mjr00

18 ms·

361.
by mjr00 1y ago
Sorry, I'm not going to let people rewrite history here: for the first ~year after ChatGPT's release, there were tons of comments, here on HN and the wider internet, arguing that LLMs displayed signs of actual intelligence. Than
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by mjr00 1y ago
This is the gap between capability (what can this tool do?) versus workflow (what is the best way to use this tool to accomplish a goal?). Capabilities can be strictly evaluated, but workflow is subjective. Saying "Google has the site:
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by mjr00 1y ago
> How can you be so sure? Did you compare in a systematic way or read papers by people who did it? No, but I didn't need to read scientific papers to figure how to use Google effectively, either. I'm just using a results-based
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by mjr00 1y ago
> I'm not sure about your example about talking to LLMs. There is good reason to think that speaking to it like a human might produce better results, as that's what most of the training data is composed of. In practice I have n
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by mjr00 1y ago
> My intuition here is that this study mainly demonstrated that the learning curve on AI-assisted development is high enough that asking developers to bake it into their existing workflows reduces their performance while they climb that
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by mjr00 1y ago
> If you know what code you want to type, but don't know how to use a keyboard, that would be a taste-skill gap. Ira Glass is a writer. Do you think he meant the taste-skill gap was when people couldn't physically write the wor
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by mjr00 1y ago
> There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard. Strongly disagree here. The taste
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by mjr00 1y ago
AI works as a smokescreen when doing product development layoffs, but you can't really use it for sales, which is still very human-to-human, or when canceling entire projects like they're doing in XBox Game Studios.
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by mjr00 1y ago
I'm not debating the usefulness of LLMs, because they are extremely useful, but "think broadly" in this instance sounds like "I can't think of anything specific so I'm going to gloss over everything." Mark
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by mjr00 1y ago
> But even if it remained, I can see businesses adopting these to cut their expenses in all possible ways. Adopting what to do what exactly? Businesses automated order fulfillment and price adjustments long ago; what is an LLM bringi
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by mjr00 1y ago
> I still don't see a good reason why independent developers like me should have to publish their personal address and phone number on the App Store [for paid apps]. Because if someone purchases an app and there's a dispute wit
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by mjr00 1y ago
> It seems that LLMs, as they work today, make developers more productive. Think this strongly depends on the developer and what they're attempting to accomplish. In my experience, most people who swear LLMs make them 10x more produ
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by mjr00 1y ago
Why would your employer pay you more for using Python/Java/JavaScript? You're massively more productive when using those languages instead of C for many common development tasks. Did the introduction of Python drastically red
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by mjr00 1y ago
The USA has "presently" been offshoring software development jobs since around 2001. I remember, because the same type of people dooming about AI were also telling me, a university student at the time, that I shouldn't get in
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by mjr00 1y ago
Probably not much in the AA/AAA space, but plenty of indies. The Doom engine (and GZDoom, which is the most common Doom engine derivative) is GPL and there have been multiple commercially successful games released using it. I know at l
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by mjr00 1y ago
> The writing isn't the point; the thoughts are. But they can't just post 200 words of bullet points (or don't feel like they can, anyway). Who or what is clamoring for that AI-generated padding which turns 200 words of bu
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by mjr00 1y ago
You're falling for marketing pieces, there's been multiple discussions on HN from people working at these companies calling out that all of this as bullshit. Nobody's been replaced by AI. I appreciate you citing sources, but
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by mjr00 1y ago
> So many companies like Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce and Google (who are actively using AI just did layoffs) are some how not 'competent companies' because they believe with AI they can do more with less engineers and employees
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by mjr00 1y ago
> Why would I hire 100s of employees when I can cut the most junior and mid-level roles and make the seniors more productive with AI? Because at competent companies juniors and mid-level employees aren't just cranking out code, they
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by mjr00 1y ago
Only if you assume the current amount of knowledge work being done, or the amount of output from knowledge work, is the maximum amount possible or desired. Which is incorrect. Every software company has a backlog of 1000 features they want
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by mjr00 1y ago
I disagree that it doesn't save time for some classes of problems. As a concrete recent example, I had to write a Python script which checked for any postgres tables where the primary key was of type 'INT' and print out the m
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by mjr00 1y ago
You're absolutely right. You need to verify the script works, and you need to be able to read the code to see what it's actually doing and if it passes the smell test (as a sibling commenter said, the same way you would for a code
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by mjr00 1y ago
It's also what you're writing. The GP's commenter's bio shows they're a product lead, not a full-time software developer. To make some broad assumptions about what kind of code they're talking about: using an
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by mjr00 1y ago
I didn't interpret the article that way. > Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable
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by mjr00 1y ago
Yeah the article using "useful" and "valuable" isn't ideal, but I was sticking with those terms for discussion. I agree it's largely about strategic vs tactical thinking.
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by mjr00 1y ago
> Lots of fresh grads and junior staff focus 99% on being useful, but career advancement beyond the first one or two promotions depends MUCH more on being valued. Yeah. I've seen a lot of ICs get stuck at the "senior developer&
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by mjr00 1y ago
> But by it's nature, duck typing supports an unbounded number of input types and is what Python was built on. You're trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. It's not about right or wrong. Either you want your fu
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by mjr00 1y ago
> Following the general stupidness of the post: they are now unable to do that because a security consultant said they have to enable and can not break RUFF rule ANN401: https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/rules/any-typ
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by mjr00 1y ago
The top comment in that post shuts down the whole nonsense pretty quickly and firmly: > If you have a super-generic function like that and type hinting enforced, you just use Any and don't care about it. It's a stupid example,
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by mjr00 1y ago
You mean your "self-driving" Tesla where you're still sitting in the driver's seat with your hands on the wheel (they are on the wheel, unless you want to admit to a crime)?

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