gspr

I wonder if this has any relevance at all to a bunch of new stuff that people on HN seem very obsessed over these days.

Do you conclude the same about the US when some lawmakers in e.g. Texas propose some insane law rooted in the old testament or something?

You shouldn't. Nor should you conclude anything general about the EU from something French politicans do. It's disingenuous.

The resulting mechanical code change might be trivial. The bugs themselves are often decidedly not.

You're essentially saying that swallowing a pill is trivial, so therefore pharmaceutical engineering is.

There dies part of my childhood. RIP, you gave the world so much!

> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes

What is this bullshit assumption that keeps coming up? I'm sure some people get an education for the job prospects, but lots and lots and lots do to grow their minds as human persons! In fact, I think a hypothetical world in which there is no earnings pressure (I doubt it's around the corner), more people would broaden their horizons through education, not less!

Can someone help me understand this idea, so popular on HN, that a university education is primarily a mean towards a higher income? It sounds so absurd! Is it an American thing, maybe?

"Come on just try it" is a quite weak argument.

Was it so hostile?

The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?

Did it really? It would be nice to see some concrete examples.

Everyone seems to say that it was always a terrible place to ask questions where you'd have your question closed for no reason.

I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

I think it's good that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.

Nearly unrelatedly: a few months back I tried to have Qwen and all the frontier models be a RISCV CPU, and they all failed miserably every time. They'd get a handful of instructions in at most before derailing completely. What surprised me the most was that they would all often fail on decoding instructions, which should be pretty close to a task that they've shown themselves to be good at before.

I even added a warmup phase where they were given the answer to a decode and a few steps of running, and ask them to abort if they disagreed. Didn't help.

All in all, for someone who doesn't use LLMs much, this was a far more exhausting and boring exercise than I'd imagine it to be. The only thing that sparked some joy was the models' persistent cheating, whereby they'd try to analyze the whole program upfront and only give the final output (when applicable), despite orders to faithfully step through each and every instruction.

Yes. "A hodge-podge of little snippets I don't understand" is the situation I'm in and wish to avoid. "An LLM wrote a lot more that I don't understand" will make the situation a lot worse.

There's indeed lots of good advice in this thread. I appreciate it all! "Just use an LLM for the stuff you don't understand" is, however, not one of them.

Reading code in a language you do not understand is not a way to understand.

> LLM agents do a great job already customizing your configuration for you.

I'd rather leave it unconfigured than have a massive configuration I don't understand.

So here's an embarassing confession for the occasion:

I code in Emacs almost every day. I read and write e-mail in Emacs almost every day. I take notes in Emacs almost every day. I maninpulate data in Emacs almost every day. Yet I don't know LISP (any LISP!) at all, I barely use any packages beyond "whatever it is that Debian ships by default", and I'm quite bad at fancy Emacs shortcuts. My Emacs config file is a hodge-podge of little snippets I don't properly understand – and it measures in at just about 100 lines, including comments and whitespace, with a significant part of that being just mundane configuration data for the mu4e Emacs client!

This has been the case for about 15 years now. And I'm the kind of person who really likes to know my tools. It's such a ridiculous situation! I somehow never get properly around to sitting down and learning, and I really struggle to make LISP click.

Sigh. I hope I'm not alone. I really really really should learn this thing!

Anyway, the most important part is: Despite all of this, Emacs is still fantastic for me! Here's to the next 50!

Poor guys. I'll never understand why it's so attractive to generate tons of code that you clearly don't understand, and then especially to go on and push it onto humans who do strive to understand.