

31.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Code was always expensive. Entire industries of design tools cropped up simply to avoid writing the wrong code since it is so expensive. There are entire journals dedicated to this. Organizations are fixated on making sure that the right
32.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
How can there be tons of evidence for a 3 year old technology? Everyone seems to think that all writers using AI are one shotting their content. A writer can carefully edit and revise their content using AI tools just as well as manual wr
33.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
The heuristics you are looking for are "editorial" and "curation". That's why there are things like newspapers and magazines. The world has always been awash in more low effort content than can be consumed. We re
34.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
That's not what the author is saying at all. You are presuming that AI is capable of generating original thoughts. The author's point is that original thought is what matters. If a skilled writer with decades of experience can
35.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
It doesn't have perfect traction. It stumbles in the videos. This is consistent with other wheeled robots that have come out the last few years.
36.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of imp
37.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
I so don't have time to revisit books that I've already read. I'd probably be embarrassed by my earlier naiveté.
38.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
The whole resource argument against AI is quickly becoming obsolete. Time to move on to a new argument.
39.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Can you provide reasons other than "he's wrong"? There is no other technology that compresses so my knowledge into such a small space. A 24 GB diffusion model can generate a good approximation of any human relevant image fr
40.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Most of the discussions I've read about AI is as a tool. There is a narrative being created that its all about replacing humans. I've not seen that outside of a view influencers.
41.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
I don't think you can make the absolute statement that there is no audience or market for these tools. I enjoyed watching all of these videos. They are far from banal crap. They are deranged. They are not intentionally deranged, it
42.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Handwriting is inherently ableist. A portion of the population is blessed with the inherent ability of fast, legible handwriting. A portion of the population is not. Typing is an equalizer that allows more people to participate in the co
43.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
The same way that I verified all of the code that was written before AI. Just because you hand type the code doesn't mean that you don't have to test and verify. I can test much more thoroughly with AI that without.
44.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Sorry but you are just wrong. Perhaps if you are working on tiny problems in very small projects. Beyond that AI is simply many times faster regardless of how fast you type.
45.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
You seem to have a narrow definition of "build it". LLMs don't have agency. If I build software using an LLM I built it. Just like if I build a house out of lumber from a lumber mill, I built it even though I didn't h
46.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
The llm is the better community tool. The important change is that you don't have to settle with someone developing a monolithic tool that happens to do what you need it to do. That was the way things used to need to be done because
47.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
I don't agree that Anthropic's position is AI is all you need. My interpretation is that it's about developer acceleration. I've been following their messaging closely and it's not that you can fire all of your de
48.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
The point of cursive was make writing efficient with a quill pen. With a quill pen you run the risk of ink dropping off the tip if you lift it from the paper. Therefore cursive tries to keep the pen in contact with the paper most of the t
49.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Unfixable errors? Why unfixable? Python is Turing complete. I can see difficult to fix, but not unfixable. LLMs lower the bar to refactoring code mistakes.
50.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
I don’t believe that “reasoning” is very useful in large code bases written by multiple developers. If you are trying to be axiomatic and prove to yourself that the code is correct, there are a thousand different ways the part of the code
51.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
I’m sure in certain domains this makes sense. However, English is a poor language for doing reasoning in. More and more I’m relying on the code itself as the documentation. One of the superpowers of LLMs is reading code. and turning it into
52.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Not my experience at all. There are a couple of linters to choose from, and uv is becoming the dominant packaging environment. In my experience it is much easier to write large maintainable projects in Python than in TypeScript. Python h
53.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
I’m not referring to trivial functions nor classes. I talking about things like overloading operators, or changing the default idioms of the language. This means that a person can’t read the code without fully understanding the entire cla
54.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Languages are never the answer. Lisp isn't superior to Visual Basic. They are both Turing complete. Humans can express good ideas in each. It's better to think of languages as tools. An impact drill is not superior to a simpl
55.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
In commercial practice DSLs are an anti-pattern. Someone will create an under-documented DSL that only they understand and move on. The following programmers have to try to decipher this strange language. It is almost always a better ide
56.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
Nice rant with no evidence. I'll choose to ignore it.
57.
by doug_durham 3mo ago
My Hyundai Ioniq 5 has Car Play and knobs and buttons. It's not either or.
58.
by doug_durham 4mo ago
People engage with music in different ways. Some people focus on lyrics and the connection they make. Other people largely ignore lyrics and focus on the rhythms and patterns. Both are valid and both are very human. We do not need gateke
59.
by doug_durham 4mo ago
Your statement is so imprecise as to be meaningless. Is EDM made on an Abelton DAW human made? Even though the human didn't touch an instrument and used a robot drummer? What about a human who uses AI to generate snippets of music an
60.
by doug_durham 4mo ago
The NSA is government agency. They are certainly not training any world class LLMs. They probably have some specialized fine tunings of existing models, but that's it. They don't have the capacity.

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