the beautiful code
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Coherent originality does not point to the machine’s understanding; the human is the one capable of finding a result coherent and weighting their program to produce more results in that vein.
Your brain does not function in the same way as an artificial neural network, nor are they even in the same neighborhood of capability. John Carmack estimates the brain to be four orders of magnitude more efficient in its thinking; Andrej Karpathy says six.
And none of these tech companies even pretend that they’ve invented a caring machine that they just haven’t inspired yet. Don’t ascribe further moral and intellectual capabilities to server racks than do the people who advertise them.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Coherent originality does not point to the machine’s understanding; the human is the one capable of finding a result coherent and weighting their program to produce more results in that vein.
You got the "originality" part there, right? I'm talking about tasks that never came close to being in the training data. Would you like me to link some of the research?
Your brain does not function in the same way as an artificial neural network, nor are they even in the same neighborhood of capability. John Carmack estimates the brain to be four orders of magnitude more efficient in its thinking; Andrej Karpathy says six.
Given that both biological and computer neural nets very by orders of magnitude in size, that means pretty little. It's true that one is based on continuous floats and the other is dynamic peaks, but the end result is often remarkably similar in function and behavior.
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You can vibe code the tests too y'know
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You know, I'd be interested to know what the critical size you can get to with that approach is before it becomes useless.
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You can fit an awful lot of Perl into one line too if you minimize it. It'll be completely unreadable to most anyone, but it'll run
Qrpff says hello. Or, rather, decrypts DVD movies in 472 bytes of code, 531 if you want the fast version that can do it in real time. The Wikipedia article on it includes the full source code of both.
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This made me laugh so hard one of the dogs came to check in on me.
Oh my goodness, that's adorable and sweet of your dog! Also, I'm so glad you had such a big laugh. I love when that happens.
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Watching the serious people trying to use AI to code gives me the same feeling as the cybertruck people exploring the limits of their car. XD
"It's terrible and I should hate it, but gosh it it isn't just so cool"
I wish i could get so excited over disappointing garbage
You definitely could use AI to code, the catch is you need to know how to code first.
I use AI to write code for mundane tasks all the time. I also review and integrate the code myself.
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You definitely could use AI to code, the catch is you need to know how to code first.
I use AI to write code for mundane tasks all the time. I also review and integrate the code myself.
The AI code my “expert in a related but otherwise not helpful field” coworker writes helps me have a lot of extra work to do!
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Why do you want AI to save you for learning and understanding the tools you use?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]If you do it through AI you can still learn. After all I go through the code to understand what is going on. And for not so complex tasks LLMs are good at commenting the code (though it can bullshit from time to time so you have to approach it critically).
But anyways the stuff I ask LLMs are generally just one off tasks. If I need to use something more frequently, I do prefer reading stuff for more in depth understanding.
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You know, I'd be interested to know what the critical size you can get to with that approach is before it becomes useless.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]It can become pretty bad quickly, with just a small project with only 15-20 files. I've been using cursor IDE, building out flow charts & tests manually, and just seeing where it goes.
And while incredibly impressive how it's creating all the steps, it then goes into chaos mode where it will start ignoring all the rules. It'll start changing tests, start pulling in random libraries, not at all thinking holistically about how everything fits together.
Then you try to reel it in, and it continues to go rampant. And for me, that's when I either take the wheel or roll back.
I highly recommend every programmer watch it in action.
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You can vibe code the tests too y'know
Return "works";
Am I doikg this correctly?
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Well I've got the name for my autobiography now.
This is where I got the term from: https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/
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It can become pretty bad quickly, with just a small project with only 15-20 files. I've been using cursor IDE, building out flow charts & tests manually, and just seeing where it goes.
And while incredibly impressive how it's creating all the steps, it then goes into chaos mode where it will start ignoring all the rules. It'll start changing tests, start pulling in random libraries, not at all thinking holistically about how everything fits together.
Then you try to reel it in, and it continues to go rampant. And for me, that's when I either take the wheel or roll back.
I highly recommend every programmer watch it in action.
I'd rather recommend every CEO see it in action...
They're the ones who would be cock-a-hoop to replace us and our expensive wages with kids and bots.
When they're sitting around rocking back and forth and everything is on fire like that Community GIF, they'll find my consultancy fees to be quite a bit higher than my wages used to be.
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I recently tried it for scripting simple things in python for a game. Yaknow, change char's color if they are targetted. It output a shitton of word salad and code about my specific use case in the specific scripting jargon for the game.
It all based on "Misc.changeHue(player)". A function that doesn't exist and never has, because the game is unable to color other mobs / players like that for scripting.
Anything I tried with AI ends up the same way. Broken code in 10 lines of a script, halucinations and bullshit spewed as the absolute truth. Anything out of the ordinary is met with "yes this can totally be done, this is how" and "how" doesn't work, and after sifting forums / asking devs you find out "sadly that's impossible" or "we dont actually use cpython so libraries don't work like that" etc.
It's possible the library you're using doesn't have enough training data attached to it.
I use AI with python for hundreds line data engineering tasks and it nails it frequently.
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I tried, it can't get trough four lines without messing up. Unless I give it tasks that are so stupendously simple that I'm faster typing them myself while watching tv
Four lines? Let's have realistic discussions, you're just intentionally arguing in bad faith or extremely bad at prompting AI.
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The ideal code is no code at all
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The image is taken from Zhihu, a Chinese Quora-like site.
The prompt is talking about give a design of a certain app, and the response seems to talk about some suggested pages. So it doesn't seem to reflect the text.
But this in general aligns with my experience coding with llm. I was trying to upgrade my eslint from 8 to 9, and ask chatgpt to convert my eslint file, and it proceed to spit out complete garbage.
I thought this would be a good task for llm because eslint config is very common and well-documented, and the transformation is very mechanical, but it just cannot do it. So I proceed to read the documents and finished the migration in a couple hour...
I used Claude 3.7 to upgrade my eslint configs to flat and upgrade from v7 to v9 with Roo Code and it did it perfectly
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Ai code is specifically annoying because it looks like it would work, but its just plausible bullshit.
It needs good feedback. Agentic systems like Roo Code and Claude Code run compilers and tests until it works (just gotta make sure to tell it to leave the tests alone)
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It can become pretty bad quickly, with just a small project with only 15-20 files. I've been using cursor IDE, building out flow charts & tests manually, and just seeing where it goes.
And while incredibly impressive how it's creating all the steps, it then goes into chaos mode where it will start ignoring all the rules. It'll start changing tests, start pulling in random libraries, not at all thinking holistically about how everything fits together.
Then you try to reel it in, and it continues to go rampant. And for me, that's when I either take the wheel or roll back.
I highly recommend every programmer watch it in action.
I think Generative AI is a genuinely promising and novel tool with real, valuable applications. To appreciate it however, you have to mentally compartmentalize the irresponsible, low-effort ways people
sometimesmostly use it—because yeah, it's very easy to make a lot of that so that's most of what you see when you hear "Generative AI" and it's become its reputation...Like I've had interesting "conversations" with Gemini and ChatGPT, I've actually used them to solve problems. But I would never put it in charge of anything critically important that I couldn't double check against real data if I sensed the faintest hint of a problem.
I also don't think it's ready for primetime. Does it deserve to be researched and innovated upon? Absolutely, but like, by a few nerds who manage to get it running, and universities training it on data they have a license to use. Not "Crammed into every single technology object on earth for no real reason".
I have brain not very good sometimes disease and I consider being able to "talk" to a "person" who can get me out of a creative rut just by exploring my own feelings a bit. GPT can actually listen to music which surprised me. I consider it scientifically interesting. It doesn't get bored or angry at you unless you like, tell it to? I've asked it for help with a creative task in the past and not actually used any of its suggestions at all, but being able to talk about it with someone (when a real human who cared was not available) was a valuable resource.
To be clear I pretty much just use it as a fancy chatbot and don't like, just copy paste its output like some people do.
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Oh my goodness, that's adorable and sweet of your dog! Also, I'm so glad you had such a big laugh. I love when that happens.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]He’s a sweet guy. … Mostly. Very much in need of a lot of attention. Sometimes he just sits next to you on the couch and puts his paw on you if you’re not giving him enough attention.
Here he is posing with his sister as a prop:
