agentultra

12,784 karmajoined 16 anni fa

Code: https://github.com/agentultra Blog: https://agentultra.com Stream: https://twitch.tv/agentultra Socials: https://types.pl/web/@agentultra

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8 ore fadiscuss

Wild idea: just write code.

I know. It’s an unbelievable concept in this AI era. Write code? Isn’t that what dinosaurs did?

If you expect that a human will need to read and maintain that code you might as well write it for them. You’ll get annoyed by having to read overly-verbose copy-pasted code. So will they. So write the code yourself and bringo: you’ll fix things yourself and write things in a way that makes sense for other humans to maintain.

Or you can come up with a convoluted web of markdown files to try and coax your agents and loops to understand what future human maintainers will expect the code to look like.

I’m not sure what path will be easier in the long run. Anyone inherit a loop-based agent-driven code base yet and have to try to understand it?

14 ore fadiscuss

I learned a while ago that eMacs is more like a programming environment that has a text editor built in. Sort of like some SmallTalk images. When you think of it this way it’s pretty neat.

4 giorni fadiscuss

Coding does not inherently have the “precision” of mathematics. If you’ve ever tried to formally verify even a basic algorithm you’ll know how “loose” programs are with their specifications.

If you end up down this route you’ll gain an appreciation for a branch of mathematics that has spent most of its history maligned by the wider community.

I too finally started grokking trigonometry and calculus in high school thanks much due to programming.

I don’t think it’s the best entry point for mathematics though. Us programmers tend to bias its effect on our learning and appreciation. For most people programming is tedious, cryptic, and frustrating. It doesn’t aid understanding mathematics if you can’t even use it.

Maths is beautiful on its own. And so is programming.

I think it’s still worthwhile because for all that these systems can do it still takes an experienced human to drive them. Any positive results are due to a human understanding the training data, the system, and importantly the output. You can’t one-shot a production grade C compiler or OS with these tools and never will be able to without over fitting the model. You need to know what a production grade C compiler requires in order to generate one using tools like this.

So keep learning. Mainly because it suits you, benefits you, and you like doing it.

4 giorni fadiscuss

Well the other thing is that agricultural uses are generally on a different scale and use different sources. And at least you can eat almonds and alfalfa. Probably more useful than asking an LLM to autocomplete your homework. Depending on your needs.

Even amongst municipal water usage, it seems hard to figure out how much DC usage factors in to other uses because often they’re not required, and therefore don’t, disclose their usage.

All I’m saying is that it’s not a closed case and not everyone complaining about DC water usage is a Russian propaganda bot.

4 giorni fadiscuss

Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable.

See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them!

They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes.

The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped.

I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”

10 giorni fadiscuss

“The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads.”

I disagree. If you ask a model for a manual and it regurgitates that manual from its training data, it’s over-fitted. It will regurgitate something that looks like a training manual. Or whatever fits your query about training manuals.

You still have to push back on them sometimes when you spot an error. And you can only spot them if you already know what you’re looking for and should expect. Otherwise you have to ignore the output and just get the links which… could be outdated or made up as well. You’ll never know until you verify the results.

And this degrades with compression and time.

There’s no royal road. I agree that trying and getting frustrated and having to take the effort to understand something pays off in spades. I just think it’s still worth it and vastly under appreciated in this era of “everything fast, now.”

11 giorni fadiscuss

PBT is great and often good enough.

I use model checking mostly in the design phase of a project.

Some much bigger projects at MS and Amazon use it continuously throughout their process.

11 giorni fadiscuss

If you are willing to relax the restrictions, and you probably should, model checking is probably worth its weight in gold for these scenarios.

You won’t get proofs but you will spell out your logic in a formal language[0] and each run of the checker will exhaustively check your invariants[1].

[0] Useful because often you will learn something you hadn’t considered.

[1] A proof will guarantee your statements hold over quantifiers that are much too large for a model checker to check exhaustively. But, you can say that for a model of size N, property Y is guaranteed to hold. The “small model theorem,” posits that if there is an error in your specification, it is more likely to show up in a small model. You sacrifice the completeness of proofs but this trade-off has been worth it to me.

11 giorni fadiscuss

You can’t vibe code a production capable C compiler if you’ve never written one.

Sure, companies are asking for LLM experience. But whether they know it or not they are also hiring someone who knows what they’re doing with the output.

Projects like this are still worth doing by hand. I’d dare say it’s even enjoyable.

11 giorni fadiscuss

Alienation is inherent to the system.

12 giorni fadiscuss

For sure. Just because the studies are incomplete or difficult doesn’t mean they’re useless. We still do unit testing and type systems continue to get more sophisticated and spread further because we believe they have an effect on quality and productivity regardless of the lack of evidence.

However it takes some taste in engineering and perhaps some mathematical sophistication to figure these things out. “Just use AI,” is not a very convincing argument either.

It’ll take time to sort out, I wager.

12 giorni fadiscuss

A lot of people believe that. Not a lot of evidence on the table for it (it’s not agent developers’ fault; empirical studies are expensive and rarely live up to scrutiny). Not sure it’s worth forcing people unless you like malicious compliance.

12 giorni fadiscuss

Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.

15 giorni fadiscuss

> * whether you’re protected from hackers or data breaches*

Not a matter of if, but when, a breach happens.

15 giorni fadiscuss

Doubt that. If you couldn’t write it yourself you can’t get an LLM to do it for you. So unless you’re attracting the 50 best software developers you’re getting middling to miserable results.

16 giorni fadiscuss

You can’t beat thermodynamics no matter how hard you try.

This shouldn’t be a surprised to the majority of people.

22 giorni fadiscuss

Exciting stuff, especially the tree-sitter changes.

Emacs is a fine weapon. And one that grows with you over the years of honing it to perfection. Nothing else compares.

23 giorni fadiscuss

Every line of code is a liability. A potential security breach. An error waiting to corrupt customer data. A maintenance burden.

23 giorni fadiscuss

I’ve had to use one of these to book something with a service company. It was horrible. It’s like talking to Pinnochio… there’s nothing there. And it’s trying to sound human and conversational. It’s creepy and annoying.

Just give me a human being or a plain voice menu.

Businesses just don’t want to pay people if they can help it. Some things are inefficient. Get over it.

24 giorni fadiscuss

Can’t we value both?

If we consider that “attractive code,” to many means simple, elegant… and therefore easy to extend, maintain, few errors, performant, etc.