PhilipTheBucket

Yeah, and I’m only supposed to use this bong for smoking tobacco. It said so very very clearly when I bought it so you know they mean it.

Making a few digits worth of wrong division way down in the not very significant bits of the answer, is way better than encouraging all your users to use an LLM to generate the answers for their quarterly reports / tax forms / do we have enough food for the winter calculations. The Pentium division fuckup was barely worth fixing unless you were doing some kind of numerical analysis or simulation or something, which is why it slipped past all the testing initially. This is astronomically worse of a fuck-up.

It is a good joke but you missed the chance to call back to one of the better gags from Space Quest 3 by writing “Yes / Yes”

“Importance”

Honestly, man, I get what you’re saying, but also at some point all that stuff just becomes someone else’s problem.

This is what people forget about the social contract: It goes both ways, it was an agreement for the benefit of all. The old way was that if you had a problem with someone, you showed up at their house with a bat / with some friends. That wasn’t really the way, and so we arrived at this deal where no one had to do that, but then people always start to fuck over other people involved in the system thinking that that “no one will show up at my place with a bat, whatever I do” arrangement is a law of nature. It’s not.

Is that really true? I guess I have no reason to doubt it, I just hadn’t heard it before.

I feel like at some point it needs to be active response. Phase 1 is a teergrube type of slowness to muck up the crawlers, with warnings in the headers and response body, and then phase 2 is a DDOS in response or maybe just a drone strike and cut out the middleman. Once you’ve actively evading Anubis, fuckin’ game on.

In the olden times, it was a big point of pride of American politics that a lot of people didn’t want to kill the leaders. It was sort of assumed that in feudal style European politics, of course the common people kind of wanted to kill you, because you were threatening their safety and taking their stuff. In America, the way we did things was to earn the respect of the people you governed. The people actually wanted this person to be in charge. Why would I shoot that guy? That’s who we picked, we like him.

Of course there are some caveats (slavery large among them). The reality never matched up to the ideal. But we’re going back to where even the approximation of consent of the governed that we used to have, isn’t assumed anymore. Fuckin bullshit

I thought I had it worked out, how to sort of strike a balance so I can keep my focus intact and let it be helpful without wasting time constantly correcting its stuff or shying away from actually paying attention to the code. But I think my strategy of “let the LLM generate a bunch of vomit to get things started and then take on the correct and augmentation from a human standpoint” has let the overall designs at a high level get a lot sloppier than they used to be.

Yeah, you might be right, it might be time to just set the stuff aside except for very specialized uses.

Certainly possible

I’m also genuinely a little bit alarmed looking back now at my pre-LLM code and seeing the quality vs. the with-LLM code.

IDK, I just popped open a project from 10 years ago and it’s perfectly clean, it’s actually better than some of my modern code because it’s not LLM-ified to save time.

I think it has a lot more to do with whether it was made in that “kind of crappy IDK what I’m doing” phase of programming. Some of your old stuff is going to be in that category sure. As long as you’re out of that, however long it took you to get there or however far away it was in time, your code should be good.

Yeah, that sounds about right lol. All my python projects for years were basically writing C in python. It actually took me all the way up until I got to look at the code ChatGPT likes to generate that I learned idiomatic python. My first database project was based on the Unix philosophy, where everything was strings (no ID keys, no normalization), because Unix is good.

The client wasn’t happy when they looked at the DB code lmao. Whatever, it worked, they still paid us and I didn’t do it again.

Am I the only one who likes looking at my old code? Generally I feel like it’s alright.

Usually the first project when I’m learning how to use some new language or environment is super-shitty. I can tell it’s very bad, usually I don’t like interacting with it if I have to make changes, but it’s still not overly painful. It’s just bad code. And that one exception aside I generally like looking at my code.

Yeah. I feel like in a few years when literally nothing works or is maintainable, people are going to have a resurgent realization of the importance of reliability in software design, that just throwing bodies and lines of code at the problem builds up a shaky structure that just isn’t workable anymore once it grows beyond a certain size.

We used to know that, and somehow we forgot.

Yeah. I have no idea what the answer is, just describing the nature of the issue. I come from the days when you would maybe import like one library to do something special like .png reading or something, and you basically did all the rest yourself. The way programming gets done today is wild to me.

I sort of have a suspicion that there is some mathematical proof that, as soon as it becomes quick and easy to import an arbitrary number of dependencies into your project along with their dependencies, the size of the average project’s dependencies starts to follow an exponential growth curve increasing every year, without limit.

I notice that this stuff didn’t happen with package managers + autoconf/automake. It was only once it became super-trivial to do from the programmer side, that the growth curve started. I’ve literally had trivial projects pull in thousands of dependencies recursively, because it’s easier to do that than to take literally one hour implementing a little modified-file watcher function or something.

Same as anything really

They actually observed the natives setting those controlled burns, and decided to themselves, “Yeah they’re wild savages, they clearly don’t give a fuck about anything or know what they’re doing, here’s me with syphilis and muskets and I think it’s time to share civilization with them, they’ll thank me later.” All that magic prairie ecosystem (which is basically gone now) was a carefully constructed environment maintained over generations to make hunting big game cheap and easy. But no, let’s have railroads and lead paint instead.

What kind of endorsement is that lmao