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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I think the question of fair use is separate from the question of piracy, and probably separate from the question of intellectual property in general. Even if we were to protect fair use, that doesn’t make it legal to wholesale copy books. Individual piracy from people who can’t really afford it is one thing and largely harmless, even a net good. I know people who only started reading books from particular authors because they pirated one copy and bought others. That’s very different from a company downloading entire libraries of books without paying. Shifting the question from piracy to fair use is just another way of making you think of the wrong question.

    I’d like to live in a world that doesn’t gatekeep property. But we live in a world where artists aren’t paid for their work directly, and in that world intellectual property is necessary.


  • I’d say don’t be hesitant to try to get her into things. Don’t push it multiple times, but if she’s genuinely never heard of, for example, South Park, just show her an episode. If she doesn’t like it, that’s that and it’s not your fault or anything and it sounds like she’s at least willing to give things a shot for you.

    Then of course try to find things you’ll both like. But do it together cause it’s more fun that way and it sucks to feel like you’re the only one trying.

    But also maybe you don’t have a ton of interests to share and just enjoy each other’s company and that’s fine 🤷


  • Compilation is CPU bound and, depending on what language mostly single core per compilation unit (I.e. in LLVM that’s roughly per file, but incremental compilations will probably only touch a file or two at a time, so the highest benefit will be from higher single core clock speed, not higher core count). So you want to focus on higher clock speed CPUs.

    Also, high speed disks (NVME or at least a regular SSD) gives you performance gains for larger codebases.


  • I think the main barriers are context length (useful context. GPT-4o has “128k context” but it’s mostly sensitive to the beginning and end of the context and blurry in the middle. This is consistent with other LLMs), and just data not really existing. How many large scale, well written, well maintained projects are really out there? Orders of magnitude less than there are examples of “how to split a string in bash” or “how to set up validation in spring boot”. We might “get there”, but it’ll take a whole lot of well written projects first, written by real humans, maybe with the help of AI here and there. Unless, that is, we build it with the ability to somehow learn and understand faster than humans.




  • I don’t mind a whoops somebody fucked right up error message if you let me click a button for more details. Or at the very least, give me a reference number I can tell somebody about. Some “software companies” don’t even properly log things on their end so nobody can solve shit.












  • Well, not exactly. For example, for a game I was working on I asked an LLM for a mathematical formula to align 3D normals. Then I couldn’t decipher what it wrote so I just asked it to write the code for me to do it. I can understand it in its code form, and it slid into my game’s code just fine.

    Yeah, it wasn’t seamless, but that’s the frustrating hype part of LLMs. They very much won’t replace an actual programmer. But for me, working as the sole developer who actually knows how to code but doesn’t know how to do much of the math a game requires? It’s a godsend. And I guess somewhere deep in some forum somebody’s written this exact formula as a code snippet, but I think it actually just converted the formula into code and that’s something quite useful.

    I mean, I don’t think you and I disagree on the limits of LLMs here. Obviously that formula it pulled out was something published before, and of course I had to direct it. But it’s these emergent solutions you can draw out of it where I find the most use. But of course, you need to actually know what you’re doing both on the code side and when it comes to “talking” to the LLM, which is why it’s nowhere near useful enough to empower users to code anything with some level of complexity without a developer there to guide it.


  • jcg@halubilo.socialtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devTradeoffs
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    1 year ago

    You can get decent results from AI coding models, though…

    …as long as somebody who actually knows how to program is directing it. Like if you tell it what inputs/outputs you want it can write a decent function - even going so far as to comment it along the way. I’ve gotten O1 to write some basic web apps with Node and HTML/CSS without having to hold its hand much. But we simply don’t have the training, resources, or data to get it to work on units larger than that. Ultimately it’d have to learn from large scale projects, and have the context size to be able to hold if not the entire project then significant chunks of it in context and that would require some very beefy hardware.