Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years.
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@robpike while I deeply agree, “lose” feels far too passive for this. This is an industry actively trying to sell it to anyone and everyone.
@petrillic @robpike The recent Timothy Snyder essay on "Superpower Suicide" was posted/re-posted a lot this weekend. "Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity." I hate to be susceptible to trying to make everything-look-like-everything-else but these two rots feel related if not foundationally then at least spiritually.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike - You may have come across this, but in case you havn't, a message of hope.
https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii -
@mrgrumpymonkey @robpike Thank you for sharing!
@JohannesStarke @robpike You're welcome. It's just one of many stories.
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But hey, the industry has spoken. Who am I to question it?
@robpike I had a conversation with a close friend (also works in IT, we met 30 years ago).
He'd built a 3d print of a computer case using Claude to generate OpenSCAD.
What was most curious was his complete indifference to the generated code. He said he didn't learn any openscad syntax, and could not modify it without Claude if he wanted to.
The complete lack of curiosity involved was fascinating, and mildly chilling. Fine for a 48 year old man /maybe/, but is that what we want? -
Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike what changed, specifically?
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@robpike I had a conversation with a close friend (also works in IT, we met 30 years ago).
He'd built a 3d print of a computer case using Claude to generate OpenSCAD.
What was most curious was his complete indifference to the generated code. He said he didn't learn any openscad syntax, and could not modify it without Claude if he wanted to.
The complete lack of curiosity involved was fascinating, and mildly chilling. Fine for a 48 year old man /maybe/, but is that what we want?@robpike I've been programming since I was seven, and doing this stuff professionally for 30 years . I've got 15 years worth of mortgage left. All I really want to do right now is crawl under a rock. I simply can't bring myself to use these things. Not just the tools, I could cope with a bit of fancy auto complete, but it's the insane money, all going back to a dozen people. Paying them o turn our industry into another meat grinder?
It's all too much. -
But hey, the industry has spoken. Who am I to question it?
@robpike in my opinion, a bunch of people can think one way while I’m the only one thinking differently, this doesn’t mean the big group is right. People used to think the Earth is flat, doesn’t mean it’s right
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If the world survived Perl, VBA, CORBA, SGML/XML, and Code Generation from UML, it can survive this.
@maxpool @dougmerritt @robpike
I don't feel like the world completely survived XML. It's just become endemic and most people are in denial about taking precautions to limit infections. -
Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
A forest burns but it comes back ever stronger.
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@robpike I had a conversation with a close friend (also works in IT, we met 30 years ago).
He'd built a 3d print of a computer case using Claude to generate OpenSCAD.
What was most curious was his complete indifference to the generated code. He said he didn't learn any openscad syntax, and could not modify it without Claude if he wanted to.
The complete lack of curiosity involved was fascinating, and mildly chilling. Fine for a 48 year old man /maybe/, but is that what we want?@tmcfarlane to me that sounds like baseline neurotypical human. Minimize energy expenditure at any cost.
If something doesn't explode immediately: it works.
If something doesn't work: fiddle with it minimally until it does."Good enough", move on.
Spend that energy on something that makes you feel better about yourself, i.e. something that improves your perceived position in the hierarchy.
@robpike -
@nickzoic since you're a CAD person, I'll share a story I shared with him during this discussion.
My dad was a product engineer and product designer, and specialised in autocad and pro-engineer. I always thought he was smart but never really understood what he did. Then, one day I went in to his office on a weekend (to play games on one of the PCs, we didn't have one at home)... -
@nickzoic since you're a CAD person, I'll share a story I shared with him during this discussion.
My dad was a product engineer and product designer, and specialised in autocad and pro-engineer. I always thought he was smart but never really understood what he did. Then, one day I went in to his office on a weekend (to play games on one of the PCs, we didn't have one at home)...@nickzoic dad always used to ask me questions about how I thought things worked (to keep me curious I guess). I caught a glimpse of him working over his shoulder and asked him what he was doing, and in the process I asked him how he make a model of a chair.
He opened an empty document and proceeded to build a proper sculpted, curved, chair (the style with baton for a back rest). No child's sketch. A real chair. He did it in about 5 minutes... -
@nickzoic dad always used to ask me questions about how I thought things worked (to keep me curious I guess). I caught a glimpse of him working over his shoulder and asked him what he was doing, and in the process I asked him how he make a model of a chair.
He opened an empty document and proceeded to build a proper sculpted, curved, chair (the style with baton for a back rest). No child's sketch. A real chair. He did it in about 5 minutes...@nickzoic ...and he did it in ways I don't think 99% of the population would even imagine, with simple geometry, rotations, and extrusions and symmetry, and extruded swept shapes. (what I'd later know as CSG).
It completely blew my mind that there was this entirely different way of seeing the world.
And that's the joy of learning, and I really cannot fathom why people would want to skip that. -
@tmcfarlane to me that sounds like baseline neurotypical human. Minimize energy expenditure at any cost.
If something doesn't explode immediately: it works.
If something doesn't work: fiddle with it minimally until it does."Good enough", move on.
Spend that energy on something that makes you feel better about yourself, i.e. something that improves your perceived position in the hierarchy.
@robpike@einalex @robpike this particular friend is definitely not "neurotypical", and wouldn't have got as far as he has without being curious. I get the desire to just get stuff done.
In fact, he *did* describe what he'd genuinely learned about approaching tasks using an LLM, and that was in itself interesting.
But he hadn't learned how to do the thing he wanted to do. He'd learned how to pay someone else to do it for him, and he was weirdly excited about that bit. -
Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike sad
I'm a bit jealous that you were able to retire before the madness -
@robpike have you ever had a sense of what a precise artist you are? You are the apotheosis of beautiful creation. The reality is much of the industry doesn't need that beauty. I don't know how to reconcile that but it is at least consistent.
@nelson (blush) What a lovely compliment, thank you.
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@einalex @robpike this particular friend is definitely not "neurotypical", and wouldn't have got as far as he has without being curious. I get the desire to just get stuff done.
In fact, he *did* describe what he'd genuinely learned about approaching tasks using an LLM, and that was in itself interesting.
But he hadn't learned how to do the thing he wanted to do. He'd learned how to pay someone else to do it for him, and he was weirdly excited about that bit.@tmcfarlane hrm, maybe he got gaslighted into "llms are really working"... in that case deep diving how they work would probably drastically change his outlook. @robpike
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@tmcfarlane hrm, maybe he got gaslighted into "llms are really working"... in that case deep diving how they work would probably drastically change his outlook. @robpike
@einalex @robpike that's not reality. I was at his house for dinner, there were 6 of us there. I was the only one not using these tools. Everyone else is using them daily. Two of those were kids.
He built an actual object, a working case. It doesn't matter to him that it is built on the stolen work of others. He wanted to do a thing, and it did it (the object exists, that's not something that can be argued against). -
@einalex @robpike that's not reality. I was at his house for dinner, there were 6 of us there. I was the only one not using these tools. Everyone else is using them daily. Two of those were kids.
He built an actual object, a working case. It doesn't matter to him that it is built on the stolen work of others. He wanted to do a thing, and it did it (the object exists, that's not something that can be argued against).@tmcfarlane Nobody argues that llms don't produce something. The argument is that the thing created is a weird aproximation of the thing desired, and is produced at greater cost (which is differently distributed).
If you allow me an example of catastrophic failure of human engineering: bridge designs ignoring resonance.
- Tacoma bridge (wind caused)
- Millennium bridge (pedestrian caused)Both seemed like bridges before failure. Design without understanding made them traps instead.
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@tmcfarlane Nobody argues that llms don't produce something. The argument is that the thing created is a weird aproximation of the thing desired, and is produced at greater cost (which is differently distributed).
If you allow me an example of catastrophic failure of human engineering: bridge designs ignoring resonance.
- Tacoma bridge (wind caused)
- Millennium bridge (pedestrian caused)Both seemed like bridges before failure. Design without understanding made them traps instead.
@tmcfarlane
Point being: something is something because of its characteristics, but is classified as something by human observers because of (usually) different, perceived features.We're comically bad at this, hence why the rules of trade in engineering are written in the blood of the victims of our prior misconceptions and mistakes.
"llm works" is a result of low requirements, rare/short use (hasn't failed yet), low stakes, and ignorance", rather than one of problem complexity.
