146 karma · joined August 13, 2016
Now low effort noise can masquerade as high effort signal, drowning out the signal for things that actually matter.
Direct relationships of trust matter more than ever now. You can't just trust that if something looks high effort that it actually is. You need to know the person producing it and know how they approach work and how they treat you personally. Do they cut corners all the time or only for reasons they clearly communicate? Do they value high quality work? Do they respect your time?
I've noticed that slop code has certain tell tale markers (such as import statements being moved for no discernible reason). No sane human does things like this. I call this "the sixth finger of code." It's important to look for these signs as soon as possible.
Once one is spotted, you can generally stop reading; you are wasting your time since the code will be confusing and the code "creator" doesn't understand the code any better than you do. Any comments you post to correct the code will just be fed into an LLM to generate another round of slop.
In these situations, effort has not been saved by using an LLM; it has at best been shifted. Most likely it has been both shifted and inflated, and you bear the increased cost as the reviewer.
Overall, I think it's a win. Especially if there is a stdlib implementation that is a no overhead, bogstock, synchronous, blocking io implementation. It follows the "don't pay for things you don't use" attitude of the rest of zig.
My only question is was the cow milked by hand or by machine? The tubing in a milking machine almost certainly contains plastic.
Then the next version of my doc becomes the summarization, and I only flesh out details where the summarization went too far and removed critical details.
Sadly, most corporate executives will learn the wrong lessons from this and instead use this as an opportunity to push RTO even more.
Even when I'm forced to use another IDE for work, I try to find Vim keybindings ASAP. I like that I can learn Vim motions and actions once and use them in nearly every IDE.
A high search rate doesn't necessarily mean high rate of real world usage. Correlating across multiple metrics would be a better way to measure popularity.
Although popularity itself may still be a weak signal depending on your purposes.
Later some of my coworkers sent an article to me mentioning that the owner was under investigation by the SEC for (allegedly) embezzling funds from investors. I think I figured out where everyone's paychecks were going.
The one good use I have found is using it to tighten up my writing in design documents. I tend to use too many words to describe things. I use an LLM as a type of prose compressor on my documents. I need to re-read it afterward and make minor corrections, but it still saves me time since summarising my own writing takes much more time and energy.
That is the only net win I've had with LLMs so far.
Some people can handle it better than others. I'll never do it again though.
If oncall burden is light, then everyone volunteers because it is an easy way to make a bit of money.
However, it is a huge systemic change to move towards a voluntary model. Not sure how feasible this really is.
The one highlight is that we learned about the brand Speed Queen from the sales person at Lowe's. She talked them up as being the best, but they aren't sold at any big box store. Speed Queen is only sold through mom and pop shops.
When we dug in and did some research, we found that Speed Queen has the best consumer ratings by a wide margin.
They still produce a fixed drum model for the washer, like the type that whirlpool and maytag used to make decades ago. We put up with the whirlpool for a couple of years, but when we moved we got rid of them and bought a fixed drum style Speed Queen (look for the models marketed as "classic clean"). Best consumer appliance I've ever owned. I expect it to last at least another 20 years.
I think there is a secondary effect here. Many people remember how many jobs were deemed "non-essential" and how many people were laid off. Building your own business is one way to insulate oneself from this.
I think some amount of continued momentum is people preparing for the next time government overeach interferes with their ability to feed and house themselves and their families.
To make a play on an old programming joke:
Once there was an individual who noticed there was a problem with society. He said to himself "I'll use the State to change things!" Now there were two problems.
I could be wrong about all of that though.
I've been thinking a lot about private versus public companies. Most of my favorite products come out of privately held companies. There is something about the incentives for publicly traded companies that encourages them to make poor choices. I think it is because there are effectively two forms of revenue: selling products/services and selling stock. And those two things often conflict with eachother to the detriment of the customer. However, with a privately held company, the loyalty is primarily to the customer. Thus the products are better because they need to be to keep the company afloat.
I don't think that means that public companies shouldn't exist, but I wonder how an individual can structure their publicly traded company to avoid having the company misalign its incentives with those of the actual paying customer.
My current theory is to focus more on revenue sharing instead of stock price. For example, dividend stocks. I don't think it completely solves the problem, but it at least moves things in the right direction.
They would also use the bag the flour came in as material to make underwear. Literally nothing was wasted. That is probably also why this stuff got passed down to our generation: they couldn't bear to part with anything.