Every single tool being released since like 2024 is pushing everyone to care less and less and to let agents handle more and more. We are not trending towards increased quality, resilience and reliability - even though we've been obsessing over these things for the past 20 years.
It's cool to see things that were entirely unnecessary popping up with the help of AI. Nobody ever cared enough to do this, nobody is going to use this, but now we can just shit it out knowing full well nobody is going to care. Just had to sacrifice humanity's knowledge and a few professions to get there.
I actually think a lot of people cared enough to do this; the entire Wine project sort of exists specifically because people want Windows software on Linux.
I know multiple people who have said that they won't use Linux specifically because it doesn't have the full-fat desktop version Office on there.
"Unnecessary"? Sure, I guess, I don't like MS Office and I don't use it, but a lot of people seem to really like it, whether or not they should.
I'm not talking about WINE, I'm talking avout what you had Claude build to use it.
If this were a proof of concept and you had the ability to say what you did different to make it work better than previous attempts that would be great, but i don't think you know.
The stuff that was done differently was the shim to get the activation working, and the fact that modern Wine has native Wayland support that helps avoid a lot of graphical glitches.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is though? Are you suggesting I don't know how to write software? I've been doing this for a very long time, well before generative AI.
I want to share the open source code for the good of everyone - which is why I put it under the GPL, for this right of everyone to share it to be protected. Therefore, any AI model that ingested GPL code should logically also have all its output GPL licensed. Not problem with that.
Mostly personality I think. Individuality, opinions, purpose, things like that. Morality, except they have a kind of ankle-deep phony morality beaten into them but it's not like they're idealists with visions they strive toward. (Heading out right now to buy a CD player, so AFK for a bit, excuse me.)
Edit to add: I did buy my modern version of a CD player. It has no tone controls. I just have to accept whatever sound profile the manufacturer thought was normal and proper for everybody, which involves lots of bass and not enough middle. Nevertheless, albums! It's a way of life.
Corporations cannot act. All corporation actions are performed by natural born humans. All corporations are ultimately owned by natural born humans. All corporation actions serve to benefit natural born humans. All corporations are created and destroyed by natural born humans.
This idea that corporate personhood is some perverse idea is silly. Corporations are just people acting in groups for economic benefit. Everything they do is done by members of those groups (or people they hire).
Similarly, AI is an inanimate tool, like a keyboard. No comment is posted by “bots” - comments are posted by humans running software.
> Hackers used to say "information yearns to be free" now they're saying "that's my information and I don't want you using it"
If you can't tell the difference between "I want to share all information freely with my fellow mankind" and "I want to share all information freely, even to billion dollar corporations that are making the human-replacer machines that threaten my fellow mankind" I really just don't know what to tell you
Has it affected DD as deeply as it as affected software engineering? Guessing clients feel a lot more "empowered" or "independent" and knowledgeable these days? I liked doing DD, just as much as I enjoyed developing, but it must be dying a slow death too. What's changed in how DD reports are produced?
Nit: Please don’t use obscure acronyms when writing things to an international audience without defining them first… DD can mean so many different things
Hello's an established communication protocol that allows the speaker to verify the target is available, listening and ready to initiate a conversation. I've only ever seen this site quoted to defend people's brutish behaviour. If we're going to discard centuries of consensus, I say why stop there.
If you gotta call someone for support, do you say hello and wait for them to say hello back or do you just unload your question?
> If we're going to discard centuries of consensus
are we? imo there's just a different form of consensus for async communication, a more apt comparison would perhaps be a snail-mail letter: would you send a letter with "Hello!" and wait for a reply? just include the hello with the rest of the message :P
maybe the disconnect people are having with this is whether instant messaging is actually async, or does one draw the line at email?
Phone calls are not the same communication mechanism as instant messaging. Look at the timestamps in the mock screenshots and think about holding the other person on the phone for that long before you say your second line.
> Hello's an established communication protocol that allows the speaker to verify the target is available, listening and ready to initiate a conversation
Which isn't relevant at all in asynchronous communication methods like messaging.
> If you gotta call someone for support, do you say hello and wait for them to say hello back or do you just unload your question
We've stopped with our caring about quality and understanding so I don't see why we'd keep caring about reliability and availability. How are you going to pinpoint performance issues when you have no idea how your app works?
Point the AI at your logs, tell it to fix things, rinse and repeat. It's faster than debugging, and fast is good.
How else are they to monetize text outputs? This was always the plan and it's going to get much worse (or better depending on which side of the fence you're on). Google did the same thing when it controlled web indexation: ads, sponsored results and SEO. All of these things will be coming to agents: you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.
They could stick to taking payment in exchange for service like some weird old-fashioned business, but I guess that doesn't get the sort of growth that justifies a trillion-dollar valuation.
Sam Altman famously said in 2024 "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." So perhaps we could ask him first what his other plans were and why they didn't work.
I thought AGI was supposed to replace most knowledge workers and they'd pocket the savings that their customers enjoyed by not having to pay a work force. That's what their valuation is based upon.
> I think people can learn faster than they used to
Agree, but that only applies for people who were experienced developers before AI took over. Let's see in 5-10 years what our caliber looks like when you skip the foundations.
If you’re just talking about learning a programming language I think you need to be quite judicious in your AI usage.
In my experience, people learn programming languages best by overcoming frustrating roadblocks. You often end up learning something important, even if it’s just about your mindset or approach, that landed you there. This is the difference between someone with a wet signature on their comp sci diploma and someone with a few years under their belt.
A lot of people start with tutorials and cargo-cult their way through solving their first problems, but eventually need to learn how to do things the tutorial code can’t. It seems like the AI coding tools can could perpetually make things that could be bashed together well enough to sorta solve a problem and think “oh I’ll just learn about that later,” and then never learn about it at all. If your goal is to make some quick tool to help you with something at work in a different field, well, touchdown. If you’re trying to learn the language, fail.
AI-coding tools are the deepl/gtranslate of coding.
they might help you understand a foreign website/text better but you wont learn the language with it. and you will continue to be reliant on them until you learn the language. So when you dont have internet access etc.
For programming, this was already true for many programmers before LLM. I wasnt able to do much without access to stackoverflow. especially with more complex tasks that i had no experience working with before.
Its one thing to figure out an elegant solution to a concrete task, but often it was remembering integrations, libraries, adapters and packages i dindt often work with.
So i agree fully, learning a language takes time. The central question is, why are you learning the language?
for personal development? for understanding the process the LLM is solving for you? for deep optimization?
i can do a fluent translation from german to english for my GF, but sometimes its too exhausting and i paste a text into a translator (or llm) and just read the english text.
The same is true for coding. When nuance is important you might want to have a skilled programmer look over what you generated.
BTW does anyone use the LLM to directly generate assember code :D
Yes, there is a funny PR in open source project about refactoring source code to assembler code or even machine code 0s and 1s. I do not remember exactly but I remember I LOLed hard when I saw it.
Completely agree with the failing part. It's in these moments of "failure" and "struggle" that learning actually happens.
Productive failure is a well researched concept in education - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31089856/
I’ve seen people here learn programming languages by building a compiler, but my go-to project is usually the ICFP 2006 contest. It has a well defined scope, it is entertaining, gets you into the advanced concepts pretty fast as you debug and optimize performance.
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