Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711187

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

(as an aside, I also struggle with super long sentences and found a pretty good trick for curing it: rewrite by hand with pen and paper. My cramping hand finds entire passages that the work can survive without)

If it's any consolation, I'm releasing a technical book on Java this year. In 2026. When AI exists and, at according to the front page most days, programming is "solved." All of it was written by hand because, well, why else would I bother? What's the point of a craft when you're not the one doing it? Half the joy is getting better at it, and that requires doing.

It's demoralizing to know post-2022 books are devalued in people's minds. It's demoralizing that I also think that way. I spend enough time at work reading other people's copy/pasted LLM output. Books should be a relief from that world, but the risk is unavoidable unless you go back in time.

But hopefully good things rise above the noise. If they don't, it's still OK. Honing a craft is its own reward, even if not celebrated. (this is the lie I tell myself as I lay in bed awake realizing I've wasted that last several years of my life)

There's always a moment, usually annoyingly late in the process, where I realize I've been massively overthinking everything or solving the wrong problem. Time is an essential an ingredient. Clear thinking is extremely hard.

LLMs are definitely useful along the way, but the thinking is the spiritually fulfilling part.

1. You need an "infinitely scalable" key/value store and have deep pockets[0]

2. you work at AWS and your deployment pipeline has so many stages and regions and fabrics that you can no longer even conceptualize what it means for there to be a "current version" of your software (the hell in which I live).

But for some awful reason it's sold as a general purpose "NoSQL Database." Pair that with the Pavlovian response developers have to the word "scale" and you've got an army of people using the worst possible tech for their usecase. Everyone eventually pairs DDB with Elastic whenever "Oh, wait, so we need to be able to query our data?" hits.

[0] And you ONLY need PK reads. Querying turns "infinite scale" into "infinite throttles."

imo, this is a problem with how it's taught! Order theory is super useful in programming. The main challenge, beyond breaking past that barrier of perceived "pointlessness," is getting away from the totally ordered / "Comparator" view of the world. Preorders are powerful.

It gives us a different way to think about what correct means when we test. For example, state machine transitions can sometimes be viewed as a preorder. And if you can squeeze it into that shape, complicated tests can reduce down to asserting that <= holds. It usually takes a lot of thinking, because it IS far from the daily routine, but by the same rationale, forcing it into your daily routing makes it familiar. It let's you look at tests and go "oh, I bet that condition expression can be modeled as a preorder on [blah]"

I dread the day when ads inevitably make their way into the main AI models. One of the things its currently good at will be destroyed.

I'm confused by this need(?) desire(?) to polish things that are irrelevant.

I don't know how to square the same people saying we're living under a tyrannical government also pushing legislation that makes sure said tyrannical government is the only one with guns.

The real AI fatigue is the constant background irritation I have when interacting with LLMs.

"You're not imagining it" "You're not crazy" "You're absolutely right!" "Your right to push back on this" "Here's the no fluff, correct, non-reddit answer"

Somebody needs to explain to my lying eyes where these 100xers are hiding. They seem to live in comments on the internet, but I'm not seeing the teams around me increase their output by two orders of magnitude.

(or something like that. Obviously I'm too well adjusted to have these existential worries)

It was a bizarre disconnect having someone be both highly educated and yet crippled by not doing.

Consider my behavior changed. I thought the "high school math" was an encouraging way to sell it (i.e. "if you can get past the syntax and new way of thinking, the 'math' is ultimately straight forward"), but I can see your point, and how the perception would be poor when they hit that initial wall.

Now is a great time to dive in, though. LLMs take a lot of the syntactical pain out of the learning experience. Hallucinations are annoying, but you can formally prove they're wrong with the model checker ^_^

I think it's going to be a learn these tools or fall behind thing in the age of AI.

One of my favorite scenes:

Peggy: "You never say thank you!" Don: "That's what the money is for!"

It captures a lot of the mismatch in perspective between employer/employee boss/subordinate. You're there to do something for someone who is paying you to do it. That's as far as it goes (despite the constant human pull to perceive it as more).