Megranium

Funny that you mention SimCity ... I used to play it (mostly the Nintendo SuperNES/SuperFamicom versions) and nuclear power plants would invariably explode at some point. I guess few people talked about climate change back then because the only drawback to the other power plant types was space usage ... reflecting on it, interesting how the assumptions formed the game ...

I guess one resolution would be to distinguish between code and product. The code, as in the material, was always malleable. In some languages you can even change it while it's running.

The product, on the other hand, was not, and that changed with LLMs quite a bit. But the code is not the product.

EDIT: You could even argue, the code itself becomes less malleable, in the clay sense, with LLMs because now you really NEED a tool to make changes, and changing the code by hand becomes much harder. So LLMs shift the malleability from code to product.

I guess then it's based on a personal feeling towards code. To me, even when my skill was more limited, code as a material still felt much more malleable than anything else. If you had asked me, I'd always have compared code to clay, or pencil on paper, rather than wood, stone, or ink.

Also, then, the comparison greatly underestimates clay. Sure, everyone can put a dent in a slab of clay but modifying things controlled takes time, skill and patience, a precise application of force that can easily go wrong so you might need to start over.

So, yeah, I guess my stance towards both code and clay is just very different ... the comparison doesn't make sense to me at all ...

Odd comparison ... code was always malleable, that's the nice thing about it, which I, as a slightly clumsy person, found the most attractive thing about coding.

You can't break anything you can't fix, and you can start out with something crappy that fulfills your needs at the moment and make it better later ... or not, if it continues to serve your purpose.

A stonemason has to buy new stones if they break something, a painter new paint, a woodworker new wood. If you build a crappy guitar you might have to buy new material, taking it apart and improving it might be tough.

With code, none of that has ever been a problem. You can start with something small, make mistakes, improve, all with the same material. You can even undo mistakes without a trace.

I'd say it's this pre-existing malleability of code that enabled LLM-based coding in the first place.

Huh, I've always understood that quote very differently, with emphasis on "premature" ... not as in, "don't optimize" but more as in "don't optimize before you've understood the problem" ... or, as a CS professor of mine said "Make it work first, THEN make it work fast" ...

I guess it's exactly the opposite for me ... I always hated using "normal" language with the computer.

I often quip that I became a programmer specifically to avoid having to use spoken language. I always twitch at the thought of using any voice-based assistant.

Thinking in systems and algorithms is more enjoyable than using human language when it comes to computers IMHO ...

I don't really have nostalgia for that, I prefer the immediacy honestly.

Nowadays people are captured by music differently, as they were captured by music differently before music could be mechanically or digitally reproduced.

Oh I do remember Napster, but that was way after 1993 as well ;)

Either way, that still took ages to download, etc, so, it was less immediate. And somehow, I remember it more as a source for stuff that's already well-known ...

Never was too much into LAN parties though ...

I honestly don't share the nostalgia.

I enjoy having a computer that allows me to create all kinds of things that weren't possible in 1993 ... mash together all kinds of audio, video, text ... put it in a backpack, bring it somewhere, perform on stage, with an 800$ laptop. Amazing.

I'm one of those "Encarta kids" who dug through Encarta for nights on end while the parents were out, and still spend slow Sundays reading random Wikipedia articles.

Having the archives that have been created since 1993, whether Wikipedia, Youtube (to me still one of the most amazing music discovery tools I've ever encountered), Archive.org, Google Scholar, Zenodo, at my fingertips has probably widened my personal horizon beyond imagination. Not sure who I'd be without it.

So even sadder to see it all drown now in AI slop ...

I'm always amazed how Youtube can be so many different things for different people ... It's true that it used to be better a few years back, but people still upload great content even it it's harder to find nowadays.

Also, music ... back in the 90ies, if you were drawn to the obscure side of music, you'd read about it, and could, at best, imagine what it was like, because your local record store didn't have it, the bigger store the next town over didn't have it, and IF anyone could order it was with a non-refundable down payment.

Nowadays, you can probably find it on YT, and that's great IMHO. I my musical horizon would be so much more limited without it.

Also I've learned a lot about guitar repair ...

I've carried my laptop around in so many different bags over the years ... sling bags, tote bags, waterproof messenger backpacks, IKEA backpacks with laptop sleeve compartment, drawstring bags. I usually pick the bag depending on the occasion ...

bike ride in the rain? -> waterproof messenger backpack

downtown stroll to satisfy my inner hipster? -> tote bag etc ...

All I know is that I'm a "single compartment" person ... I've always found that having a separate compartment for everything just comes at excess weight and loss of flexibility.

I'd give the movie prop a try for sure. Still looking for a decent source of Tyvek to take an attempt at making my own bag (it's not super commonly used where I live).

I wouldn't agree with this all-or-nothing view that ignores public transport. Yes, plenty of people want to live in the city, so it's dense, but if you live a bit outside, you can hop on a local train and be in the city in 30 minutes.

Also, Paris is an extreme example. There's plenty of mid-sized cities (400k to 1 million or so) in Europe and presumably elsewhere where you can live in a quiet space, maybe even have access to a garden, and hop on the tram or your bike, and be downtown in 20 minutes, without parking lots.

So, you can definitely have both. These places exist.

Just so I can choose and compare as a consumer, so I can filter just as I can filter by genre.

I really hope we'll get around to make it mandatory to watermark AI-generated content in a way that makes it easy to filter out ...