alansammarone

5 ay öncediscuss

Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI specifically).

alansammarone

5 ay öncediscuss

Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-level analysis.

The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are many others. Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research. Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL. That's just the obvious stuff.

Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those already.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

I...I am very interested in this subject. There's a lot to unpack in your comment, but I think it's really pretty simple.

> this does not support your conclusion that artificial systems are "computationally equivalent" to brains in any practical sense.

You're making a point about engineering or practicality, and in that sense, you are absolutely correct.

That's not the most interesting part of the question, however.

> This is like arguing that because weather systems and computers both follow physical laws, you should be able to perfectly simulate weather on your laptop.

Yes, that's exactly what I'd argue, and...hm.. yes, I think that's clearly true. Whether it takes 10 minutes or 10^100 minutes, 1~ or 10^100 human lifetimes to do so, it's irrelevant. Units (including human lifetimes) are arbitrary, and I think fundamental truths probably won't depend on such arbitrary things as how long a particular collection of atoms in a particular corner of the universe (i.e. humans) happens to be stable for. Ratios are closer to being fundamental, but I digress.

To put it a different way - we think we know what the speed of light is. Traveling at v = 0.1c or at v = (1 - 10^(-100))c are equivalent in a fundamental sense, it's an engineering problem. Now, traveling at v = c...that's very different. That's interesting.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

I believe our definitions of "winning the IDE wars" are very, very different. For one thing, using "user count" as a metric for this like using "number of lines of code added" in a performance review. And even if that was part of the metric, people who use and don't absolutely fall in love with it, so much so that they become the ones advocating for its use, are only worth a tiny fraction of a "user".

neovim won the IDE wars before it even started. Zed has potential. I don't know what IntelliJ is.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

evil and stupid are certainly the wrong words. I agree this is a nuanced issue. however, I think it is an objective fact that certain orderings of priorities - in particular, the relative priority of freedom, privacy, security, protection, "justice" (depending on how you want to define that word) are strictly worse than others.

and that assumes it's a zero sum game, which I don't think is true generally. It may be true in the limit, but...we're far from the limit, so to speak. we can have both freedom and privacy and safety. And I think giving up on any one of them is objectively bad, both individually as well as a society.

now, on a different tone - and perhaps this really is subjetive/personal - myself, I'd rather die by my own choices than live by others. literally. I think there's close to 0 value in living a life according to values that others chose.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

I don't necessarily disagree with you, broadly.

The good news is that, I think, we don't really need - if fact, we probably don't really want - most people to accept anything, at least the specific context of this thread. It's about whether we can carve out a space - some space - for people like you and me.

> I've given up on trying to change the world.

I don't think you have. Speech matters. Ideas matter. I'm not going to try to quantify such things, but looking at your HN submissions and your comments - including this one - I think you are actively changing the world, for better or worse. If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think. We have a surprisingly large number of people who don't.

> Believe in Truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

I share your feelings - both the sadness about the path we seem to be going down and the wonder about what the Internet used to be.

I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense, but is constructed - every day, little by little, by each and every one of us. What the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.

Put another way - this is a rhetorical question - can do we do anything about it? Maybe.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

Interesting point, never thought of it like that, and I think there is some truth to that view. On the other hand, IIRC, this works best in instances where it's pure chance (you have no control over the likelihood of reward) and the probability is within some range (optimal is not 50%, I think, could be wrong).

I don't think either of this is true of LLMs. You obviously can improve its results with the right prompt + context + model choice, to a pretty large degree. The probability...hard to quantify, so I won't try. Let's just say that you wouldn't say you are addicted to your car because you have a 1% chance of being stuck in the middle of nowhere if it breaks down and 99% chance of a reward. The threshold I'm not sure.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

I dont think it's quite the same. The cases you mention are more like two alternative but roughly functionally equivalent things. People still argue and use both, but the argument is different. Even if people don't explicitly acknowledge it, at some level they understand it's a difference in taste.

This feels to me more like the horses vs cars thing, computers vs... something (no computers?), crypto vs "dollar-pegged" money, etc. It's deeper. I'm not saying the AI people are the "car" people, just that...there will be one opinion that will exist in 5-20 years, and the other will be gone. Which one... we'll see.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

It certainly helps, but in my experience you get 60-80% of the benefit just with code (except in legacy or otherwise terrible code, for example with misleading/outdated comments everywhere, bad variable/function names, etc - in that case more like 40%).

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

This is an interesting threads. There are many instances of "this is bad, doesn't work, don't like it", and many instances of "it works reasonably well here, look: <url>".

Seems like a consistent pattern.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

I don't know the specifics of this particular tool, I assume it's at most using a couple of passes of (some frontier model with specific system prompt + custom tools, for example code-specific rag + some form of "summarize"). By at most I mean "probably isn't doing anything crazier than that".

But it seems to be producing docs that are better than I tend to see with basic "summarize this repo for me"-style prompts, which is what I usually use on a first pass.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

I feel you brother. Same boat. I've been able to do things I wanted to do for ages and knew how to do, but didn't have the time to type, essentially. I prefer to produce nothing than something half baked ("MVPs"), so I did nothing. Now I can do experiments, throwaway, start from scratch, design, redesign, throw away, and eventually have something I can be a little proud of.

Maybe, just maybe, there will a new era where crappy software (by crappy software I mean almost everything we see around us - open source and closed source) is not the norm anymore - because now a single, smart and knowledgeable enough person can write something like Kubernetes (which is my baseline for OK software) or even Linux in a reasonable amount of time. And maybe we won't be stuck with 40 year old (or more) technologies because "too hard to change". Did you ever try to add bottom padding - literally just bottom padding - to the command prompt in a terminal emulator (in my case, I tried Iterm and Kitty + tmux only)? It's near impossible. That is absurd.

Point is: bad software existed before (most of it), and good software existed before (very little). It will be the same in the future. It's just that now, less people coordinating are needed to right good software.

alansammarone

8 ay öncediscuss

This is getting absurd, seriously. People can choose the tools they use. Whether you're old school or one of the new age people who don't even use punch cards anymore (don't even get me started on people using vi... myself, nothing will ever beat ed).

The comments section of this it's all a version of ad hominem, essentially (whats latin for tool?): "this is using AI, isn't?"

Right now, I'm not interested in the content, so I won't make any comments about that. That's not my point. But the "lol AI????" tone is getting out of hand. Let's judge people by the quality of their content, not by their choice of tools.

alansammarone

9 ay öncediscuss

Just to make a small addition to my comment, which also addresses the sibling and child replies.

I 100% agree that any good professional still needs (with or without AI) the "design, engineer, and knowledge of your constraints". I'm not arguing against that. Those are, in fact, part of what I find most fun about programming, and the reason why I fought through the typing boredom since I was 13. I'm also not a vibe coder.

I'm just saying all of that is somewhat orthogonal to the typing of code itself. With strong typing (as in type theory - I still write the types, sometimes signatures for interfaces, etc) and other tooling, you really can get a lot done by delegating the bulk of the implementation to these tools.

alansammarone

9 ay öncediscuss

after reading so many people argue about this over the last few years (and having had my own experience - I've been writing software professionally for close to 15 years), I've come to believe people are talking past each other because different people enjoy or excel at different aspects of coding.

at the very least, there's people who enjoy the experience of hand-crafting software - typing, being "in the zone", thinking slowly through the details.

then there are others, like me, who enjoy thinking abstractly about the pieces and how they fit together. might as well be doing algebraic topology. nothing bores me more than having to type precise but arbitrary syntax for 5 hrs (assuming you've decided to use the brain capacity to memorize it), and having to fight compiler/small logic errors throughout. I like the thinking, not the doing.

yes, we havent needed AI to build this for decades. we did however need to waste a hell of a lot of time doing essentially physical, mechanical work with your fingers.

alansammarone

10 ay öncediscuss

That's right, one person caring and not acting doesn't change reality, neither does one person caring and acting (most of the time). A relatively small number of people caring and acting, however, can change the course of history.

While it is in nobody's interest to care, individually, we're all better off if we care and act just a little bit.

alansammarone

10 ay öncediscuss

This. I can't keep myself from quoting another 20th century lesson from Snyder:

> Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

alansammarone

10 ay öncediscuss

While I think I agree with most of what you're saying, I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme, so I'll just leave a quote from the absolutely fantastic 20 lessons from the 20th century by Timothy Snyder:

> Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

alansammarone

10 ay öncediscuss

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm with you. I just meant more broadly - I think that inevitably, news organizations, as a whole, have more many competing interests - comercial, political, etc. I think that at least some of them at really trying their best to deliver accurate, factual claims. I'm generally less inclined to read opinion pieces, but I certainly get my news from the News, and I have a huge respect for honest journalists. I think they're one of the most under appreciated professions of our age.