Anyone else feeling like discussions like this feel archaic? due to Generative AI?
For all its problems, the presence of AI feels like it should solve some of these quibbles for the vast majority of people who program. I can't quite put my finger on why just yet, though.
No, because pairing with AI is not the same as how we've come to define coding/programming.
It's something different. To say that it'll be _better_ relative to some stated measurement is fine.
Let's use a driving analogy. You can say cars get you from point A to point B so self-driving and teleportation are better evolutions. But you wouldn't say if someone wanted drive a car, enjoyed driving a car, wanted to get better at driving a car, they should get in a Waymo. Or teleport.
Right, but lets keep that analogy going, it's a good one.
One can envision perhaps a future where, e.g. the majority of people (everywhere) don't drive cars because of public transport + Waymos.
In that world, issues surrounding "humans driving" take on a completely different flavor and relevance. Safety matters less, preferences of interfaces can matter more, etc. etc.
And I suppose it feels like the programming equivalent is around the corner, if not already here.
What do you mean? Programming languages all have different strengths and weaknesses that are completely orthogonal to LLMs.
Even if you vibe code an entire system, a human will eventually have to read and modify the vibe code. Most likely in order to refactor the whole thing, but even if by some miracle the overall quality is alright, somebody will have to review the code and fix bugs. The programming language and it's ecosystem will always be a factor in that case.
Yeah, but those perceived strengths and weaknesses I'd say more often than not end up being non-issues i.e. popular chatter about whether a language is good or not and how it is used in real life pretty much never line up.
And my guess is that this "disparity" only widens with AI.
I'm not saying discussions like this aren't theoretically interesting or that people who are into it shouldn't have them. But my guess is they overwhelmingly won't matter large-scale.
That is a naive view to have. Languages have massive differences which directly impact how software is developed, built, distributed, and executed at runtime. Not to mention how it is used and maintained.
And I've yet to see an LLMs have any impact on making any of these differences disappear. The one thing I've seen LLMs do is generate more work for senior developers who have to fix vibe coded spaghetti. There language matters a lot.
No, but as I said elsewhere -- it feels like a possible, perhaps likely, case that "personal preferences in programming and style" become significantly less relevant.
I feel the same. I think the reason is that GenAI has effectively abstracted away the tooling layer. Not perfectly, and not always efficiently, but in terms of going from requirements → workable outcome, it has removed much of the pain of choosing one developer experience over another.
Fantastic, more of this. I don't know if I'm just missing it or what, but I'd love a GUI thing that showed all the devices on my network maybe even with a graph view.
I'm using an Eero router out of laziness and even it has some features here that I'd like to see more of in polished "home-user" style network tools; especially since it seems as if more are getting into the "homelab"/"selfhosted" thing.
That's impossible to do reliably without using agents, SNMP, or some other kind of communication protocol that you'll have to set up on each device. If you're ok with that, use SNMP. If you want topology, you'll have to have an agent that logs into all your networking gear and parses the configs.
Whatever the direct cause, as an older person who grew up Catholic, quite literally the most surprising thing in life for me to discover: Sexual repression emphatically cannot be strongly blamed on religion.
And I'm not mentioning this to defend religion necessarily, I'm just surprised and almost "impressed" at how, in the absence of religious sexual repression, young people and the internet invented a whole new way of doing it.
There's a different read of this by people such as Stirner. As he pointed out, people only ever abandoned the divine subject but left the divine predicates intact, making the tyranny even worse because now even the unbeliever can't escape. They never abolished religion but simply changed the masters. I think it's worth quoting the text because it has always to me explained why so little has changed in this regard:
"But, properly speaking, only the god is changed - the deus; love has remained: there love to the superhuman God, here love to the human God, to homo as Deus. Therefore man is to me - sacred. And every thing 'truly human' is to me - sacred! 'Marriage is sacred of itself.
And so it is with all moral relations. Friendship is and must be sacred for you, and property, and marriage, and the good of every man, but sacred in and of itself. Haven't we the priest again there? Who is his God? Man with a capital M! What is the divine? The human! Then the predicate has indeed only been changed into the subject, and, instead of the sentence 'God is love', they say 'love is divine'; instead of 'God has become man', 'man has become God', etc. It is nothing more or less than a new - religion."
It's possible that Roman Catholicism and then the Reformation made sexual repression a part of Western European culture in a way that survived the transition to a more secular society (although the US in particular is still mostly nominally Christian).
But some kind of sexual repression seems to be a feature of every human society. Probably that's because people in every society often harm themselves and one another for sexual reasons, so people everywhere attempt to repress that.
Birth control, especially barrier methods such as condoms, and modern medicine have dramatically ameliorated the degree to which people harm one another for sexual reasons. But rape, infidelity, and falling in love with harmful partners are still enormous problems, as well as some more prosaic problems mentioned in the article.
Yeah, and I think often it's not hard to see the historical intersection with power; a lot of the Christian stuff has to do with preserving the churches power.
Seems like today's stuff is in line with the combination of an extremely good and reasonable desire to protect the vulnerable, with a perhaps unhealthy dose of "protecting ones own individual feelings from any awkwardness or discomfort whatsoever?" But for whatever reason, not very "large official institution" driven?
Yes, it's officially atheist because there's only room for one god figure, who happens to be a man. Christianity and Islam are "officially atheist" in the same absurd way. In NK the one permissible exception is not called Allah or Yahweh but Kim.
You know, the guy whose portrait hangs in everyone's home in the exact same spot where you'd find a crucifix in a southern American home.
And no, the religious nature of personality cults is not a fallacy. If anything, No True Scotsman applies to claims that a personality cult is not a "real religion." They are absolutely indistinguishable from theistic religions, except for the minor, ignorable detail that the god is alive and walking around.
Of course there's also a strong component of ancestor worship in the cult of the Kims. The portrait or other object of veneration is as likely to feature il-Sung as one of the other two.
In America it begins with the mass mutilation of baby boys right after birth. The fact that this is hardly brought up in the debate about sexual repression shows you just how large of a mountain men need to climb to achieve anything close to “sexual liberation” similar to what women ever got.
Repression is the hammer. The church, institution, or social circle are the carpenter. The only real difference today is that now the hammer comes standard with wi-fi.
This is what most don’t understand. The reality is, we’re all villains. And we’re all angels. And the only thing that determines how we’re perceived, is the disposition of those perceiving us.
This person is a villain, because you don’t like this kind of person. That person is an angel, because you have an affinity with that person.
There is no one benefiting, other than we ourselves. But don’t underestimate the power of the dopamine rush we all get by having our biases validated.
This seems like a false equivalence. We all have the capacity for great good and great evil. And most of us have probably done very good and occasionally very bad things, objectively speaking.
Framing matters and context too, but some things are just objectively bad in any light. Some are objectively good.
I think that truth (or at least belief in it) underlies why we collectively punish folks perceived as getting away with something that looks undeniably bad. Then add other phenomenon like the bandwagon effect and it can be crushing to the target.
No. You're both about 50% correct; what's making everything weird is that the things associated with "hacking" transitioned from "completely optional side hobby" to "fundamental basis of the economy, both bullshit and not."
This is why I'm finding most of this discussion very odd.
Hmm. No. Not really. I don't think "hacker" ever much meant this at all; mostly because "hacker" never actually was much connected to "labor for money."
"Going to work" and "being a hacker" were overwhelmingly mutually exclusive. Hacking was what you don't do on company time (in favor of the company.)
"Hacker" of course, has overwhelmingly mostly lost the plot. Especially here, but elsewhere too.
"Hacker" was a recognition that there existed a crusty old entrenched system (mostly not through any fault of any individual) and that it is good to poke and chip away at it, though exploring the limits of new technology.
Whatever we're doing now here, it's emphatically not that.
For all its problems, the presence of AI feels like it should solve some of these quibbles for the vast majority of people who program. I can't quite put my finger on why just yet, though.