Mniot

joined 2 months ago
[–] Mniot@programming.dev 4 points 1 hour ago

To be honest, you sound like you're only just starting to learn to code.

Will coding forever belong to humans? No. Is the current generative-AI technology going to replace coders? Also no.

The reaction you see is frustration because it's obvious to anyone with decent skill that AI isn't up to the challenge, but it's not obvious to people who don't have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses "no, that's not actually correct".

Someone else referenced Microsoft's public work with Copilot. Here's Copilot making 13 PRs over 5 days and only 4 ever get merged you might think "30% success is pretty good!" But compare that with human-generated PRs and you can see that 30% fucking sucks. And that's not even looking inside the PR where the bot wastes everyone's time making tons of mistakes. It's just a terrible coworker and instead of getting fired they're getting an award for top performer.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 5 points 3 days ago

Makes sense.

For a reference point: I'm a millennial, living in a pretty liberal state of the US. Reading the front page of Reddit (not logged in, running ad-blockers so I think I get a "generic" experience), Ars Technica, occasional HackerNews threads, Something Awful forums. My friend circles are unanimous that Israel is an apartheid state, Russia is an invader, immigrants are not any kind of problem. It includes a few trans people who are vocal about their experiences. I would not call it a radically progressive group. For example, I don't think most of them would actually be comfortable with mass-executions of wealthy people.

Before joining Lemmy, I'd never encountered "tankies" in enough quantity for them to have any kind of label or for anyone to self-identify as "anti-tankie". It's still a weird idea to me.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)

immediately shut up about this evil as soon as Biden took office

Citation needed.

Every single person I know who reluctantly voted for Biden spent the next 4 years complaining constantly. Online forums were full of liberals calling Biden "basically a Republican". Plenty of news stories covered how more progressive Democrats felt Biden wasn't doing enough.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

I had this mouse and liked it. You rest the heel of your hand on the table and don't move your wrist at all. The mouse movement is fingers-only. Acceleration allows you to cover the entire screen with this very small amount of movement, and because it's all fingers it's highly accurate.

And like all ball-mice, it had a built-in fidget toy.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was at Google when they announced that only AI-related projects would be able to request increased budget. I don't know if they're still doing that specifically, but I'm sure they are still massively incentivizing teams to slap an "AI Inside" sticker on everything.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 0 points 1 week ago

My most recent usage of AI was making some script that uses WinGet to setup a dev environment.

This is a good example. What I'm saying is that pre-AI, I could look this up on StackOverflow and copy/paste blindly and get a slightly higher success rate than today where I can "AI please solve this".

But I shouldn't pick at the details. I think the "AI hater" mentality comes in because we've got this thing that boils down to "a bit more convenient than copying the solution off of StackOverflow" when used very carefully and "much worse than copying and pasting random code" when used otherwise. But instead of this honest pitch, it's mega-hype and it's only when people demand specific examples that someone starts talking like you do here.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 8 points 1 week ago (7 children)

I've heard this from others, too. I don't really get it.

I watched a teammate working with AI:

  1. Identify the problem: a function was getting passed an object-field when it should be getting the whole object
  2. Write instruction to the AI: "refactor the function I've selected to take a Foo instead of a String or Box. Then in the Foo function, use the bar parameter. Don't change other files or functions."
  3. Wait ~5s for Cursor to do it

It did the instructions and didn't fuck anything up, so I guess it was a success? But they already knew exactly what the fixed code should look like, so it seems like they just took a slow and boring path to get there.

When I'm working with a new intern, they cost me time. Everything is 2-4x slower. It's worth it because (a) I like working with people and someone just getting into programming makes me feel happy and (b) after a few months I'm able to trust that they can do things on their own and I'm not constantly checking to see if they've actually deleted random code or put an authentication check on an unauthenticated endpoint etc etc. The point of an intern is to see if you want to hire them as a jr dev who will actually become worthwhile in 6+ months.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago

I appreciate you explaining it. My LLM wasn't working so I didn't understand the joke

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This reminds me of another post I'd read, "Hey, wait – is employee performance really Gaussian distributed??".

There's this phenomenon when you're an interviewer at a decently-funded start-up where you take a ton of interviews and say "OMG developers are so bad". But you've mistakenly defined "developer" as "person who applies for a developer job". GPT3.5 is certainly better at solving interview questions than 90% of the people who apply. But it's worse than the people who actually pass the interview. (In part because the interview is more than just implementing a standard interview problem.)

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Based on the article, it seems like cult-follower behavior. Not everyone is susceptible to cults (I think it's a combo of individual brain and life-circumstances), but I wouldn't say, "eh, it's not the cult's fault that these delusional people killed themselves!"

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

lol is it even worth tracking what's tariffed today?

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 4 points 3 weeks ago

I don't disagree with you, but I don't put a lot of value in that judgement. Like, if I was the VP of Denying Claims at UnitedHealthcare, I guess I would avoid being in a room with him and a gun just to be safe? I donno...

When I see people saying he's definitely innocent, I mostly read that as a reaction against the media which portrays all suspects as 100% guilty. And that's a pretty fucked-up thing, right? Like, suppose there's a real trial and we all get to see that the evidence against Manione is garbage and that he's clearly innocent and he gets correctly exonerated. Even still, he'll spend the rest of his life as "Luigi, that dude who killed the CEO!" because that's what people saw on TV long before his trial.

 

"I found an entirely new way to get out of 'what do you want to get for dinner?'"

 

As opposed to "interactivity". I saw this in a post from wpb@lemmy.world: https://programming.dev/post/26779367/15573661

view more: next ›