hpaone

I find it very strange the way people sometimes talk about AI in general. It's in a manner usually devoid of criticism, rooted in the firm belief that it's the next "Big Thing", a technological jump akin to when we replaced assembly with higher, more abstract constructs (as the article puts it). Beyond that, those that don't believe this trend are themselves "stubborn", unable to glimpse at an obvious truth that is staring them down in the face, being themselves faded to be left behind while the righteous believers reap the benefits borne out of their superior insights regarding technology. I myself, clearly, find this proposition hard to believe.

While I won't knock the utility of LLMs (they obviously have a wide range of applications), this "ride or die" attitude seems to verge on religious zealotry. You don't need AI to code and, without reasonable proof of a real productivity increase (which the author only hints at, citing some internal studies that show a minimum increase of 30%, but without actually presenting the studies themselves), I will continue to doubt its ability at generating programs, even in the simplified, glue-it-together manner that the authors puts it.

One must remember what these LLMs truly are: statistical machines with no real contextual knowledge. It can't, therefore, be aware of the particulars of each implementation. What it generates needs to be analyzed and likely mangled by developers. So it begs the question, why not just code it directly? Perhaps it could lower the barrier of entry, after all, if I cannot code, at least the AI can give me a head start. But the novice developer won't even be able to discern between good and bad code, being forced to simply trust (and hope) that the generated program is not only correct, but that it fits well in the context of her application.

Further, what the machine can generate is wholly dependent on what is available for consumption (most of it stolen). Novelty, even in small amounts, will inevitably stump it. It already just performs educated guesswork, but, without basis, it's now only guesswork minus the education.

This is not to say that AI is useless, far from that, but is frequent that I see it be given this almost divine-like status. As if it were this inevitable, unstoppable thing, that will forever grow until it achieves perfection, to the woe the skeptics and the joy of the believers.

In my humble view, it remains a useful tool in a variety of situations, a occasionally better alternative to Stack Overflow for one, but I would never trust it to write code, at least good code that is.

I feel like a lot of people miss the forest for the trees when pursuing knowledge, that is, they see learning as a means for achieving something else. The knowledge they acquire must serve them is some way, usually the true final goal seems to be either money or feeding the ego. Spent hours learning a complex web technology? Well, it's usually done to get a well paying job or to feel that you're a good programmer, smart enough to tackle complex challenges.

Not that these two things are necessarily bad, we all need money to live and is nice to have confidence in one's ability, especially when that confidence is backed up by actual ability. The problem arises when we reduce learning to only its byproducts, when it's much more than that.

Learning, the process of understanding the world and, through that, of oneself, is a beautiful and rewarding pursuit on its own. What we get from it's useful, but it shouldn't be the ultimate reason we pursue it. It can be a motivator, many times I have learned things due to external reasons (for school or work), but its not the ultimate reason for my learning, it was simply a catalyst for something that I already had a deep desire for. Not the thing itself, the object of learning, but for the actual process of understanding it. It's akin to child's play. Children can acquire abilities while playing which can then be applied in other areas of their life to gain things. But that is not their ultimate reason for it, they play because is fun. I learn, and believe will all should learn, because is fun.

And to the poster's other reason for sadness, i.e that LLMs are getting smarter, remember that these robots don't learn by any means, unless one considers learning consuming information only to spit it back out partly digested. Learning is much more that, it requires life and, perhaps, even soul. A machine can't feel its soul soar upon realizing the limitless bounds of knowledge, it has no soul and it has no feelings.

Since I have some knowledge regarding computers, people keep giving me their somewhat broken or old spare notebooks, so I can have a crack a repairing them. They end up just sitting on the corner of my room gathering dust, mostly due to lack of time, but also of a fear from touching them. Something about attempting repairs at a hardware level, on anything beyond the cursory, just seems daunting to me.

I always had this desire to deeply understand the computer at the most fundamental, physical level, to be able to repair or manipulate them to my heart's desire. To be able to open one up and understand what I'm looking at just by, well, looking at it.

Maybe is the apparent complexity of it all (which I'm sure translates itself to real complexity), but something about it practically begs for me to understand it, but life gets in the way.

I suppose I should attempt to dedicate some time to learning the basics and trying (read: failing) to repair a few. Then maybe I could do something like these good folks.

Man, this brings me back. I spent a lot of my childhood in front of the computer playing games on emulators. My father had this CD with written "MAME" in blue ink on it, it got a lot of use in the family's ancient PC (I think it ran Windows 95? I'm not sure, only thing I remember is the homogeneous turquoise background that I always greeted me on startup).

Many afternoons where spent playing Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Final Fight and a bunch of others, too many to remember.

Glad to know development is still going strong.