Extasia785

Can developers agree on what the best programming language is? The best framework? The best OS?

AI is a diverse technology and will work differently for everyone, just like JS is a really, really bad technology for many, yet widely used.

On top of that it (as coding agent) is brand new, just a few years old. Looking at the history of technology it will probably take a few decades for it to settle into some sort of stability. Which does not mean it does not provide value during this time of exploration, however there is no trodden path leading you there.

I don't agree with many statements in the article. It almost seems like an article from about a year ago, despite it being posted yesterday. Not sure if the author had the idea a long time ago and just took his time to finish it up, but the "vibe-coding" he describes surely isn't the current way of using LLMs in a codebase.

While LLMs are surely used to generate a lot of slop-code and overwhelm (open source) code bases, this surely isn't the only thing they can do. I dislike discussing the potential of a technology exclusively by looking at its negative impact.

LLMs in proper hands don't create code which is "stolen", they also shouldn't create unnecessary code and definitely don't remove any of the ownership of the programmer, at least not any more than using a mighty IDE does.

The problem seems to be in the usage of LLMs. These effects definitely do happen when just releasing an agent on a codebase without any oversight. But they can also largely be mitigated by using frameworks such as Openspec or Spec-Kit, properly designing a spec, plan, granular tasks and manually reviewing all code yourself. The LLM should not be responsible for any creative idea, it should at most verify the practicality against the codebase. When doing that, the entire creative control is in the hands of the programmer and so is the mechanical execution. The LLM is reduced to a very powerful autocomplete with a strict harness around it. Obviously this also doesn't lead to 10x or even 100x improvements in speed like some AI merchants promise, but in my personal experience the speedup is still significant enough to make LLMs a very, very useful technology.

A forklift is "lifting" things, despite using a completely different mechanical process as a human "lifting" things. The only real similarity between these kinds of "lifting" is the end result, something is higher up than it was before.

You are describing domain-driven design. Outsource generic subdomains, focus your expertise on the core subdomains.

https://blog.jonathanoliver.com/ddd-strategic-design-core-su...

but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.

It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.

This entirely depends on the company culture. I worked in teams where every small decision is in the hand of the PO and I've worked in teams where a software engineer is a respected professional enabled to make their own technical decisions. I found the second option to create higher quality software faster.

Also not sure what you mean by additional effort? Created_at, updated_at or soft-deletes are part of most proper frameworks. In Spring all you need is an annotation, I've been using those in major projects and implementation cost is around a few seconds with so far zero seconds of maintenance effort in years of development. At least those fields are solved problems.

Ukraine has around $1.2 billion and still got 10% tariffs.

A bad analogy doesn't make a good argument. The best analogy for LLMs is probably a librarian on LSD in a giant library. They will point you in a direction if you have a question. Sometimes they will pull up the exact page you need, sometimes they will lead you somewhere completely wrong and confidently hand you a fantasy novel, trying to convince you it's a real science book.

It's completely up to your ability to both find what you need without them and verify the information they give you to evaluate their usefulness. If you put that on a matrix, this makes them useful in the quadrant of information that is both hard to find, but very easy to verify. Which at least in my daily work is a reasonable amount.

For each problem, our system sampled many candidate submissions and submitted 50 of them based on a test-time selection strategy. Submissions were selected based on performance on the IOI public test cases, model-generated test cases, and a learned scoring function. If we had instead submitted at random, we would have only scored 156 points on average, suggesting that this strategy was worth nearly 60 points under competition constraints.

Did you read the post? OpenAI clearly states that the results are cherry-picked. Just a random query will have far worse results. To get equal results you need to ask the same query dozens of time and then have enough expertise to pick the best one, which might be quite hard for a problem that you have little idea about.

Combine this with the fact that this blog post is a sales pitch with the very best test results out of probably many more benchmarks we will never see and it seems obvious that human experts are still several order of magnitudes ahead.

I've started doing something similar around a year ago, after noticing that I reached basically all goals I set out for myself after school. I was at a point where I felt like I stopped growing as a person and found myself unhappy with my life, yet was seemingly stuck.

What I did was to have a very strong introspection over a few weeks. I thought about each important aspect of my life - social life, family, career, hobbies, health, even my daily structure - and formulated a very specific target for each area. Basically a well thought out fantasy character. This was hard work, it took many nights of thinking and it's honestly a process that never stops, even nowadays I still update that document from time to time.

Once I had a list I was reasonably happy with, I started thinking of the type of person that would reach that goals and what kind of habits they had. And then I started implementing them. The most important part here is a habit of doing stuff. I can not stress enough how important that is, everything else pales in comparison. I recommend reading Atomic Habits and personally follow the "Getting Things Done" system. But once you have written down everything you need to do and actually do it, you have a superpower and the ability to transform every part of your life in a few months. I found that most "hard" things in life are actually quite easy to do, it's just that doing stuff consistently is extremely hard.

I agree with the author, simply telling people about your future self also helps massively. The first time it will feel extremely weird, like talking about a fantasy character. You will talk about some guy you seemingly have nothing in common with and talk about future achievements with absolutely nothing to back it up. But do it 2-3 times and suddenly that future self will feel familiar. Do it some more, take some steps to be that person and suddenly you'll be far more similar to that guy than you could've ever envisioned.

At least for myself this process was the most important thing I've ever done in my life. I've gone from a pretty shy, boring, somewhat depressed and risk-averse guy to moving across the country for an awesome job, restarting my entire social life and solo-travelling across the world. And most importantly, I'm happy now, it feels like I'm finally me and not just the product of my upbringing and surroundings.

I completely agree. I'm always amused by the idea that dating apps have this secret, sophisticated algorithm that gives you dates that are nice but leave you wanting more. Human relationships are hard and I doubt that the best experts in the field could come up with something like that, and it's certainly impossible for an algorithm without any information about the person. I always feel that these complaints come from the frustration of not being able to find the perfect partner, from people who don't even come close to the standard they want in a partner.

In my experience, online dating is a pretty well functioning marketplace. People have a limited amount of time to date, so they'll take the best one they can get. Of course, online dating narrows down the ranking process to superficial information, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that. As a man I've seen both sides of the coin. When I started out with online dating I didn't have good pictures, no good bio, no good writing skills and didn't pay. I went months without a good match and even longer without a date. Then I decided to clean up my profile, highlight my strengths as a potential partner, learned to carry a fun conversation and started paying for the product and suddenly had to reject women, simply because I had too many options for any given night.

Dating apps are just a more extreme form of real dating. Dating always has been a competition, people will choose the best partner they can get. The advantage of the real world is that people often don't have many choices, but the disadvantage of the real world is also that people don't have many choices. Apps get rid of that disadvantage, but also of that advantage.

What's wrong with cancelling Amazon Prime? I did it recently and it took less than a minute. I even had the option to cancel immediately and have them refund my money, even though my yearly subscription was still running for half a year, which AFAIK is not possible for App Store subscriptions. I'm in EU so might be different to US.

Unions in Germany aren't really split up by profession, but by industry. So if you e.g. work in the car or manufacturing industry, there's a good chance that most workers in your company are part of "IG Metall", which is the biggest union in Germany. And that union then negotiates the salary & working conditions for every normal employee, even if you aren't part of the union. So if you ever met a developer from Siemens, Mercedes, BMW, Bosch, etc. they are probably enjoying the benefits of a union.

I'm doing well by mapping out my days. I have all my projects written down, with dating being one of them. And then I just plan at what day I do what. Of course life gets in the way, but more often than not I stick to my plans. You'll always struggle if you're trying to do more than you can fit into a day, but writing and explizit planning helps setting the priority.

Langchain previously had a nice blogpost about how they build their RAG chatbot, maybe there are some helpful hints in there: https://blog.langchain.dev/building-chat-langchain-2/

But the net positive is so, so much bigger for society that I'm sure we'll figure it out.

Considering that the democratic backsliding across the globe is coincidentally happening at the same time as the rise of social media and echo chambers, are we sure about that? LLM have the opportunity to create a handcrafted echo chamber for every person on this planet, which is quite risky in an environment where almost every democracy of the planet is fighting against radical forces trying to abolish it.

While cats are native in some places, evolutionary mechanisms stop working when a predator has an unlimited supply of food supplied by humans. The problem of cats nowadays isn't their existence, but that the amount of cats per square meter is more than the ecosystem can support. Usually this would easily balance out by the predator dying. But with humans feeding cats, they can rampage the ecosystem until it's destroyed without checks and balances. Feeding a predator and letting it outside is never suitable.

Ads per se are a fine alternative to pay for a website, the problem is when they are the most attractive option. Because them being the most attractive option usually means they are the only option, meaning they are also the only option for people that would be willing to pay to see no ads (me).

I see it like smoking. It should be legal, but there need to be laws in place preventing smokers from harming and annoying anyone that chooses not to smoke. Ads should be legal, but there need to be laws in place allowing people to completely avoid them by paying a fair price. Until this is the case and everyone can choose, making them unavoidable is morally wrong.

Depends on the region. The big advantage of WFH is the global job market. I live pretty rural in Germany and salaries are quite a bit lower than in the city. And they are far lower than remote US-jobs. So I easily eclipse all my friends and neighbors with my salary, it's pretty much impossible for them to catch up. They would need to straight-up double or triple their salary, which is unlikely when salary has been pretty stagnant the past decades.

I can see WFH jobs decreasing your salary if you lived in a big city with high wages before, but for anyone else the advantages of global competition pay a massive premium right now. Maybe that changes at some point, but looking at the massive shortage of software experts my country is facing right now, this point is still decades away.

They could re-open it. But the last time we had a popular unmoderated subreddit, it became a mixture of porn, onlyfan models and Donald Trump / Jeffrey Epstein posts. Good OOTL if you want to give Reddit a click in these times: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/gfo102/what_i...

In the end Reddit and Mods are co-dependent on each other. Mods use the platform provided by Reddit, but Reddit uses the voluntary work of mods to have a usable platform. Reddit could exchange all voluntary workers with paid mods, but I doubt something capital-intensive like that is what they planned for their pre-IPO strategy.

but Reddit has this deep depression inside it that isn't really noticeable until you leave. Like, you don't ever really see happy people on there anymore, just people with varying levels of misery

Well put, I've also noticed this. Be it games, movies or sports. Whenever I enjoy something, I just know that the moment I go on Reddit (or Twitter), there will be a shitstorm complaining and crying about mundane details. And without fails those threads gain thousands of upvotes, while the positive threads die with 12 upvotes in new. Outrage seems to be the best way to drive engagement and clicks.

You seem to be quite misinformed about the war. It's openly known that Ukraine is running propaganda campaigns and intentionally publishes misleading information, to win the information war. Note, this isn't bad and in fact is encouraged by us western allies. We *want* Ukraine to lie. In fact that's how the last counter offensive happened. Ukraine ran a massive propaganda campaign about their "offensive" in the south, then attacked in the north. That's also why even western secret services don't know how many soldiers Ukraine has lost so far. That's also why we don't know who blew up Nordstream 1&2, even though the tracks point to a Ukrainian oligarch, as reported by reputable western newspapers.

But that doesn't mean that we - normal citizens in comfy chairs - can't try to look through the fog of war. No reason to go into the Reddit outrage mode. It's very possible that Ukraine has made a mistake or expects some military advantage from the dam breaking. But its also very possible that Russia broke the dam, to enhance their defense. Or it was an honest mistake due to lack of maintenance. Or it was a partisan group, who are active in this area. We will probably only really know in 2-3 months, when independent western experts have finished their investigation, anyone stating "facts" beforehand is just making up stuff. It isn't "victim" blaming to keep some rational mind in this conflict. We all know that Russia is a genocidal aggressor, but we also know that Ukraine is intentionally spreading misinformation, to gain military advantages.

As a junior that also just started before COVID forced everyone into remote, my experience has been that team culture is the deciding factor. I've always been extremely vocal in communicating ideas, acquiring feedback and asking for help digitally, but my experience has been split for the two teams I've been yet.

The first team was just set up as the pandemic hit and thus had all collaboration happen online. This created structures that fit a remote-first approach and even worked after work got hybrid again. All important discussion happened online, we had ways to spontaneously get help and enough formats to get creative. And it worked, I never felt left out, all blockers for everyone got cleared as fast as you would expect and feedback cycles were good.

I can't say the same about my second team however. While it's officially hybrid, I'd say 70% are coming into the office every day, while the other 30% (me included) work basically exclusively remote. And it isn't working well, the office people just have their own bubble. They exchange ideas and communicate offline and it's hard to be part of that. I tried integrating digital tools, I tried talking about it, but it just doesn't work. I can plant seeds for new ideas, I can ask for feedback, but the second I communicate it to the office bubble, I'm not part of it anymore. This isn't intentional obviously, but when they talk about stuff at the coffee machine or during lunch, the idea will start developing by itself, while I have no way to take part in it. And who can blame them? If you have a good idea during lunch, why should they not talk about it? And who wants to provide an official protocol for the remote workers about lunch discussions? And then when I then try to talk about the idea a few days later, I always notice that it advanced without any possibility for me to participate. This sucks obviously, because it massively diminishes my influence to bring in and grow my ideas. And while I do get feedback when I ask for it directly, I have noticed that barely anyone actively informs you about the small 1% stuff that you can improve. Which doesn't sound bad, but if you miss an 1% improvement every week, even in a year it will amount to a big enough sum to matter.

And I think these 2 things do massively influence a career. You need to be the face of a bunch of good ideas if you want any kind of soft power. You do need the small informal feedback someone gives you when getting a coffee, if you want to be the top 10%. And in some hybrid organizations, you will miss out on that.

It is very interesting that you get these "bad" results from my prompt. I just tried again on a completely new chat and got the following answer:

"Here's a new word: "Aurovexia"

Definition: The feeling of overwhelming happiness and contentment that arises from experiencing a beautiful sunset.

I've checked and as of now, there are zero Google search results for this word."

Which at least in my view is quite creative. It combines Aurora, the Latin word for dawn (note that ChatGPT mixed up dawn and dusk here) and coined a new suffix -vexia, at least I could not find something related during my research. Again, there are zero results on Google for this right now. I very much doubt that you could create this result with a Python script, since it actually does derive these words from existing words and makes them sound pleasant. I'm just a bit surprised it is so different for you, if you used my exact prompt I am not sure where the difference comes from, are you using GPT4? My prompts were used on GPT3.5 (if this is still the current version of the free ChatGPT version).

If I were to start with ChatGPT I would, necessarily, only say what has been said.

This is not true though, you can test it for yourself:

Prompt: Invent a new word, which has never been written before. When I type it in Google, I should get zero results.

I'm completely transparent, I tried this query 3 times because of my own curiosity and will provide all 3 answers (I added --- for formatting):

---

ChatGPT (answer 1):

Sure, how about "flumtraz"?

---

ChatGPT (answer 2):

Here's a new word: "Ardidio"

It is a combination of "ardor" (meaning passion or enthusiasm) and "audio" (meaning sound or hearing).

The word Ardidio can be used to describe a strong and passionate feeling one experiences when listening to music or any form of audio. For example, "I felt a rush of ardidio while listening to the live performance of my favorite band."

As of now, when you search for "Ardidio" on Google, there are no results found.

---

ChatGPT (answer 3):

"Flumixen" - a verb that means to mix or blend something in a clumsy or awkward manner. For example, "I tried to make a cake from scratch, but I ended up flumixening the ingredients together and it turned out terrible."

---

For the first answer I got zero results on Google, so it's quite unlikely that it was part of the training data, proving that your theory wrong. It can say things that have never been said.

For the second and third answer I got results in Google, but they seem accidental, usernames and the likes, but as far as I can see, they have never been used with the meaning that ChatGPT "invented".

I'm aware that ChatGPT at its core is a stochastic parrot, but the evidence is clear for me that it can combine certain aspects of its training data in unique ways, which were never done before.

I agree, I subscribed to a physical, high-quality Sunday newspaper (I hope this word exists in English, it's a newspaper that gets released once a week on the weekend) and I find it perfect. Frequent enough to stay up-to-date, but slow enough to not get caught up in speculation and clickbait.

It made me realize how basically no "breaking news" is important to my personal life. Reading high-quality reports a few hours once a week is enough to stay more informed than constantly discussing breaking news on Twitter and is far better for my well being.

Well what you are criticizing is mainly a problem of the media. Look at the actual IPCC report [0], there multiple scenarios are outlined, with 1.5 degrees being the most optimistic one, which makes sense. I did not read through it yet, but from a quick glance they do describe the impact of different scenarios, while also presenting measures to reach those, just like you asked for. You sadly can not expect that kind of nuance from the media though, most articles (just like the linked The Guardian article) seem to focus exclusively on the 1.5 degrees scenario.

[0] https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf

1.5 degrees is commonly talked about because almost every country on earth pledged to "pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels" [0] in the Paris agreement. We won't hit that anymore, but it makes sense for scientists to compare the taken measures with the original goal. Every degree matters and aiming for 1.5 and missing by 0.5 degrees is better than aiming for a "realistic" 2.5 degrees and missing by 0.2 degrees.

[0] https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement

This is an interesting topic though, because this generation is the first generation of kids who grew up with social media, so it's not unfathomable that "kids these days" are different, for better or worse. Kids these days might be normal, but with them being the first generation to truly grow up in the internet and social media era, there is a legitimate argument that they are not.