Vampiero

It's cheaper to hire 5 juniors and to give Tim a mental breakdown than it is to hire 5 Tims.

Realistically though, if you really did hire 5 Tims you would deliver in 1/5th of the time and the software would actually be decent on the first iteration.

It seems to me that consultancy companies actually want inexperienced developers because they can bill their inexperience to the client as they train them to become useful. Awful and, as stated, a major source of mental breakdowns for the Tims who have to put up with their bullshit. And also for the juniors who are always running from fire to fire as they try to fix the clusterfucks they created.

This is not how you should do stuff, but it's how everyone does it. At some point it's just the blind leading the blind, because Tim also has other shit to attend to and can't review every LOC on every PR by himself.

I didn't become a senior by being mentored by other people, btw. I became one because I've always loved doing what I do, and nothing more. The internet and physical books mentored me impersonally. So I'm sure that they can mentor other people just fine, and I don't see why I should waste my time just because my boss is stingy and can only hire a couple of people with my experience or drive to learn outside of work.

And let's be clear -- mentoring and being taught something are two very different things. I'm not anal about the latter. I'm anal because I want to write code, I don't want to tell people that they should learn to fucking read the error messages and google them every 5 seconds.

Though right now I'm being very brutally honest. I'm actually nice and friendly to them in person, and I'm very patient. But that causes me to break every once in a while because I secretly loathe it!

If only someone had warned us...

That is literally any economic model that assumes capitalism as the underlying system.

Morality and ethics are just a way to hurt profits.

john carmack is my spirit animal

realistically any scenario is possible if the asteroid is going fast enough

No wonder dogs like to eat shit off the ground

Bold of you to imply that GPT asks questions instead of making baseless assumptions every 5 words, even when you explicitly instruct it to ask questions if it doesn't know. When it constantly hallucinates command line arguments and library methods instead of reading the fucking manual.

It's like outsourcing your project to [country where programmers are cheap]. You can't expect quality. Deep down you're actually amazed that the project builds at all. But it doesn't take much to reveal that it's just a facade for a generous serving of spaghetti and bugs.

And refactoring the project into something that won't crumble in 6 months requires more time than just redoing the project from scratch, because the technical debt is obscenely high, because those programmers were awful, and because no one, not even them, understands the code or wants to be the one who has to reverse engineer it.

Except that AI is actually MUCH more expensive!

Have _you_? It lost its novelty after a couple of days.

Nah I just insult it and tell it that it costs me 20 dollars a month and it's a huge disappointment

You got hit by a former employee

Consider how quickly conhost.exe starts compared to the new cmd.exe

Most of it is because of ancillary stuff and heavy dependencies.

a lot of them think it’s psychological.

no worse feeling in the world than hearing a doctor confidently tell you that it's all in your head and that you're wasting their time. Ask me how I know..

Umm, is this right?

No way to know until you painstakingly verify every single assertion that the AI made! The author of this article certainly didn't, and the content was good enough to them.

Trust me, AGI is almost there.

My poor baby boy Prolog... it's only down there because people are irrationally afraid of it :(

And most are too focused on learning whatever slop the industry wants them to learn, so they don't even know that it exists. We need 500 different object oriented languages to do web applications after all. Can't be bothered with learning a new paradigm if it doesn't pay the bills!

It's the most intuitive language I've ever learned and it has forever changed the way I think about problem solving. It's just logic, so it translates naturally from thought to code. I can go to a wikipedia page on some topic I barely know and write down all true statements on that page. Then I can run queries and discover stuff I didn't know.

That's how I learned music theory, how scales and chords work, how to identify the key of a melody... You can't do that as easily and concisely in any other language.

One day, LLM developers will finally open a book about AI and realize that this is what they've been missing all along.

If only someone could find a solution to this tragedy.

Well, someone earlier in the thread said to abandon Marxist thought because it's obsolete. So I don't know how to help you!

In what AI-powered world do you think that local small software businesses will survive?

The law shouldn't be about who can afford the most lawyers. It naturally consolidates power which is pretty dangerous to democracy.

Same exact thing that happened with united healthcare: it's a crime only when poor people do it.

That's something that insecure people with no actual skills do

Just ask to reply in rot13

I also use o1 and sometimes it just gets stuff confidently wrong. For example it often makes up command line arguments or optional parameters to methods or configuration keys. Anything that is even remotely niche, anything that hasn't been posted 1000 times on the internet, GPT will get wrong without ever telling you that it does not know.

Anything else, you can just google it because 9/10 there's a SO thread about it, and when there isn't, the documentation is usually good enough. GPT is not going to help you there.

But you can see it in the small things. For example if you ask an intelligent person "how do I install X on docker?" it will search google and then find a tutorial or some resource to reference. Then they will break it down and adapt it to your scenario.

GPT instead will give you... whatever it feels like giving you in that moment. It will not look on the f*n internet to make sure that what it says is correct and up to date. It does not update an internal knowledge base with factual information that it can then reference to produce a coherent plan. It has no concept of truth so it can't use logic.

You can throw as much compute and chain of thought as you want to the problem, it's the architecture itself that is disappointing.

That's called a dictionary attack and it's one rung above bruteforcing

AI today is better than anyone could hope for,

I hope for an AI that can actually reason and doesn't bullshit its users though

I literally just bought a LTE watch because I hate phones, I never use mine, and I keep forgetting it anyway. I'd rather have a watch with an eSIM

Cool story but at least try to give some argumentation when you say stuff like:

The design of the language in Dockerfile is ad hoc in a bad way. It’s difficult to understand, for me, and easy to make mistakes.

Because that reads like a skill issue to me

Why do devops keep piling abstractions on top of abstractions?

There's the machine. Then the VM. Then the container. Then the orchestrator. Then the controller. And it's all so complex that you need even more tools to generate the configuration files for the former tools.

I don't want to write a Kubernetes controller. I don't even know why it should exist.

It means being good at first order predicate logic. And possibly higher order too when you consider `call/n` and lambdas. It means being good at generalization, at reasoning in causal terms, at understanding structure and grammar, at encoding problems as graphs and querying them for solutions, and much more.

Basically it's what current LLMs lack. They're good at spewing coherent text but they lack the building blocks of reason, which are made of logic, and which confer the quality of being consistent. A implies B.

When, precisely, did programmers stop caring about efficiency? Why is everything in the modern tech stack so bloated and inefficient? It's so funny to me that modern AI is the most wasteful thing we've invented and it's not even good at what it does. It goes against everything I know as a programmer.

No, if A's PRs always bounce because the testers find bugs then A is going to look like an idiot. Then again you need to work at a place that actually employs testers.

If B always submits PRs and they always go straight to merged in prod, then B knows what he's doing

The test is very simple but people simply don't realize it.

When LLMs are good at Prolog, it means they're good at logic, which means they're good at reasoning. Until then, you can't trust them.