Apocryphon

Author ought to think it

> This is a classic riddiculous and humorous riddiculous riddiculous riddiculous riddiculous riddiculous riddiculous riddiculous riddiculous riddiculous

Bone-chilling.

What “great games?” Even independently of the advent of LLMs, the game industry has been in the doldrums for decades. AI adoption might be new, but it hasn’t exactly reversed that trend yet

What other languages?

I'm not sure how widespread this meme (in the general sense, not the internet fad sense) is, but I came across it theorized by this humanities account, Adam Walker - Close Reading Poetry:

The New Renaissance is Coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvixEyV10Q

Perhaps, but the examples in that article all clearly look like they're using AI-generated art assets. You might as well call that style "slop" in the sense that it is very easy to spot. I don't know if it's possible to create a general AI filter for the actual code, but certainly labelling ones that had AI-made visual and audio assets, with minimal human craftsmanship involved, would be a good first step.

High-level programming languages, garbage collection, expressiveness, functional programming, code completion, jQuery, Wordpress, no-code solutions, Bootstrap.js, "batteries-included" SDKs...

Of course, prompting an LLM to one-shot an app is a quantum leap in comparison, but c'mon, the whole direction of the field is towards automation, abstraction, convenience. It's always trended letting the programmer write less code. Have to deal with less menial tasks. So LLMs are just the latest manifestation of that motivation. And, perhaps in a decade or two, something will come along to replace LLMs, and this conversation will happen again, except even with more desperation and despair.

But while your example exists, I don't believe that's how the industry works, yet. They're not just allowing laymen to one-shot their production software. Certainly some teams may be trying that, and some indie devs have made good money already selling vibecoded software. But I don't think the technology is good enough to auto-generate professional code at scale, without human oversight. Give it another eighteen months.

I think this is really an excellent comment because it challenges us to reframe what we take for granted as creativity, enforces us to reconsider what creativity could be in the face of really powerful automation.

What you and I are saying is synonymous. I’m simply reusing language that the post I’m responding to used. And also de-glamorizing/de-romanticizing things a bit, sure.

And given that fast food is the pinnacle of sustenance as a product and Hollywood has been content-brained since 1977, sure!

You’re overlooking that the point of technology- and technologists- is to ultimately serve customers. The pleasure is incidental.

Writing left-pad isn't the issue, the issue is that projects were importing a one-liner package and blindly using it, which requires no skill.

> Second, even if the package’s logic is correct, I can’t help but be amazed by the fact that developers are taking on dependencies for single line functions that they should be able to write with their eyes closed. In my opinion, if you cannot write a left-pad, is-positive-integer, or isArray function in 5 minutes flat (including the time you spend Googling), then you don’t actually know how to code. Hell, any of these would make a great code screening interview question to determine whether or not a candidate can code.

> Finally, stringing APIs together and calling it programming doesn’t make it programming. It’s some crazy form of dependency hacking that involves the cloud, over-engineering things, and complexity far beyond what’s actually needed.

Obviously LLMs make the situation even more dire, but I think people are overlooking that the industry was automating itself out of programming as a craft even before them. It's just the automation involved reuse of the work of other humans.

NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program? (http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-how...)

1725 points|df07|11 years ago|854 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798

Obviously entrusting an entity to do everything is different from using a dependency or library, but aren’t LLMs for work just a natural progression of this? Programming is about automation. Programmers have been automating and outsourcing their work since the concept of SDKs were invented. Or even since high-level languages were invented. The industry was already doing this, and doing it excessively, long before Claude. left-pad happened a decade ago and we’ve learned nothing.

Yeah, but therein lies the difference between coding as a hobby and software engineering as a profession. The latter tends to promote DRY overuse of dependencies, whether the dependencies were invented in-house or not!

I don’t deny that there’s more slop than ever, but I would argue that this is a quantitative issue not a qualitative one, because frankly, the Internet has been drowned in slop for over a decade now. Those creative industries have had to deal with a lot of low quality content (some bot-generated even before LLMs!) for a while now.

So the central challenge has always been the same: discoverability is the difficulty. It’s just even harder now, and we need to find ways to promote the good stuff.

Given the amount of complaints and generally downtrending tone on HN over the past decade and a half, did people really enjoy programming for work? It feels like the vicissitudes of the market, from the “move fast and break stuff and technical debt be damned” era of ZIRP, to “move even faster because now companies have to show profit and we are post-ZIRP cracked 100x engineers” just led to a lot of sloppy inelegant code, features and products built that never shipped, and unending meetings about half-baked business requirements. And a lot of the programming just ended up writing API glue code.

If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?

Lame. It should belong to R. Talsorian Games still.

S.F.'s California Academy of Sciences used to have an open room near the lobby with a ton of Macintoshes loaded with children's software. I always remembered trying out Kid Pix.

I mean, they’ll probably train a law LLM to find a way to attack it.

FAANG Simulator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48836778

That game is more of an idle / clicker game, and while I quite enjoyed the one from a few months ago about being a SWE in SF, the shtick wears thin quickly especially if you’re not in the niche that identifies with all the in-jokes.

There's probably something to be said as well that modern work, at least in American culture, really chips away at work-life boundaries. I understand one might want to stay late at work for all sorts of reasons. But perhaps one shouldn't have to the detriment of one's own personal life, whether familial or otherwise.

Urbanization and industrialization is social and economic.

Did they at least rent a house? If not, how spacious was their apartment, how accessible was outside space for the kids to play in? If so, what was the percentage of their income was the rent?

Isn't that a mixture of because they don't expect every child to survive to adulthood, and/or these are subsistence agricultural areas who need more manual labor?

The U.S. birth rate fell around 20% after the Great Recession and has never risen since. Seems like this is a pretty significant angle to focus on!

https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/data-snapshot-ten-years-a...

https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth...

You are still writing in generalities. You need to actually pick a prominent study and state how it specifically mistakes correlation for causation. Just saying “oh all the existing science is wrong” doesn’t advance your argument. You’re assuming the reader knows what you’re talking about.

I don’t have any vested interest in upholding those studies, for all I know you might be entirely right. But if they’re the only studies out right now, the onus is on you, as a minority dissenter, to say specifically why they’re wrong. To just handwave it away is to undercut your own position because it makes you look like a crank who is just casually attacking the state of the field. And in the context of a forum such as this, it’s very off-putting, obnoxious behavior.

You’d get no pushback if you actually substantiated your points rather than tossing around general criticisms.

Never knew of Golding’s post-Flies bibliography. Sounds like it’s worth diving into! And wonder if his relationship to Monteith is worth some sort of dramatization.

Nope, it’s on you to either provide counter-studies first, or even just provide one solid, concrete example of what issue you have with these studies, rather than just handwaving them away as if such a rhetorical flourish can substantiate any sort of argument.

They made that game 20 years ago:

https://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/