Maybe? But it doesn't change the fact that most code written is tedious and repetitive and not particularly novel, except as part of one's own personal journey as a programmer.
I wrote my own frameworks as a kid, and I found that exciting. It helped me understand and accept frameworks written by others, and with actual adoption. Doesn't change the fact that none of that code is particularly original or insightful. It's mundane and done to death - like almost all almost every software company does.
Not seeing the tedium may be a sign of working on really interesting problems, or using excellent frameworks and support tooling - but I'd wager it's mostly a sign of inexperience.
Sometimes frameworks are a little too magic. Think raw sql vs a magic orm. No I'm not saying don't use an orm, but when everything ends up as magic meta configuration it's sometimes too much. Sometimes making things a little explicit can make it more flexible going forward.
Even if the framework is good, an llm can read the docs faster than you. Probably it's important to understand things in a lot of cases, but sometimes you just need to get it working without really reading the framework source or docs.
Yeah its not a huge amount, but its a start. eg - just got it to make me a class in Lua with names for all the colours. It went and named all the colors and did a very nice job (Claude) - it would have taken me ages to go and find the names, sort them out etc, and I was avoiding the work, cause its tedious. I've got it to make me windows controls and data structures, parsers all well defined stuff.
I think the problem comes about when it doesn't know the context you're in - give me a list of colour names is well defined, and I assume the LLM's would have read a million pages with this done, so its easy for it to do this. Doing something more exotic that it hasn't seen a lot, then you'll get weird results.
In my experience your suspicion is well-founded. Most commercial software is written to solve some business problem or another, and the novelty mainly comes from the specifics of the domain rather than the software itself, as most businesses have broadly the same problems.
The average non-software business likely doesn't need to innovate in the software space but rather automate as much as possible so they can innovate elsewhere.
The number of people I’ve seen use the term CRUD while simultaneously not knowing what isolation levels are is deeply concerning. Unsurprisingly, every crud job I’ve worked has had many race conditions / data consistency issues.
You could basically categorize all programming as CRUD (you’re just reading and updating some bits).
I hope nobody categorizes LLMs, compilers and interpreters, optimization problems, games, simulations and many other things as CRUD. Neah, you basically could not.
In some cases, definitely. Then good luck making the business case to improve the framework or swap and refactor around a different framework. (Or you can do what I do during the more motivated/less busy times in my life: find undisturbed unpaid time to do it for your team.)
In other cases improving the framework comes at the cost of some magic that may obscure the intent of the code.
The nice thing about LLM code is that it's code. You're not monkey patching a method. You're not subtly changing the behavior of a built-in. You're not adding a build step (though one can argue that LLM generated code is akin to a separate build step.) You're just checking in code. Other contributors can just read the code.
Raising the level of abstraction has significant costs though. Anyone who has built a large or complex enough system becomes very wary of abstraction.
I think this is one of the major benefits of LLMs. It's far less tedious to repeat yourself and write boilerplate when doing so is a better engineering decision than adding more layers of abstraction.
"Objective good" can only be determined through subjective opinion and belief. What is "good" is judged by us based on our own values, which can differ amongst people. While we may all trend towards similar values, there still can be significant differences amongst people. For example, some may value to live in a freer society while others may value a more restrictive yet more secure society.
Value is objective, as good is a matter of being the kind of thing a thing is. That a subject is making the determination doesn't mean it has no objective reality. The subjective is not a cause of value anymore than a telescope is the cause of the image of the moon. The telescope can distort the image, but it would be nonsensical to call it the cause.
To consign value to mere subjectivity only makes value more mysterious, not less, as all this does is assert it as a brute fact with no relation to reality. On the other hand, an objective basis grounds it in human nature.
A large part of the development of Europe, especially after the Renaissance, was resistance to the church and its historical teachings. The Reformation, Renaissance, rise of deism, scientific revolution, etc were all in response to and in many cases disagreeing with historical understanding. Saying "our current civilization is based on the teachings of the church" ignores the many aspects of our civilization that came about in spite of said church.
I’d argue the Catholic Jesuits probably had a more profound impact on science than any counter-catholic Christian denomination - purely from their intellectual output
They were formed around the same time as the reformation, but obviously had vastly more money and power (not that this should discount their contributions)
Examples:
- Christopher Clavius (created our modern Gregorian calendar)
- Anathasius Kircher (somewhat helped pull geology and medicine from vague Natural Philosophy into actual disciplines)
- Rodger Boscovich (atomic theory and a lot of basic everyday lab work was first used by him)
- A lot of contributions to astronomy and mathematics by many priests
- Probably their biggest contribution was the communication to the west and preservation of Chinese and Indian cultural artefacts/traditions. Without their work later anthropologists would have lost entire fields of study
Protestants had, what? Max Weber? That’s more cultural than intellectual or scientific
I agree with you though the later scientific revolution and age of enlightenment were in spite of the Catholic church, but I’d also probably broaden that as in spite of Christian belief altogether
Team Protestant had, well, lets see. Isaac Newton is a good place to start, who singularly contributed more to science than everyone on your list combined.
And how about Kepler, Boyle, Hooke, Leibniz, Linnaeus, Euler, Maxwell, Lord Kelvin. That's off the top of my head, and this isn't even a subject I've really thought about.
All of those are from the later scientific revolution (except Linneaus, Maxwell and Kelvin) and none of those are priests/leaders of a church. You’re correct in that they’re protestant and were surely religious but had little to no influence on protestant theology
Can you find any protestant priests with major scientific contributions during the reformation?
I only mentioned Weber as there are no other major contributions I can think of that actually influenced protestantism/wasn’t primarily from the scientific revolution
But the author didn't say that. He said "a large part of our civilization rests [on Aquinas]". That can be perfectly true even if there were other, equally significant, influences.
Yeah there's many influences. Pagan gods, greek philosophy, trade with asia, egypt, middle eastern religious inspiration and so on. And cultural geniuses maybe put their trust mostly in their lived experience and craft and so on like the sheer product and infrastructure of civilisation is mostly made by nonbelievers just doing their thing
> tptacek wasn't making this argument six months ago.
Yes, but other smart people were making this argument six months ago. Why should we trust the smart person we don't know now if we (looking back) shouldn't have trusted the smart person before?
Part of evaluating a claim is evaluating the source of the claim. For basically everybody, the source of these claim is always "the AI crowd", because those outside the AI space have no way of telling who is trustworthy and who isn't.
If you automatically lump anyone who makes an argument that AI is capable - not even good for the world on net, just useful in some tasks - into "the AI crowd", you will tautologically never hear that argument from anywhere else. But if you've been paying attention to software development discussion online for a few years, you've plausibly heard of tptacek and kentonv, eg, from prior work. If you haven't heard of them in particular, no judgement, but you gotta have someone you can classify as credible independently of their AI take if you want to be able to learn anything at all from other people on the subject.
Part of being on Hacker News is learning that there are people in this community - like tptacek - who are worth listening to.
In general, part of being an effective member of human society is getting good at evaluating who you should listen to and who is just hot air. I collect people who I consider to be credible and who have provided me with useful information in the past. If they start spouting junk I quietly drop them from my "pay attention to these people" list.
That system depends on pulling funding for roads if they don’t follow the rules. Technically any state can opt out if they don’t receive any highway funding. Given the government isn’t giving large AI funding to states, they can’t do the same here.
In the few days following the election, there was a flood of conservative posters all over the place. After about a week, they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around. Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the lack of a primary was the issue.
Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.
The strongest candidate for either party to field would be an incumbent President, especially one who has already beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit. The second strongest candidate would logically be an incumbent Vice President.
The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in contention. And the margin between her and Trump turned out to be slim, so a Harris win wouldn't have been impossible.
Harris was pretty much the only option. The primary was already over and there were real questions on who could spend campaign funds with Biden's step down.
That said, I really blame her lose on her and the biden campaign more than anything. They chased hard for disaffected republican voters at the expense of the base. They failed to win those voters and lost some of their base voters.
Ive noticed very clearly a material change even on this site, where a comment with a conservative viewpoint would get downvoted into oblivion, and now I seem to see far more diversified opinions. Which is great, I want that.
Some of the people who have done the worst things in history have been well put together people. The man who is ruthless and puts himself before everything oftentimes ends up successful, wealthy, and with plenty of resources to take care of himself and the people he chooses. Does that make him a good person?
One of the most important, time-tested values is one of responsibility and honor. That means doing the right thing with the power that you do have, both by yourself and by others, even if it hurts you. We each are responsible for the environment (natural and man-made) that we inhabit, and to that extent it is our duty to help others and ourselves.
We have been given many, many resources at our disposal, and we bear the responsibility to use them well. Too often in our society we shirk that responsibility with the excuse "well, its not our problem".
I will try to save someone if his life is in danger. I will try to help a stranger if I can and I by helping him does not produce harm to others.
But I am only motivated to help individuals. I don't plan to change societies, I don't plan to help social groups, invade countries, dictate some policies, doctrines, because that is what someone can mean "by taking care of the world".
I began to have a profound mistrust and dislike for activists, ideologues, social warriors, fighters for "a good cause" and revolutionaries. Their actions are usually finalized through loss of freedoms and blood baths.
Some of the most horrific atrocities have been done by people trying to " take care of the world"
> We have been given many, many resources at our disposal, and we bear the responsibility to use them well.
You should use "I" rather than "we" and I would agree. I've been given the gift of life in my children and I do everything for them. Fortunately I have resources to spare and try to take care of my family and neighbors as well, and I suggest you do the same.
The best people I know do good in both local and global ways. It's not necessary to choose one or the other. I don't disagree with your examples, but I notice that they say nothing about donating money to World Vision or putting solar panels on your roof, for example. Replace these with causes you believe are good.
This might be unfair, but I'd summarise what you said as "living a charitable life, but only for people within 50km of your house", and I think it's fairly obvious that "living a charitable life, mostly for people within 50km of your house, but also you give $50 a month to an international charity and you try to generate a bit less carbon dioxide" is better for the world, better for you because you don't have to harden your heart, and wouldn't harm most people's ability to look after themselves.
I agree that it's possible to be too neurotic about this and do what Sam Bankman-Fried did. It's also possible to be a little better than average at caring for the world without much cost to yourself. I don't understand why anyone would have a problem with the latter.
I do, and I do so with the knowledge that this is a responsibility that has been placed on me, and others, by the gifts that have been given to me. I help others and contribute to society, as is my duty, and I expect others to do the same. I also expect the same responsibility, trustworthiness, and honor of those who have been given power.
