3,993 karma · joined June 26, 2021
How many people have tried to figure out a new maths, a GUT in physics, a more perfect human language (Esperanto for ex.) or programming language, only to fail in the vast majority of their attempts?
Do we think that anything but the majority of the attempts at a paradigm shift will end in failure?
If the majority end in failure, how is that not the same brute force methodology (brute force doesn’t mean you can’t respond to feedback from your failed experiments or from failures in the prevailing paradigms, I take it to just fundamentally mean trying “new” things with tools and information available to you, with the majority of attempts ending in failure, until something clicks, or doesn’t and you give up).
What do we think humans are doing? I think it’s not unfair to say our minds are constantly trying to assemble the pieces available to them in various ways. Whether we’re actively thinking about a problem or in the background as we go about our day.
Every once in a while the pieces fit together in an interesting way and it feels like inspiration.
The techniques we’ve learned likely influence the strategies we attempt, but beyond all this what else could there be but brute force when it comes to “novel” insights?
If it’s just a matter of following a predefined formula, it’s not intelligence.
If it’s a matter of assembling these formulas and strategies in an interesting way, again what else do we have but brute force?
Tool calling failures, hallucinations, bad code output. It felt like using a coding model from a year ago.
Even just as a general use model, somehow ChatGPT has a smoother integration with web search (than google!!), knowing when to use it, and not needing me to prompt it directly multiple times to search.
Not sure what happened there. They have all the ingredients in theory but they've really fallen behind on actual usability.
Their image models are kicking ass though.
Also, did you use Codex 5.3 Xhigh through the Codex CLI or Codex App?
> 'green everything, at all costs' and importing millions of unskilled people who don't share your values
Are you in good faith attempting to argue that those sentiments are not predominantly right wing talking points?
Btw, not defending Xcode. It may be powerful but it is so goddamn sluggish that it is miserable to use.
I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.
All around me, people's houses, the roads, the infrastructure, food cultivation and preparation, furniture, vehicles, it goes on and on, the tendency is towards loose approximation, loose standards. Things are constantly breaking, the quality is low, people are constantly being poisoned by the waste seeping into their water, air and soil, by the plastic they burn to cook their food, by the questionable chemicals in the completely unsafe industrial environments they work in to produce toxic products consumed by the masses.
There is no uniform size of steps. Yet the majority of humanity lives this way, and not just tolerates it but considers it a higher standard of living than we've had for the majority of human history.
I don't think people in the first world are a different species, so we will also adapt to whatever shitty environment we regress into as our standards fall. We'll realize that the majority of the areas we may consider sacrosanct are in fact quite negotiable in terms of quality when it comes down to our needs.
All this is to say that yeah, I think people will generally tolerate the quality of software going down just fine.
At the same time, the direction of software by and large seems to me to be going in the direction of fast fashion. Fast, cheap, replaceable, questionable quality.
Not all software can tolerate this, as I mentioned in another comment, flight control software, the software controlling your nuclear power plant, but the majority of the software in the world is far more trivial and its consumers (and producers) more tolerant of flaws.
I don’t think of seniors as purely irrationally fixated on the artisanal aspect, I also think they are rationally, subconsciously or not, fearful of the implications for their career as the bottom falls out of this industry.
I could be wrong though! Maybe high quality software will continue to be what the industry strives for and high paying jobs to fix the flawed vibe coded slop will proliferate, but I’m more pessimistic than to think that.
> A consumer
is all that ultimately matters.
All those things you’re talking about may or may not matter some day, after years and a class action lawsuit that may or may not materialize or have any material impact on the bottom line of the company producing the toaster, by which time millions of units of subpar toasters that don’t work sideways will have sold.
The world is filled with junk. The majority of what fills the world is junk. There are parts of our society where junk isn’t well tolerated (jet engines, mri machines) but the majority of the world tolerates quite a lot of sloppiness in design and execution and the companies producing those products are happily profitable.
Think of all the awful cheapest android phones and Windows PCs and laptops that are slow, buggy, have not had a security update in however long and are thus insecure, become virtually unusable within a couple years. The majority of the people in the world live on such devices either because they don't know better or have no better option. The world continues to turn.
People are fine with imperfection in their products, we're all used to it in various aspects of our lives.
Code being buggy, brittle, hard to extend, inefficient, slow, insecure. None of those are actual deal breakers to the end user, or the owners of the companies, and that's all that really matters at the end of the day in determining whether or not the product will sell and continue to exist.
If we think of it in terms of evolution, the selection pressure of all the things you listed is actually very weak in determining whether or not the thing survives and proliferates.
I think part of the problem a lot of senior devs are having is that they see what they do as an artisanal craft. The rest of the world just sees the code as a means to an end.
I don't care how elegantly my toaster was crafted as long as it toasts the bread and doesn't break.
This almost feels like a retro computing kind of hobby than anything aimed at genuine productivity.
Yes, anything from a couple of drinks a night with dinner / tv to getting blackout drunk multiple times a week, alone, with your significant other, or with friends / roommates.
In the case of people in my social circle (late 30s early 40s) it's primarily still for fun, as well as just a large amount of momentum from your teenage years, 20s, 30s, etc. For a lot of people I know, the association between drinking and good times / relaxation has been deeply engrained since high school.
I've recently taken an extended break for my health, as I'm fully aware that it takes a toll on me, but I still love grabbing some drinks whether I'm relaxing alone in the evening or going out with friends and family.
While it's certainly true that many people get into a dark place with drinking and let it spiral into a self-destructive, depressive pursuit, I don't think it's quite the rule it's made out to be.
I have a good amount of family who live idyllic, full, happy, social lives, drinking heavily multiple times a week with their friends and family into their 70s/80s until death.
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