jsdalton · HackerLangs

I strongly agree with this take — and that’s partly why the article posted here leaves me scratching my head. PRs are already the gate, right? I don’t care what an agent does or doesn’t do within the confines of its workspace assuming their contributions are gated via a git repository and they don’t require exotic access to a production environment to do their development.

I’m also with you on the junior / mid-level engineer framing (a “brilliant” junior engineer perhaps, one who graduated from at the top of their class from the best CS program in the country) with a big caveat: AI is like a junior engineer who doesn’t know how to learn.

It’s like you’re working with the guy from Memento. Every day your LLM reports to work and they’ve learned nothing from your work so far. Every day is the first day!

Now like the Memento guy you can help them to scatter their workspace with sticky notes and reminders everywhere. With some effort you can start to approximate that thing called “learning” which is LITERALLY the most important trait of every single software developer on a team.

But I confess it’s a struggle for me and the available tooling isn’t there yet. The best I’ve done looks closer to the “second brain” people use tools like Obsidian for. Sadly I don’t think a second brain is a substitute for a first brain. And to be 100% honest any engineer who exhibited the same inability to learn and grow as an AI agent would be sacked after their first month on the job at any company I’ve ever worked at.

I’m actually reasonably optimistic that either the main AI providers or someone else will improve on this in the coming years. It certainly feels like a decent memory paired with a well architected thinking system that’s better at contextually injecting memories (I find LLMs today don’t know what they don’t know unless you force them to put metaphorical sticky notes all over the place) as well as capturing real learnings without supervision shouldn’t be an impossible task requiring novel technical structures.

Anyhow I’d love to be wrong about some of the above and I’m always reading articles like this one hoping that someone has solved these problems already and that I’m just slow on the uptake. But as of today, I’m only modestly better at architecting such agents than I was when I started.

jsdalton

11일 전discuss

Permanent DST is just a synonym for "let's all agree to wake up an hour earlier." The same change could be affected by e.g. schools and businesses agreeing to open at 8am instead of 9am. (Of course that would be wildly unpopular so permanent DST is just way to trick people into swallowing the pill.)

But would behavior change in the long run? Countries like Spain where solar noon differs wildly from clock noon just end up aligning their rituals accordingly (e.g. eating dinner at 9pm).

jsdalton

지난달discuss

It seems to me the parent commenter is saying the opposite: looking exactly like each other _is_ the point. It's a form of social signaling, to indicate that a project "belongs" to the in group of high-flying successful AI hype projects.

Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.

jsdalton

2개월 전discuss

I’d much, much prefer people were honest about AI answers and text and had the decency to cite it explicitly when they use it.

What I hate far worse than what this article complains about is just blatant AI writing in articles, comments, video narration you name it.

Way more insidious, way bigger problem!

jsdalton

2개월 전discuss

It’s aggressively AI written. I’d rather just read the prompt.

It’s unfortunate because many of us are going “full AI” when it comes to coding. And there are some true gives and takes that are interesting to explore.

Sadly, this piece reads like pure hype.

jsdalton

2개월 전discuss

Yes, and it immediately called to mind for me the phrase “the map is not the territory.”

Put another way: no matter how detailed or “perfect” you make a map, it will never be the territory, ie the thing that is mapped.

Computers and AI are like a map in this regard —- just ones and zeros that we have assigned meaning to arbitrarily. No matter how “good” AI gets, it’s still just a map of the thing not the thing itself.

So AI saying “I feel sad” is never more than a representation of sadness that should not be confused with the subjective experience of sadness itself.

jsdalton

4개월 전discuss

It’s AI.

jsdalton

4개월 전discuss

The metaphor that’s popped into my head recently is baking bread.

You can learn to bake good bread. It’s not _that_ hard. And it’ll probably taste better than store bought bread.

But it almost certainly won’t be cheaper. And it’ll take a more more time and effort.

Still, sometimes you might bake your own bread for kicks. But most of the time, you’ll just buy the bread someone else has already perfected.

jsdalton

4개월 전discuss

I was more bothered by the extraneous word spacing on the second line, between “and” and “the.” Is it just me?

jsdalton

5개월 전discuss

Which model did you get, and how much did it end up costing per square foot (if you don't mind me asking)? Just curious how much the real costs end up comparing with the sticker pricess on their website.

jsdalton

8개월 전discuss

Start with SICP!

jsdalton

8개월 전discuss

That all sounds very interesting. As someone who has synesthesia, I’d be interested if you still maintain those tests you refer to?

jsdalton

9개월 전discuss

I simply don’t agree with the conclusion though I appreciate the approach to thinking about products.

I recently chose to take the train vs driving and the factors behind that decision were:

* Time, yes. Train was approximately the same but an actually a bit slower.

* Cost. Train was slightly cheaper when looking at the true cost of driving. Also significantly cheaper than flying.

* Experience. This is entirely overlooked in the timetable centric approach. Train is simply the most pleasant way to travel long distances (maybe ferry is competitive there). I was able to move around and get work done and enjoy the view. If the train company had swapped my train for a bus I would NOT have been a satisfied customer.

* City center to city center (vs airport to airport). Had the train company said “we swapped the arrival location to the airport but technically we still got you to the city” I would NOT have been a happy customer.

The “trains as timetables” hypothesis would imply that the train could meet my needs via something other than rail travel and would definitely lose me as a customer.

On the other hand, improvements such as better wifi service (it was terrible and not sure why cell service is also poor on a train) or a route that was more scenic but did not impact my arrival time significantly would positively affect my likelihood of choosing train.

So the better lesson is know your customer needs and know their specific jobs to be done and center your hypothesis around this.

jsdalton

10개월 전discuss

I’ve often thought this would be useful for version control and change review, since it allows diffs to be a lot less noisy. I’m imagining how much easier it would be to review a PR with significant README edits if the file was already structured with semantic line breaks.

I’ve previously had the above thought and applied it to the end of sentences, but the idea of introducing them at the level of semantic thought had not occurred to me. But if this is where we’re going I’d start to wish for indentation possibilities. I’ve do this frequently with SQL statements, introducing both line breaks and indentations to provide a visual structure that mimics the semantic structure of clauses and the details they contain.