Posts by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
 (DIR) Post #B46IYdhaooSShvjqpE by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @chandlerc But that means they didn't allow themselves the time required to build the same understanding that they would have built previously.So if someone isn't allowing themself _at least_ t1 hours/days/weeks to work the problem, then it is fair to at least _suspect_ that their understanding is not as complete as it would have been in the pre-LLM days.
       
 (DIR) Post #B46IYdrsCagJDoY3qi by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @chandlerc And furthermore, i would bet money (if we had a good way to test this) that, a few months after the merge of such an LLM-assisted PR, the programmer's recall of their own thought process will be worse than if they'd worked the problem without an LLM. (Basically, the more excited they are about the amount of time they saved, the more money i would be willing to bet.)
       
 (DIR) Post #B46IYdzfjav5c0CI0O by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @chandlerc Knowledge gained without much effort or significant emotion is knowledge that you're definitely going to forget in less time than you would have otherwise.
       
 (DIR) Post #B46IYe7TGb9s0BqWA4 by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @chandlerc Again, I do not intend to be hostile about this!But these are the reasons why i sincerely don't see how, in the long run, anyone is going to understand code that was produced with the "high productivity" offered by an LLM.
       
 (DIR) Post #B46IYeEYqEpUMBABDE by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @chandlerc And if the _author_'s memory fades like that when they lean on LLM assistance, then it is probably the case that in a year or two, nobody will understand it.That means it'll be **as if** that code is unmaintained. And that's why i'm reminded of the decades-old terms "living project" and "dead project": if there is no living person who maintains & understands the code, people would say it's "dead" (though ofc with effort a codebase can be revived).
       
 (DIR) Post #B46IYePuA3u4vMTEtU by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @chandlerc One of the things that i've respected about Clang, ever since Doug told me about it, is the policy on unmaintained features: If nobody claims ownership of a feature, it's removed. Clang is the first project I ever learned about that has that policy. It's a really good policy!I think the same principle applies to code for which nobody's memory can be jogged to produce an accurate understanding of the motives & considerations around design & implementation.
       
 (DIR) Post #B46IYenIl4cQ5vPvMW by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @chandlerc And it's possible that i'm wrong! (But again, i'm not exactly sure about the best way to test that.)
       
 (DIR) Post #B46IYfj5IEq6z8S4Qa by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @chandlerc [end of way-too-long-reply]
       
 (DIR) Post #B46IdtWtOrbPF9EuPI by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       PSA: neovim is contaminated. Don't know how long it'll take for their infection deteriorate into full zombie status, but it would be best to kick them out of the party before that point.Now looking forward to the neovim-before-ai fork.
       
 (DIR) Post #B46Idtiwg3F9qWsXC4 by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       A "living" software project is one that is maintained & understood by a team of engineers.A "dead" software project is one that is unmaintained: nobody works on it, and the people who understand (or understood) it are either unavailable or literally deceased.If you use "a.i." to generate more code than you can understand, then nobody understands the code, which means that part of the project is dead. But that means it's both active (being modified) _and_ dead; i.e. it's a zombie project.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5R6ZHmeiuyBglK3LE by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @thephd 🥃
       
 (DIR) Post #B67wc5pOzEF3jVaFQ8 by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @neauoire wait a minute...does this mean that the filesystem+file browser is kind of a... spreadsheet app...?
       
 (DIR) Post #B8Ike2UyUWhyPaPC40 by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @whitequark @implr @ariadne yeah; i mean, in the case of "the kernel believes [whatever]" or "in this release, git learned how to [do thing]", those are examples of _metaphorical_ use of anthropomorphizing language, not _literal_ use.the trouble with the LLM industry is that too many people started interpreting longstanding metaphors as literal, the LLM executives fraudulently took advantage of that, and now many previously-reasonable people have cooked their brains (metaphorically speaking).
       
 (DIR) Post #B8Ike2u8ywqDfeBIIK by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @whitequark @implr @ariadne (maybe "cooked" is not a great metaphor, because in principle recovery should be possible)
       
 (DIR) Post #B8NPppTxhRK8JPgCjA by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @ariadne can we have a hype cycle for a technology that makes the hype men depressed(it seems like all the wrong people are depressed. if only depression were transferable...)
       
 (DIR) Post #B8Rdy3gawyIOfhFLdY by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @ariadne i used to use it, when i ran windows 7 (when windows search was reasonably good) and on windows 8, but with some add-on software that restored that functionality (after windows 8 (or 10?) removed it)
       
 (DIR) Post #B8sMm5VrqJOMiUlnWK by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @ariadne an important example of this is the one that says, "if there were a corporation that genetically modified people a little bit and then re-branded them as 'not-people', way too many people would go along with it and there would be a new slave trade, so definitely avoid that."& then 99.x% of the audience (or at least the white audience members) ended up thinking that the genetically-modified humans are not only non-human, but also non-biological, thus proving the film's point too well.
       
 (DIR) Post #B914VRs3AeFNrEYK9I by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @ariadne as soon as i read the phrase "model rights" in the first paragraph, i closed the tab because of... y'know, the delusion.but then i re-opened it, because there's a chance that more people are going to get suckered into delusions like this, so i guess we have to be prepared for it
       
 (DIR) Post #B91A64BEiKZmrso5c8 by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @ariadne a tragic part of his post is that, viewed from a mechanistic pov, there might be a point there:helpful text from a model is likely to echo patterns of communication between human beings who, at the time of their communication (which later got scraped up and added to the training data), had a healthy working relationship.and so it seems plausible that the quickest way to get that echo is for the user to act as one of the people in that relationship.(to be clear: i hate this.)
       
 (DIR) Post #B91qRx5jwj3tKRM2Xw by JamesWidman@mastodon.social
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       @ariadne @drq this idea is intriguing to me, and i wish to subscribe to the newsletter