illuminator83

há 13 horasdiscuss

I've seen lots of code that people have maintained for 20 years and its full of these duplication and worse. In fact I'm sad to say that majority of code I've seen people write and maintain is worse than what LLMs produce today. Often it is inexperience, sometimes it is willful negligence, but most often it is just tight deadlines and pressure to do finish whatever is being done right now. People know how to do it better, but nobody got the time and budget to actually do it. LLMs also learned from that.

illuminator83

há 17 diasdiscuss

I think a lot of people here have either not read the article fully or are misapprehending it.

Neither this author nor most other sane people I know claim that the code or architecture these "loops" produce is great. In fact, the author explains how it is not great. His point is rather, that we'll increasingly see a world in which code quality and maintainability by humans will cease to matter for a lot of codebases.

There might be many software companies in the future which successfully sell software products which were created without a single software developer being involved in its development or maintenance. The code might be bloated and bad - but it doesn't matter because machines can still create and maintain it cheaper and faster than people can.

I already see this happening at a small scale at the place where I work. Product managers with zero coding ability are attempting to create entire new product features on their own using Claude or Codex. We do not let them merge this stuff unsupervised but in some corners and in new repositories they are publishing stuff that they have barely spoken about with a developer. They are just doing it. We'll see more of that.

illuminator83

há 19 diasdiscuss

Phew .... I saw the title and thought this was some horrid LinkedIn post from a "Founder" dad about teaching his kids how to pitch their startup to investors ...

Luckily it's not about that!

illuminator83

há 2 mesesdiscuss

Installation of software has usually become simple and easy enough that I feel more safe if i just look it up on the official source and run some curl or package manager command to get it installed. I trust that more than letting an LLM figure it out and then having to worry that I it got hijackeed and installs something based on out-dated or wrong info.

But configuring / setting up complex pieces of technology is something in which I let LLMs help me regularly. I'm happy that I don't have to RTFM that much anymore to get something done. And yes, I'd hate to figure out IAM policies myself or decipher a truckload of error message of third-party systems by myself.

So, yes, I expect LLM help with these kind of things is going to become the norm.

For an LLM to work well, the installer should still exist, the UX should also be kind of self-explanatory and the error message must also have relevant and clear info.

So in that regard, not much has changed.

illuminator83

há 2 mesesdiscuss

I and everybody else here call BS on that. People make mistakes all the time. Arguably at similar or worse rates.

illuminator83

há 5 mesesdiscuss

Intelligent people tend to reproduce a lot less than other people. You wanna be average (or slightly above) for the best chance at successful procreation. And hyper-intelligent people are especially bad at procreation.

illuminator83

há 5 mesesdiscuss

It's not really about the implementation of Java (might be bad, I don't know). It is the specification.

- People talked about null being an issues and that is a big one.

- The entire idea of OOP extremism Java implemented was a mistake - though just a consequence of the time it was born in. Much has been written about this topic by many people.

- Lacking facilities and really design for generic programming (also related to the OOP extremism and null issue

So much more more you can find out with Google or any LLM

illuminator83

há 6 mesesdiscuss

Especially since the US is not going to have any allies anymore soon.

illuminator83

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I'm a big fan of high-level languages and abstractions. I'm just not a fan of bad abstractions.

illuminator83

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I think we are just used to it. Like we are used to so many suboptimal solutions in our professional and personal lives.

I mean, look something like C++ or the name "std::vector" specifically. There are probably 4 Trillion LoC containing this code out there - in production. I'm used to it, doesn't make it good.

illuminator83

há 6 mesesdiscuss

There are lots of suboptimal solutions for lots of problems out there. I don't know why it would matter if the Linux Kernel does the same mistake. And I'm sure that wasn't the only solution. Just something somebody implemented and noone bothered to change it because it worked "well enough". But I wouldn't be surprised if this is known to cause the kind of issue GCs are known to cause such as race conditions, resource exhaustion and stalling.

Let me do some quick research:

https://gist.github.com/bobrik/82e5722261920c9f23d9402b88a0b... https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2024-26923

illuminator83

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I'm hoping for a future in which humankind looks back with embarrassment at this silly period in its history in which people used to think a leaky and bad abstractions like garbage collection was ever a good approach to deal with resource life-times.

illuminator83

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I do not know the guy, and I do not care who he is. This really is not "slop". I can attest to the validity of almost all of his points based on my own career. And even if he used ChatGPT assistance to help with the writing, the content clearly was not invented by ChatGPT. This is valuable advice for people in our industry.

illuminator83

há 8 mesesdiscuss

For the most part, yes. Because people usually read docs and test it on their own.

But I remember a few people long ago telling me confidently how to do this or that in e.g. "git" only to find out during testing that it didn't quite work like that. Or telling me about how some subsystem could be tested. When it didn't work like that at all. Because they operated from memory instead of checking. Or confused one tool/system for another.

LLMs can and should verify their assumptions too. The blog article is about that. That should keep most hallucinations and mistakes people make from doing any real harm.

If you let an LLM do that it won't be much of a problem either. I usually link an LLM to an online source for an API I want to use or tell it just look it up so it is less likely to make such mistakes. It helps.

illuminator83

há 8 mesesdiscuss

Yeah, for the most part. But I've even had a few instance in which someone was very sure about something and still wrong. Usually not about APIs but rather about stuff that is more work to verify or not quite as timeless. Cache optimization issue or suitability of certain algorithms for some problems even. The world is changing a lot and sometimes people don't notice and stick to stuff that was state-of-the-art a decade ago.

But I think the point of the article is that you should have measure in place which make hallucinations not matter because it will be noticed in CI and tests.

illuminator83

há 8 mesesdiscuss

Are you sure? I've been confidently wrong about stuff before. Embarrassing, but it happens.. And I've been working with many people who are sometimes wrong about stuff too. With LLMs you call that "hallucinating" and with people we just call it "lapse in memory", "error in judgment", or "being distracted", or plain "a mistake".

illuminator83

há 8 mesesdiscuss

It's the tragedy of the commons all over again. You can see it in action everywhere people or communities should cooperate for the common good but don’t. Because many either fear being taken advantage of or quietly try to exploit the situation for their own gain.

illuminator83

há 8 mesesdiscuss

About 7 or 8 years ago I worked at a startup which got money from Softbank / Masayoshi Son. Our founder and our CTO went to meet him in LA IIRC to pitch.

They came back telling us he was basically asleep during the pitch meeting which was scheduled for only 10 minutes anyway.

Our business/product really had no chance of succeeding at this point and most knew it. We got some money from Softbank anyway - forgot how much. Our management was basically laughing about how easy it was to get funding from Softbank.

I jumped ship a year later or so and that was good timing.

illuminator83

há 8 mesesdiscuss

I think in most of my projects, many of the C++ packages I used for work (lots of computer vision, video codecs etc) I had to compile and host myself. The latest and greatest of OpenCV, dlib or e.g. gstreamer weren't available on the distros I was using (Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos). They'd lag a year or more behind sometimes. Some stuff was outright not available at all via package manager - in any version.

So, yes, you do have to figure out how to build and package these things by yourself very often. There are also no "leftpad" or similar packages in C. If you don't want to write something yourself.

In constrast - virtually every software package of any version is available to you in cargo or npm.

illuminator83

há 8 mesesdiscuss

I think it's mostly the fact that C dependencies are much rarer and much harder to add and maintain.

The average C project has at most a handful of other C dependencies. The average Rust, Go or NodeJS project? A couple hundred.

Ironically, because dependency management is so easy in modern languages, people started adding a lot of dependencies everywhere. Need a leftpad? Just add one line in some yaml file or an "Alt-Enter" in an IDE. Done.

In C? That is a lot more work. If you do that, you do it for advanced for stuff you absolutely need for your project. Because it is not easy. In all likelihood you write that stuff yourself.

comments