I guess, but this isn't just some claude-kiddie, he's the creator of Three.js. it's like slamming Linus for using AI on the Linux kernel. He knows what he's doing.
I know who he is and I don't care what he does with ai.
To me these little challenges are about improving programming skills, showing creativity, and mostly just for fun. So using LLMs on 'codevember' feels weird. That doesn't mean I'm blaming him for it, I'm just having a hard time accepting it.
A big chunk of the software development industry is not typing code but figuring out what code to write in the first place.
If you want to draw out the construction analogy, ask a mason or carpenter if they'd rather be an architect. (a lot would probably not want to, but I know a few people in the trades that can do a lot more than just welding two pieces of steel together, it's just that their job is the welding part.
Actually this will be one of the challenges; LLM assisted coding has empowered people to be more decision makers, lead developers, architects, etc than code monkeys. But it's a pyramid, there's only so many lead developers you feasibly need on a project.)
Writing software and having software running on a computer is not the point of all of this. The point is to then use these tools to improve your physical world outside of the computer, and to use the computer to improve your mind and then apply that to how you live in the physical living world. The computer is not your friend, your colleague, or your enemy, it's a screwdriver the over excited gave a celebrity complex.
Do I get the same satisfaction from defining and directing a project that my team at work implements?
Yes. Writing code was always fun but running a project is itself a systems engineering problem. Especially if you’re the one defining project scope.
So yes, absolutely it is the same level of joy. The code I wrote was just the method needed to solve the low-level problem but it was never the entire problem space.
I can see my fingerprints all over the user facing design and I can see all the places where I agonized over different approaches to maximize user enjoyment. Seeing the solutions manifest is thrilling frankly. I see users of LLMs as filling a similar role to mine in this respect.
That said, I understand that not everyone enjoys the entirety of the problem space to the same degree and so I can see how a reasonable group of people might not find the higher-level puzzle as enjoyable as its low-level counterpart just as there are those who might find the low-level tedious instead of rewarding.
There is a point in the LLM usage spectrum where I feel that I am not really understanding the stuff I am creating. I can have the LLM write some code, without starting to feel this. But it is only a small amount of code...
Imagine you're getting an extension to your house. You might not be an architect, an electrician, a plasterer, a carpenter, an interior designer, a grounds worker, a gardener, a labourer or any other profession I've missed off (apologies) but you get a great sense of joy from designing and seeing your extension built.
You outsourced literally everything, you didn't lay a single brick, didn't calculate a single beams "load-bearing" capacity but at the end you have this awesome extension you can live in that brings you joy. There's going to be snags here and there as there always is with anything, even if you crafted and did it all by hand, but seeing it built and guiding and adapting things along the way is the fun part.
The parent poster’s post is amusing because I did all of those things. I framed out an addition to my house. I demoed all of the living spaces, installed insulation, hung drywall, did the trim (which was difficult to learn!), installed windows. I also built a patio (with a shovel!), built a fence, planted an orchard, etc. I did these things because, although I have the money to pay others, it was 1) deeply satisfying and 2) I wanted it done right. I think lots of technical people think that we can’t do it right because it’s not our area but—if you care, you will do it right.
yeah man the point of software development is to develop software that is useful, helpful, thoughtful, creative, productive, or just cool. For me and most non hardcore engineers like on hackernews, the outcome is all that matters.
Creativity is about coming up with your vision with the tools at hand in my eyes. I would still argue in situations like this you need a sense of style to understand what works and what doesn't.
I don't know if any bodily phenomena are so easily explained. The insides of a single cell are insanely complex, and to try to apply a singular causal explanation to macro phenomena seems implausible.
Funnily enough it is still the case! Still not possible to get an LLM to count from 1 to like 500 without stoping or making a mistake. Unless of course you delegate that to writing a script or other external tooling
I don't know the specifics of Brazil's system, but at least in the US gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidency or Senate, only the House. It's also not without risk. Gerrymandering is bad, but it doesn't change the totals of votes; it attempts to reapportion "excess" votes yielding a large win margin in one area to give winning, but necessarily smaller, margins in more areas. Amongst other challenges though that smaller margin means if there is a wave then a gerrymander can turn into a "dummymander" where previously safe districts get flipped.
>funny business
This is actually pretty dang hard in anything but a total sham, and even then is at least obvious it happened. Some timy fiddling at the margins may be possible to sneak through, and yeah some elections that might make the difference. But that can't counter any serious victory. The more common technique seems to be trying to suppress the vote. But as well as also not being trivial it also too risks backfiring by motivating people much harder. There is a lot of human psychology around "loss", people often absolutely hate things being taken from them even if they were complacent about having them.
Brazilian here. President wins by popular vote. Period.
Must win by 50% plus 1 of all valid votes on Round 1. If not, 1st and 2nd most voted go for Round 2 a few weeks later. Then, 50%+1 again of all valid votes.
Gerrymandering can give you control of state level offices that then let you affect federal elections by say closing voting locations where you think mostly the opposition will vote or kicking people with ethnic names of voting lists at the last minute.
So there's not a direct effect on Presidential elections but there's a second order effect.
Gerrymandering is the most benign of the tricks, and both sides play that trick. What's more concerning is we don't really have a true paper record of the votes. So many of these swing states have machines that produce digital only voting records. So how do we even know that the vote is accurate? Even if there was a paper record, most states don't even bother re-checking unless it's very close. After 2016, a lot of activism across the country has forced states to switch to a paper + digital record, which allows quick tallies, but then also paper backup and opens the door to two way verification. Unfortunately, this is not enough. There needs to be validation done after the election to confirm. But again, the worst part is that the states that really matter have been the ones least incentivized to actually switch over. So who knows? While its conspiracy thinking that Trump didn't actually win in 2024, do we really know for sure?
Everything else you mentioned also matters. I can't tell you the amount of times that the state of Georgia, suddenly out of the blue, invalidated a lot of registered voters. And if people don't check, like my friend in a minority town outside of Atlanta, they won't realize until election day. Red states are more likely to play this trick. Your conclusion is something I disagree with, though. Voters have lost so much over the last decade, and they don't fight back until it really starts to affect them personally. I think the surge that we might see this election is only due to economics. If the economics were good, it's not out of the question that Trump would be doing fairly decent this election cycle. This is why Iran is playing things very well to try to enact maximum economic pain in the days before the election. But it's all about economics, and that shows you that people truly don't really care.
Gerrymandering doesn’t change the fact that the voters decide the results. Most electoral systems already give unequal weight to different votes based on district sizes etc., so gerrymandering is only a change of degree and intention, not of how democracy fundamentally works.
> Gerrymandering doesn’t change the fact that the voters decide the results.
Well it does change which voters decide the results. A lot of electoral systems seek to constantly redress imbalance by having impartial bodies redraw district lines as populations shift. It is a shame the US does not. Gerrymandering is fundamentally undemocratic.
Are the next generation of Cerebras chips designed by the current generation? Maybe it won't be recognizable as a particular layout but rather a chaotic but functional vibe layout.
For real, it's about the only thing that reliably causes ego dissolution and bliss for me. And I've spent decades with various meditation practices. Nothing beats music.
I have no clue how common an experience this is, but I quite literally get goosebumps when listening to music sometimes if it inspires strong enough emotion for me. I mentioned this to my friend who I played in a band with once, and later when we were listening to something I really liked I held up my arm to show him, and he was shocked because I guess he thought I did not mean literally literally. The hair on my arms genuinely stands up at the end and produces goosebumps purely because of what I feel when listening to music that resonates strongly enough with me; some sections of some songs produce it fairly reliably if I haven't listened to it recently.
This happens to me all the time! I'll be in the car with my wife and a song I really like will come up, and the section hits and I'll say "Goosebumps!" and show her my arm. She also did not believe me until I physically showed her.
They are often songs that are attached to important emotional events in my life, sure, but there are also songs that come out of nowhere and still give me goosebumps. Some things are just that moving!
Same for me; the frisson at particular passages of a song or piece is almost completely predictable. There might be a few dozen such passages for me; I haven't really thought about it.
"A conspiracy, also known as a plot, ploy, or scheme, is a plan or agreement between people (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful OR HARMFUL purpose, such as murder, treason, or corruption, especially with a political motivation,[2] while KEEPING THEIR AGREEMENT SECRET from the public or from other people affected by it"
Coming at me, contradicting me, what ever you want to call it. "hallucinating" is a statement of fact. You just concocted false information out of nowhere, no different from an LLM. If being truthful is being a dick, so be it. If you had something else to say and the false statement was incidental, I could have been more lenient, but the entirety of your comment was just to contradict me, and wrongly at that.
By this logic, old Twitter interfered with US elections by banning Trump.
Edit: the point about Trump was facetious, but old Twitter actually DID actively interfere in the 2020 election by censoring all sharing (even in DMs!) the New York Post Biden laptop story.
I am not making that argument, I just dislike double standards, especially considering that right wing voices have been repeatedly and consistently scrubbed from social media for years.
> Twitter interfered with US elections by banning Trump.
You mean when Twitter "permanently" banned Trump in January of 2021, after the 2020 election (which he lost)? Which election do you suppose that interfered with?
Nothing will shut him up. My god.. I wish killing his twitter account could do that.
He lost because he is a POS and people where tired of his blabbering and complaining.
All the future ones. Don't you see? If you're a big enough public figure and announce any ambition for public office, every attempt at holding you accountable for crimes is interference!
Yes. They see things like "Japanese fans cleaned the stadium before they left" and want to be part of a society like that even if they wouldn't have personally helped clean the stadium. They want to be surrounded by people who do.
That last statement was probably too harsh. I'm sure plenty of the weebs would help clean up if they were surrounded by others who were cleaning up. For me personally there's a lot to like about Japan. Mainly their civil infrastructure. Not just the fast trains but actually having walkable cities where you can reach everything you need on your own two feet. And keeping it affordable relative to other even less densely populated cities. And I hear the excuses about places like San Francisco where they really don't have the land to expand. Welcome to Japan. Your excuses suck. Zone and invest better. But I wouldn't want to live there. They are way too conservative and thus obsessed with hierarchies and keeping people "in their place".
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