skydhash

25 ms·

511.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> Humans had to develop and learn special languages so they could communicate with computers to do all those useful things you mentioned. Why? They were limited in understanding (or parsing) human languages You may need to revisit your c
512.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> Technology in the past few decades was (is) limited and humans had to adapt to it. Was it? Think first about what it replaced. Lots of manual computation in bookkeeping and financial sectors. Telegrams and snail mail moved to email. Ty
513.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Computing is useful for exactly going away from the messy real world of humans. I don’t need random errors in my financial transactions. I don’t want random errors when doctors are retrieving my medical history. And I don’t want random erro
514.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Those are not merely scaling. I can get “build upon other works”, but there’s a lot of scientific insights needed for observing and modeling a phenomena. It may even requires a boost of creativity to theorize an effect based on that model a
515.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> Why not have a preset like (preset-base-ide-1), so we don't need 200 lines of configuration before we can function? Instead we could build off of a much closer starting point First you need to define what is that much better start
516.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Military Context: Just build the code that you just reviewed. No need to get the binaries SDLC: Traceability is more important than reproducibility. Keeping logs is more important than deterministic build outputs
517.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> Being able to reproduce the binary from the source code and being able to verify that it's the same as the original is quite important in some contexts Why not build your own binaries and be done with that. If you don’t trust the
518.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Coding is literally writing code, instructions in plain text that control the behavior of computer. That implies knowing which instructions to write. But creating software is much more than that. Just like writing an essay involves more tha
519.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> Coding (programming) is a tedious and expensive part of software engineering. Why is that? Coding, for me, is kinda relaxing, and the fun part of developing software. Gathering requirements, especially in a corporate settings, is the t
520.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> Engineering for the sake of engineering has no value to the economy - aka it’s irrelevant. I would put that as my signature if HN supported that. I see a lot of systems being built where the whole point seems to be about the ritual, no
521.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> From the perspective of a diligent engineer trying to avoid technical debt and other incidents down the road, burning an extra couple of days to get it done right by hand isn't that big of a deal. LLMs become about as useful as a
522.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> Basically, a library full of books that have nice covers is going to take time to see that all those books are just filled with ipsum lorem Worse if it’s a mixture of good content and ipsum lorem.
523.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> They're saying that the mental models and thought processes are incredibly important but that code is not the place for that work to live. They’re important for discussion and brainstorming. They’re also important for sharing cont
524.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done. Sometimes they do know the work bei
525.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Do you think that everyone in the Linux kernel team write their code using AI only? What about Emacs? And cURL?
526.
by skydhash 4mo ago
My first computer was a pentium II. After one year learning about computing in my school lab and friends’ computers, it was amazing to have something to tinker with. And it and its successors brought me plenty of delight over the year. Firs
527.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Ctrl-c is mostly for modes, not core emacs. Org-mode and gnus have a lot of bindings. But there’s a convention that ctrl-c then <character> are not to be bound. There needs to be a modifier for <character>
528.
by skydhash 4mo ago
I don’t disagree with you, when building with Xcode or Android studio, kinda like 90 percent of the code is generated or copied from examples in the doc. Same with HTML when using a CSS framework. I learned vim, just to be efficient with co
529.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> It feels like implying that search engines weren't a major upgrade to research because you could always just go to the library and look through books to find your answer I do agree with you on that point as local libraries (where
530.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Writing code, IMO, is mostly the typing. AKA the syntax and whatever libraries/platforms you’re using. They are incidental to creating a software solution to whatever problems. It requires rigor, but it’s not particularly difficult. Ab
531.
by skydhash 4mo ago
I don’t think writing code was ever hard. It’s basically the same level of difficulty as learning to write sheet music, a foreign language, or mathematical formula. Same with basic computer concepts. The hardest part is the formal logic, re
532.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Both you and the sibling common by buzzwords have the same contexte: You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way. Most package assumes something standard and you can expect somet
533.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Maybe we need a definition of “understanding how software works”. There’s the technical aspect (computation theory, computer organization, compilation, executable format, …) and there’s the necessity aspect (the domain). The technical aspec
534.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> People who do understand how software works should absolutely be having agents code it. I don’t think there’s such people. Either you’re writing a software for the first time and so the premise is not true. Or you’re writing it a secon
535.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve. If it’s only relevant to what you’re using for solving it (i.e. choosing a different tool would have make those issues disappear), then that make them irrelevant. Each tooling set will bring i
536.
by skydhash 4mo ago
I was not hired to write code, but to solve problems (where often the end result is code, but it’s not the whole process). But the message from management is that our bottleneck was coding, and by using AI to code, we’ll be 10x faster and a
537.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Because it’s rarely so black and white. Knowing the inputs and outputs is merely the first steps, you need to think about the transitions too as they have their own costs. Those costs don’t disappear and it’s truly naive to think they don’t
538.
by skydhash 4mo ago
> Can you type a hundred lines a second? If not, then it is. No one has ever needed to do that for something that is new. And if it’s not new, you want to do it repeatedly with some guarantee of reliability. Not just in an uncontrolled m
539.
by skydhash 4mo ago
Theoretically they can. There are people that use Paint to draw masterpieces. But your argument is only true if they’re willing to do so. AI is a slop enabler, having the discipline to funnel the slop into something concise and useful is no
540.
by skydhash 4mo ago
I do get your point about speeds and ease of producing working code. This kind of quick win can be a good example of AI assisted tooling. But I don't generate scripts that way as I prefer to have composable blocks that I can reuse late

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