Zompist Bboard Again

jcb wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 1:57 am

People who need small-scale art and can't draw— portraits of their D&D characters, visualizations of their fantasy worlds, very specific fetish porn, whatever— should pay a damn human artist instead of techbros. There are plenty of artists who would will do something for $50 or $300. Using free AI services is exactly like accepting a free dose from your friendly local drug dealer: it is a pretend savings, it is not really free.

Zompist, I assume you print your own documents on a printer. Don't you feel bad that you're bypassing the typesetters' union and contributing to its death? ( https://jacobin.com/2017/09/typesetting ... n-printing )

I don't feel bad about automation that improves society on the whole. I don't think this is very hard to roughly evaluate: the standard of living increased for everyone (all classes, all countries) in the last 200 years. Job losses were more than replaced by a greater number of better jobs. In 1800, 80% of people were peasants; automation did not consist of killing off that now-useless 80%; it created a much larger and better-off population.

I suspect you are assuming that all technological change is good and that this replacement process is some kind of eternal law. I'd suggest looking out the window. Not all tech is an improvement, eliminating all the good jobs is not a good idea, destroying our own ecosphere with fossil fuels is not a good idea, and for the last forty years tech change has benefitted only the top 10% of the US, not everyone. That mechanism of generalizing prosperity no longer works for most people.

Besides who the money goes to, the other factor to consider is what we want humans to do. Ultimately no one ever really argued that humans really liked working in coal mines, shoveling horse manure, hand-planting rice, or typesetting. It was an improvement to work in a factory, work as a clerk or teacher or journalist or artist or bureaucrat. So long as the number of jobs kept going up, it was even an improvement to get rid of mindless clerking and let the computers do that. But, to be blunt, why do you want to take away the good jobs? There's some subset of jobs that are not only worth doing, they're work that people like. It would make a lot more sense to automate the CEO jobs away, not the artists.

I feel like most of the (very real) anxiety over "AI" is not about AI, but is actually about how techbros own AI. Imagine for a moment a different world, where each artist has their own AI trained on their own images and art style, and only they can use it. I think that instead of articles from artists about how AI messes up hands and how it will never be as good as a human artist, we'd get articles from artists about how AI, although imperfect, saves them so much time when they make another panel for their webcomic (or whatever) by producing the general outline for what they need, freeing the artist from drawing the same character or background over and over again (repetetive boilerplate art, essentially).

Of course, one of the main objections to AI is who the money goes to. Still, that's not the only problem.

One is the carbon cost of AI. It costs billions to train and run AIs and, like crypto, has the energy requirements of an large country. The cost, as I said, is hidden because the enshittification process hasn't started yet: the dealers are handing out free samples.

But also, though I can think of use cases for AI in a non-techbro world, your scenario sounds kind of horrible to me. The last thing I want from an artist is a pastiche of their own earlier work; when a writer or artist or moviemaker starts doing that, we usually consider that they've run out of things to say, that they're not what they used to be. I know a lot of consumers think that's what they want: if only Tolkien wrote LOTR again, only somehow a little new and different! But that mindset is how you get The Sword of Shanara. Or an increasingly repetitive catalog of superhero movies or Simpsons episodes. Or a Kindle store full of extruded AI-written babble.

For that matter, if an artist can't produce the basics of their profession-- the next panel of their webcomic-- maybe they're in the wrong field or genre. I read a lot of comics, and I saw the last wave of computer assistance-- 3-D modeling. Yeah, it enables a mediocre draftsman to produce far more detailed work. But it rarely actually made for good comics. Those efforts look embarrassing today-- 90s computer graphics don't hold up-- but actual hand-drawn stuff still looks fine.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 3:50 amIt would make a lot more sense to automate the CEO jobs away, not the artists.

Then again, that whole children's super fun Oompa Loompa experience disaster thing seems to have been a failed attempt at doing that. Or at least at doing that with the jobs of middle management.

I would like to gently push back against the assumption that AI "art" is a dichotomy between paying an artist and paying a techbro; Automatic1111 is free and open source, and Civitai is full of freely-available remixes of Stable Diffusion which alter the prompting (from natural language to tag clouds from websites like Danbooru or e621) and what the model focuses on. If you just want to have some fun making bad pictures of hands with your graphics card, you don't need to pay techbros a penny.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 3:50 am It costs billions to train and run AIs

Train, yes; run, no. I have no problem running Stable Diffusion on my 1070Ti, and even an entry-level 4000-series graphics card has the same amount of oomph. If you can play a video game made since 2017, you can generate bad pictures of hands.

As a programmer, to be completely honest, I do not worry about being replaced by AI, and even if AI were under my control, I do not feel that it could do what I do effectively. What people seem to be using AI for in the software development world is as a replacement for StackOverflow, and we all know the quality of what comes from that. After all, what LLM's are trained on is essentially the sum of StackOverflow and GitHub. And sure, it can produce code snippets on demand, but much of the time you have to fix up those code snippets before they will actually work, and that says nothing about actual software engineering. There is a difference between producing a code snippet from a prompt and designing an API or an environment. Also, if you have coding standards you have to follow, then you have to rework the code that is produced to follow them anyways. In the end, if you know what you are doing, if you know well enough how something ought to work that you can actually judge the output of an AI for correctness, you are probably better off simply writing the code yourself in the first place. (And for the actual drudgery that can be practically automated, such as producing the endless boilerplate demanded by contemporary Java programming standards, Java IDE's already integrated this long before LLM's hit the scene, and in a much more predictable and controllable fashion than what you would get from applying LLM's to this task.)

I suspect you are assuming that all technological change is good and that this replacement process is some kind of eternal law.

No.

and for the last forty years tech change has benefitted only the top 10% of the US, not everyone. That mechanism of generalizing prosperity no longer works for most people.

So let's strengthen unions so workers can get their share of the pie again. (One might even call this a step towards "making America great again"...) But oh wait, it looks like the Dems won't allow that: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden- ... 022-12-02/

Ultimately no one ever really argued that humans really liked working in coal mines

Did you ever ask the coal miners? Reminds me of: https://youtu.be/rryVytLuCzc?si=XVA3mLcHfmuhgLmR&t=71 On one hand, I agree with Ali G, it's a "crap job", being bent over and breathing in coal all day, but on the other hand, I agree with the Welsh coal miner; I honestly would rather work a "proper job" in a unionized coal mine than be an on-demand food delivery driver for some app. The precarious and unstable life of the latter would be devastating.

But, to be blunt, why do you want to take away the good jobs? There's some subset of jobs that are not only worth doing, they're work that people like. It would make a lot more sense to automate the CEO jobs away, not the artists.

I don't. As in my example, I'd like for the artists to own their own AIs, instead of some techbros. And I agree, let's automate the CEO jobs away! Their mostly just saying platitudes and lies anyways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhr6fHmCJ6k

To be blunt in return, why do Democrats want to get rid of most good jobs for normal people (AKA unskilled workers without a college degree) ? Watch https://youtu.be/eqceHviNBC4?si=k3xVDZaLMTBRRDZw&t=551 . (I highly suggest watching this whole video.) Not everybody's book-smart enough to get a computer science degree and become a techbro themselves. Dems seem to forget that most people *don't* have a bachelor's degree. ( https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-r ... -data.html ) Maybe they should admit that trying to retrain an old illiterate former coal miner to become a programmer is a lost cause. ( https://youtu.be/eqceHviNBC4?si=fqysRKTF33X2cibx&t=432 ) Maybe they should admit that moving all the unionized factory jobs to Mexico and China was a bad idea, not only for the direct effect of losing good jobs, but also for the indirect effect it has on factories that don't move; When the unions at those factories negotiate a contract, management can always threaten to close the factory and move it. (Or maybe they'll move the moment they see the workers try to form a union!) ( https://www.salon.com/2016/03/14/bill_c ... f_the_90s/ )

But also, though I can think of use cases for AI in a non-techbro world, your scenario sounds kind of horrible to me. The last thing I want from an artist is a pastiche of their own earlier work; when a writer or artist or moviemaker starts doing that, we usually consider that they've run out of things to say, that they're not what they used to be. I know a lot of consumers think that's what they want: if only Tolkien wrote LOTR again, only somehow a little new and different! But that mindset is how you get The Sword of Shanara. Or an increasingly repetitive catalog of superhero movies or Simpsons episodes. Or a Kindle store full of extruded AI-written babble.

I don't like watching the 30th season of The Simpsons or Superhero Movie VIII either, but the fact that they exist implies that somebody is still watching them (and enjoying them, I hope).

It's not really that I disagree with you, jcb, but I kind of wonder who you think you're talking to - someone who approves of outsourcing and union-busting?

jcb wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 12:47 pm [snip]

Do you honestly think that the Republicans are going to help the average American more than the Democrats (which I presume you do considering the number of times I see you say "Dems" above)? If the Democrats are bad, the Republicans are infinitely worse (e.g. all their populism is a lie meant to deceive the populace, and they are most interested in stripping everyone other than cisgendered straight rightist White Christian males of all their rights).

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:39 pm I think you need to take Remedial Marxism.

I think Marxian economics originally regarded art as "not real work", a position I strongly disagree with. The intellectual tradition that regards art as the highest human endeavor was probably systematized by the first New Age Buddhist, the Jew-hating philosopher Schopenhauer. Nietzsche's hysterical assertion of the Will was an unmanly reaction to Schopenhauer's work. According to Schopenhauer, life is creation of the Will and life is, exactly like in Buddhism, full of suffering. He also believed in Nirvana, but he suggested the alternative of letting the Will be absorbed into works of art. This is his theory of salvation. (Reading his books takes patience. He's takes pride in being a logic-chopping philosopher. He's not a nutcase like Nietzsche.)

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:39 pm When you side with $100,000 a year programmers like yourself (and their millionaire techbro owners)

If we're playing the Oppression Olympics, I was never paid 100k as a software engineer. I had that job in India, the place management sends jobs to lower cost. (Indians were ChatGPT before ChatGPT.) I'm currently a PhD student and TA. I earn 24k a year. Thanks to Trump, my university restricted my ability to live where I choose, forcing me to live in a gentrified region. As a result, I literally can't afford a car. Eddy is richer than me. I get paid less over the Summer semester, and I burn through all my savings from the previous year. I'm debating taking the risk of buying one of those rechargeable seatless scooters. Not only will I be dangerously low on funds, I also risk getting called a "techbro" by the kinds of radical Heideggerian "leftists" people like you encourage. If anyone can say the words "liberal elite" and mean something by it, it's me.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:39 pm and against $5,000 a year struggling artists, or even $50,000 a year illustrators, you are not on the side of the workers, you are on the side of the exploiters.
...
It's great that you have a cool job. But you don't speak for artists, not when your own profession is attempting to put them out of work and give the money to techbros.

There is no honest way to interpret my answers in this thread as saying this. It's possible your generation responded positively to blatant dishonesty like this. If lying about me promotes the leftist cause, it might even be worth it. The thing is, my generation is hypersensitive to the possibility of "the establishment" suppressing hidden truths. This kind of rhetoric backfires for the younger demographics you should be trying to appeal to.

1. I'm only claiming the right to use whatever tools I see fit for my own work.
2. It is not legitimate to violate my rights by appealing to democracy.
3. I'm not a radical democrat like Marx (or even the more centrist Eisel Mazard in No More Manifestos), only a direct democrat in specific situations.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:39 pm No one making $50k has "made it big" and you are being anti-worker and pro-capitalist to insinuate that they have, or that they are "conservative".

To me, 50k sounds like a luxurious middle class lifestyle, especially if I get to live somewhere cheaper.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:39 pm From previous discussions, your theoretical position is that while capitalism does not sufficiently value artistic work, the solution is a system which does not value it at all. This is not reassuring to artists. (I'm a writer, the one craft where work is not paid at all. You can get paid for sales, and even then, a big fraction of the public thinks that that part is optional. So your attitude is typical, but it sure doesn't sell me on your system.)

Note that you have a lot of fans who (unlike me) can't afford to pay you. Under my system, everyone will get equal votes and the opportunity to support your Patreon, allowing you to draw a salary from the government. I don't get paid by sales, and I want the same system for myself.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:39 pm Now, there are a lot more people who would like to be artists, than those who can make a living at it. This of course isn't reflected in Dept. of Labor statistics. Destroying the profession does not help those people who would like to make a living at it. People who need small-scale art and can't draw— portraits of their D&D characters, visualizations of their fantasy worlds, very specific fetish porn, whatever— should pay a damn human artist instead of techbros. There are plenty of artists who would will do something for $50 or $300.

1. I can't, strictly speaking, afford to pay for human art. 2. I do pay for human art, even when, like in your case, I don't have to.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:39 pm Using free AI services is exactly like accepting a free dose from your friendly local drug dealer: it is a pretend savings, it is not really free.

Humans can't churn out art fast enough for some purposes. Like, say, surprising your girlfriend with a unique illustration in the middle of your chat.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 8:57 am On a more meta level of discussion:

• Shifting the discussion to Jews and Nazis is great on shock value but Nazism is irrelevant here; the comparison is, besides, in poor taste.
• If your conclusion is literally 'everyone is a Nazi'... It's almost certain there is something wrong with your reasoning.

India has been cheering deaths in Gaza this whole time.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 8:57 am [*]Most of the world is capitalistic and market-based in one way or another. Anything can be blamed on capitalism. It's not wrong; but it's not terribly useful either. [/list]

1. If you don't blame capitalism, there is nothing you can do to stop people from blaming minorities. Someone is taking the fall for this.

2. Supporting the market is a political choice. A trade system that was created by humans can be abolished by humans.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 8:57 am AI art feels derivative; the uncanny touch is interesting but gets old fast. I'd be happy to see or read good examples of AI-assisted art; but I haven't seen any so far.
Also, the problem writers - for instance - have is that books just don't sell that much. AI isn't going to help with that.

I use it as an assistant to bounce ideas off of. Big artists often have assistants who help them with parts of their work.

Ketsuban wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 7:48 am Train, yes; run, no. I have no problem running Stable Diffusion on my 1070Ti, and even an entry-level 4000-series graphics card has the same amount of oomph. If you can play a video game made since 2017, you can generate bad pictures of hands.

Right, I can run coding LLMs on my personal laptop: https://github.com/ise-uiuc/magicoder If this is a waste of energy, you have to abolish 3D gaming too.

It's not really that I disagree with you, jcb, but I kind of wonder who you think you're talking to - someone who approves of outsourcing and union-busting?

I hope that Zompist doesn't support those things, but the current Democratic party certainly does. And at the end of the day, that's who I'm stuck voting for.

Note: I want to talk a little about the book "The Authoritarians" that Zompist has suggested that people read, but I don't have the time right now. I'll try to do so in a follow up post...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 1:04 pm

jcb wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 12:47 pm [snip]

Do you honestly think that the Republicans are going to help the average American more than the Democrats (which I presume you do considering the number of times I see you say "Dems" above)? If the Democrats are bad, the Republicans are infinitely worse (e.g. all their populism is a lie meant to deceive the populace, and they are most interested in stripping everyone other than cisgendered straight rightist White Christian males of all their rights).

No, of course not. Indeed, Republicans suck even more than Democrats! My point is this:
(1) The way to beat the fake populism of the repubs is with real populism ( https://jacobin.com/2024/02/populism-hi ... -class-dig ), which is *not* what the dems have been doing since Clinton. Recall this open admission of abandonment: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/c ... n-suburbs/ :

Chuck Schumer wrote:For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.

(2) I don't fault any poor unskilled rural person for voting the repubs/Trump, when the alternative is voting for the dems, a party that openly loathes them. ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... y-clinton/ , https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smit ... bia-007737 ) Note how Obama holds "anti-trade sentiment" to be the same level of sin as racism and xenophobia, and how he has no plan to help these people beyond telling them "Go to school!" (which is basically the dems' version of "Get a job!").

How the dems have abandoned the working class is not an accident, but on purpose. They have only themselves to blame for their constant electoral woes.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:02 pm The thing about AI is that in the short term AI will be used to replace said artists, at least until the venture capital runs out and AI is no longer so free after all -- but by that time said artists will be out of work altogether -- and even then those who formerly paid said artists may still be able to buy the services of the AI for less.

Supporting the market is a political choice. A trade system that was created by humans can be abolished by humans.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:02 pm If struggling novices can make art with AI, so can those who would have bought their art, without having to pay for said artists' labor.

1. I use it as an assistant to bounce ideas off of. Big artists often have assistants who help them with parts of their work.

2. How will other people reproduce what I did with my tool?

3. The profit motive distorts art. I'd be happy with the compromise that AI art can only be generated for non-profit purposes.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 9:14 am As a programmer, to be completely honest, I do not worry about being replaced by AI, and even if AI were under my control, I do not feel that it could do what I do effectively. What people seem to be using AI for in the software development world is as a replacement for StackOverflow, and we all know the quality of what comes from that. After all, what LLM's are trained on is essentially the sum of StackOverflow and GitHub. And sure, it can produce code snippets on demand, but much of the time you have to fix up those code snippets before they will actually work, and that says nothing about actual software engineering. There is a difference between producing a code snippet from a prompt and designing an API or an environment. Also, if you have coding standards you have to follow, then you have to rework the code that is produced to follow them anyways. In the end, if you know what you are doing, if you know well enough how something ought to work that you can actually judge the output of an AI for correctness, you are probably better off simply writing the code yourself in the first place. (And for the actual drudgery that can be practically automated, such as producing the endless boilerplate demanded by contemporary Java programming standards, Java IDE's already integrated this long before LLM's hit the scene, and in a much more predictable and controllable fashion than what you would get from applying LLM's to this task.)

I think you'd have a very different picture of how the world works if you ever tried to teach coding to the average undergrad. Before you, there were programmers who wrote optimal assembly code for every application and regarded higher level programming as an abdication of the duties of wizards. But quantity beats quality for many applications. Otherwise, JavaScript would never have taken off.

In my case, coding for research is different from coding for production. We routinely have to make unusual technologies work together, and they are different every time. Even a wrong first approximation can be a huge time saver when the normal human reaction is to stare blankly at the problem.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 1:50 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 4:39 pm When you side with $100,000 a year programmers like yourself (and their millionaire techbro owners)

If we're playing the Oppression Olympics, I was never paid 100k as a software engineer. I had that job in India, the place management sends jobs to lower cost. (Indians were ChatGPT before ChatGPT.) I'm currently a PhD student and TA. I earn 24k a year. Thanks to Trump, my university restricted my ability to live where I choose, forcing me to live in a gentrified region. As a result, I literally can't afford a car. Eddy is richer than me. I get paid less over the Summer semester, and I burn through all my savings from the previous year. I'm debating taking the risk of buying one of those rechargeable seatless scooters. Not only will I be dangerously low on funds, I also risk getting called a "techbro" by the kinds of radical Heideggerian "leftists" people like you encourage. If anyone can say the words "liberal elite" and mean something by it, it's me.

I do apologize for misunderstanding your situation. From this thread, I thought you had a regular job in AI. Also, watch your own damn assumptions. You make more than I do.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 2:29 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:02 pm The thing about AI is that in the short term AI will be used to replace said artists, at least until the venture capital runs out and AI is no longer so free after all -- but by that time said artists will be out of work altogether -- and even then those who formerly paid said artists may still be able to buy the services of the AI for less.

Supporting the market is a political choice. A trade system that was created by humans can be abolished by humans.

This is true -- but what can replace markets*? We have tried central planning, and we know how well that works. What you have proposed in the past is essentially a democratic version of central planning, as opposed to the Stalinist version, but I am not sure I'd appreciate being voted into writing web apps rather than embedded Forths...

* Note that I do not mean capitalism here -- the solution to the problem of exploitation and oppression by the capitalist is worker ownership and self-management of capital, not replacing markets with something else.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 2:29 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:02 pm If struggling novices can make art with AI, so can those who would have bought their art, without having to pay for said artists' labor.

1. I use it as an assistant to bounce ideas off of. Big artists often have assistants who help them with parts of their work.

2. How will other people reproduce what I did with my tool?

3. The profit motive distorts art. I'd be happy with the compromise that AI art can only be generated for non-profit purposes.

The only way the capitalist class will not use AI to attempt to replace people is either if it is A) infeasable, as I suspect is the case for non-trivial software engineering or B) unprofitable, as may be the case once all the venture capital runs out and the AI companies start charging real money for their services.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 2:29 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 9:14 am As a programmer, to be completely honest, I do not worry about being replaced by AI, and even if AI were under my control, I do not feel that it could do what I do effectively. What people seem to be using AI for in the software development world is as a replacement for StackOverflow, and we all know the quality of what comes from that. After all, what LLM's are trained on is essentially the sum of StackOverflow and GitHub. And sure, it can produce code snippets on demand, but much of the time you have to fix up those code snippets before they will actually work, and that says nothing about actual software engineering. There is a difference between producing a code snippet from a prompt and designing an API or an environment. Also, if you have coding standards you have to follow, then you have to rework the code that is produced to follow them anyways. In the end, if you know what you are doing, if you know well enough how something ought to work that you can actually judge the output of an AI for correctness, you are probably better off simply writing the code yourself in the first place. (And for the actual drudgery that can be practically automated, such as producing the endless boilerplate demanded by contemporary Java programming standards, Java IDE's already integrated this long before LLM's hit the scene, and in a much more predictable and controllable fashion than what you would get from applying LLM's to this task.)

I think you'd have a very different picture of how the world works if you ever tried to teach coding to the average undergrad. Before you, there were programmers who wrote optimal assembly code for every application and regarded higher level programming as an abdication of the duties of wizards. But quantity beats quality for many applications. Otherwise, JavaScript would never have taken off.

I must admit that I may not be the common case here (I started programming at eight years old) but the key thing is that one must not mistake coding alone for software engineering (as much as I dislike the job title "software engineer" for being vaguely pompous; I personally rather consider myself a programmer). LLM's may help you with the former; they will not help you with the latter. LLM's may make up for a lack of coding ability, but they will not help you with high-level software design and architecture. In theory the difference between coding camps and computer science programs is that the former will teach you how to churn out code while latter will teach you more the theory of algorithms, data structures, logic, software design, and software architecture; of course, in reality these get conflated (but teaching you to write code is what CS 101 (or whatever it's designated at your university) is for; the rest of the classes are for actually teaching you computer science and software engineering).

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 2:29 pm In my case, coding for research is different from coding for production. We routinely have to make unusual technologies work together, and they are different every time. Even a wrong first approximation can be a huge time saver when the normal human reaction is to stare blankly at the problem.

The key thing is if you knew how to fix a wrong first approximation you also knew how to write it yourself, even if it may have taken more time to code it, because if that is not the case, how do you know how to fix the wrong first approximation or whether it is right or wrong in the first place?

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 2:29 pm Before you, there were programmers who wrote optimal assembly code for every application and regarded higher level programming as an abdication of the duties of wizards. But quantity beats quality for many applications. Otherwise, JavaScript would never have taken off.

This is getting off-topic, but I've always viewed gruntwork coding as a failure of design. E.g. if you have to write code to format and test every prompt, that is certainly something an LLM can help you with... but a good designer should have recognized the problem and found a way to abstract it and make the UI designer's job easy.

The easy thing in coding is always to take an existing function, copy it, and rework it to do the new thing. The end result is half a dozen copies of the code that maintainers (probably including the original coder) will struggle to understand.

The ideal (not, of course, always reached) is to solve each problem only once, and have the program, not the programmer, do the gruntwork.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 4:51 pm

rotting bones wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 2:29 pm Before you, there were programmers who wrote optimal assembly code for every application and regarded higher level programming as an abdication of the duties of wizards. But quantity beats quality for many applications. Otherwise, JavaScript would never have taken off.

This is getting off-topic, but I've always viewed gruntwork coding as a failure of design. E.g. if you have to write code to format and test every prompt, that is certainly something an LLM can help you with... but a good designer should have recognized the problem and found a way to abstract it and make the UI designer's job easy.

The easy thing in coding is always to take an existing function, copy it, and rework it to do the new thing. The end result is half a dozen copies of the code that maintainers (probably including the original coder) will struggle to understand.

The ideal (not, of course, always reached) is to solve each problem only once, and have the program, not the programmer, do the gruntwork.

This is what I always hated about programming in Java -- conventional Java design standards greatly encourage boilerplate coding, to the point that you need to use a Java IDE* which automates much of the writing of boilerplate for you, as it otherwise becomes simply unmanageable.

* And the only IDE I don't hate is GNU Emacs, if that counts as an IDE...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 5:08 pm This is what I always hated about programming in Java -- conventional Java design standards greatly encourage boilerplate coding, to the point that you need to use a Java IDE* which automates much of the writing of boilerplate for you, as it otherwise becomes simply unmanageable.

* And the only IDE I don't hate is GNU Emacs, if that counts as an IDE...

Heh! In a previous job I wrote all my Java code in Emacs, much to the bafflement of my cow-orkers, many of whom were locked into Eclipse. I always found trying to use Eclipse too traumatic to be practical.

(Coming up: "Emacs??? *I* used vi!", "vi? *I* used ed!", and so on.)

alice wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 3:19 pm (Coming up: "Emacs??? *I* used vi!", "vi? *I* used ed!", and so on.)

You know, ed is the standard Unix text editor.

I use Emacs as my OS and evil-mode as my editor. The best of both worlds!

AI is now taking linguists' jobs, too!

A computer science student has managed to decipher the first word on an ancient Roman scroll carbonized by a Mount Vesuvius eruption – with the help of artificial intelligence.

For his achievement, the student, 21-year-old Luke Farritor, has won $40,000. But he should probably share the prize with AI as it helped him to identify a single word on the scroll: “porphyras,” an ancient Greek word for “purple.”

https://cybernews.com/news/artificial-i ... -vesuvius/