Writing is pretty hard for a lot of people, maybe especially so if they are more non-verbal thinkers, and then doubly so again if one must write not in one's native language.
Depends on the writing. Writing a blog post or something is challenging because you want to have an engaging style. But I see people at work using LLMs to fill out tickets, which is the easiest thing in the world. It's just a plain description of things, it requires no skill at writing at all. It baffles me that people are using LLMs for something like that, which should take less than a minute of your time to fill out and will be more pleasant for the recipient than the slop the model produces.
Here I would maybe argue that the simplicity makes these kinds of tasks tedious (like doing taxes), so it also makes a lot of sense for people to want to just throw AI at it. Tedious, easy rote tasks can be much more unpleasant than engaging ones.
I think people massively over-rely on AI and I really worry about the consequences of this. But there is nothing baffling at all about the basic appeal, IMO.
I don't think I have to speculate why comments like yours get downvoted so much.
Anyway, I completely agree. Writing isn't something to be delegated.
The problem is not new with LLMs. Businesses have been delegating writing to idiots who don't really care for the entire history of business. Authors and musicians have traded their souls for inauthentic crowd-pleasing results for about as long.
No, the problem with LLMs is that people are all using the same generic models. This only further shows that the future of LLMs is locally trained and locally run. Personal LLMs on a personal computer. Business LLMs on-prem. We will continue see them flourish in ways that generate absolutely no money whatsoever on their own, but do add marginal value when combined with a heavy dose of human creativity.
All the clueless old farts that are still alive by this point will continue to lecture the rest of us with more condescending gee whiz "whaddyaknow" and "whodathunkit" nonsense. As if they've even had their finger on the pulse since the early 2000s.
while (i < cursors.len) {
if (actual_index < arr.items.len) { cursors[i] = .{...}; i += 1; }
else iteration.remove(i);
}
I think you have to be a special kind of person to call Rust "more readable."
The thing about Rust is that if you can appreciate zero-cost abstractions on iterators then the language feels like the only right way to program. But many programmers either don't use this sort of programming at all, or don't care if it has a cost in languages like JS, Python, Java, etc.
Personally I like Zig a lot because it feels like you're doing low-level programming but without having to program C which is... well, https://xkcd.com/918/
What confuses me is that for a long while we told people to not write their passwords on a sticky note, to not write them in plain text somewhere.
Then we introduce all these "security" mechanisms that make it literally impossible to recover an account without backup codes.
Where do you store the backup codes? The average person, if they store it at all, will store it on a plain text file or in a sticky note.
Except that this creates a much more brittle system. Systems are safe when they are routinely tested/used. If you routinely have to enter your password, you are aware you need it. If you don't need your password, and you never have to enter your backup codes, you won't feel the importance of them until you actually need them.
It's the whole "I have backups" vs. "the backups actually work" problem except it's pushed onto the users who have zero technical knowledge.
FWIW my break-the-glass actual use of backup codes is for access to my password manager.
Everything else which has ever given me a backup code... gets stored in a secure note in my password manager.
It is just another knowledge-based factor. It is one that they are reasonably sure you aren't spreading around the internet. It is one that the site gets to pick rather than the user. But in reality, they are a often just a way to try to reduce some support and identity verification costs.
The path to get to the password manager is the case where the backup codes truly matter, because without them there may not be a way for support to restore access. Those codes may be your only way of regaining the master encryption key.
But that also winds up being part of the trade-off of security vs user friendliness. Some password managers are way easier to get back into.
That's because those AI's were trained on existing "CSS tricks."
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
Oddly enough if the scraping is good, AI can find the CSS tricks in the wild. Not as applicable with other technologies but scrapable web is readable for AI much like how some of us old people learned html/css by looking at source of quality websites.
I think this assumes AI needs the same kinds of “tricks” humans do.
Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.
So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.
Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.
What low level code would that be? Position every element manually with JS and position: absolute? Flex and grid are the low level layout mechanics used for any responsive webapp. Even most native frameworks use the flexbox model.
no you still probably use layout algos but most variation on top of them in css is human preference v capability (Extra HTML Elements v Pseudo Elements etc).
>I'm Tired Boss
>I'm 30 this year, and computers don't have the same level of whimsy and excitement as they once had. When I was young everything was new and interesting, it felt like there was so much experimentation and innovation. Today the various desktop environments seem to have largely converged, sharing the same flat design language and icon styles. Customisation seems to have completely fallen by the wayside in favour of a more curated experience controlled by the desktop environment.
It's funny. I share the same thoughts but it sent me from Windows to Linux.
And I'm very, very tired as well. I wouldn't recommend you to install Windows, because Windows is spyware. But I wouldn't recommend you to install Linux, because Linux is crap.
You know what I would recommend instead?
Not use computers.
If there is a way to avoid them your whole life... just do that. Otherwise you'll spend the rest of your life having to deal with... you know... all of this.
The solution is probably legal, not technological.
We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.
If humanity's "solution" to AI is to go to the government of all institutions - the very thing we have hoped for the internet to overcome, for a century before its invention - then we'll truly have fallen into a poetic trap.
The opposite of one large unaccountable entity owning the internet is not a different one doing so.
To suppose that this next phase of human evolution can be "owned" at all is a bit of a stretch. These behemoths can threaten us with violence, and carry out those threats, but they can't stop radio waves or the use of language as expression. They can't remove knowledge form the universe or change change the laws of mathematics.
I'm not a heavy AI user but there are a couple of things I noticed trying to make copilot generate something for me from scratch.
The first is that having a single file with everything you have in mind is very useful. So I end up writing what the project is about, how the model is organized, what each button does, etc. This is good practice in general because writing down everything that the AI will have to consider forces you to consider edge cases before you program them. E.g. if you write "the detail pane shows the fields of the selected item," it makes you consider what should it show when there are no items, or if multiple selection is possible. As you can imagine, this file ends up a very long document even for a simple project because the goal is to pseudo-program everything and let the LLM translate it to an implementation.
Then it still gets things wrong about design, e.g. which pane goes left and which goes right, if you don't also provide an image that shows the layout.
And then, if you supply an exhausting amount of detail, the agent can generate more or less what you had in mind....... or rather, it can generate an OUTPUT that matches your specification from scratch.
The problem is that if there is something you failed to consider, and the AI makes an assumption there, you can end up with a fundamentally broken architecture that you will have to untangle yourself later. And at that point it's easier to write everything from scratch than to fix a pile of AI code that is based on a flawed design.
And it turns out that due to the "totem pole" way that software works, there are infinite places in code that a bad design decision can affect everything it touches.
A good example is how 2 components in a UI are bound to data. You can use events, a bus, state reactivity, etc. Personally I think the mediator pattern is the simplest way to handle GUIs. But an LLM is probably just going to use events for property bindings.
I don't think I have ever seen someone outside of tech saying this. It's always people working with the data-copying machines, never the people creating the data protected by the law, that want said laws gone.
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