I use LLMs at work without much thought by now. I'm also contributing a little bit to Sourcehut and keep my personal projects there.
While I'm not necessarily in the "LLMs are evil" camp, I find I respect this position a lot. I wish more people would do what they feel is right, even if that's going to result in a backlash from those who disagree.
When it comes to my personal projects, I realize I haven't really touched many of them in the LLM age. In a way, AI has made me uninterested in programming. This might actually be a nice demarcation line: keep my free range organic code on sourcehut and actively not use AI for my personal stuff. After all, LLMs (may) mostly help with speed (sometimes) - which was never the issue for the stuff I create "just because".
Screenshot and share functionality get massively overloaded on iOS, but it's not because a product person / designer lacks the necessary taste, vision or "courage". It's because the OS is not capable of composing apps well: "I want to X, but with Y". As a result, functionality like screenshots, sharing, clipboard get overloaded with all kinds of adhoc half-baked workflows to work around the single app mindset.
I kind of agree with what you're saying, in that screenshot and share functionality is increasingly overloaded with options and things that just don't make any sense in that context. I disagree that this isn't because a product designer lacks vision, Apple control the entire stack on iOS, and there's nothing stopping them from rethinking things so that "Share" isn't a weird synonym for "Junk drawer menu".
There is no justifiable reason that Safari's find in page option is under the share menu, hidden underneath a View More button. Finding within a page has nothing to do with sharing, and even if somehow a user guessed that it might be in that menu without searching the web for it, they're probably going to dismiss it because they haven't expanded the view more menu.
iOS and macOS are riddled with illogical decisions like this. The menu bar is an unusable mess of icons that things have added, a problem that Windows (kind of) solved about a decade ago by allowing me to select which icons appear by default. The Dock seems to choose at random whether an app remains pinned or not, with particular confusion brought by apps updating themselves. Shortcuts is a wonderful idea in principle while in practice anytime I try to do something with it some part is missing.
I used to be a huge proponent of macOS in particular, and I would like to be one again, but currently its incredibly hard to do that.
Totally agreed; I was talking from the POV of someone designing an iOS app. Apple could fix a lot of this jank with better design, individual apps less so.
If solutions come naturally to you in OOP, why not just roll with it?
Personally I find it easiest do design data flows: think about what we need in order to compute the result. The less I have to think about state the better. Functional patterns fall out and it feels simple and easy to me, so I do it. I'm way over the phase I thought that's somehow cooler than the OOP folks, however.
When you need a configuration step, cmake will actually save you a lot of time, especially if you work cross platform or even cross compile. I love to hate cmake as much as the next guy, and it would be hard to design a worse scripting language, but I'll take it any time over autoconf. Some of the newer tools may well be more convenient - I tried Bazel, and it sure wasn't (for me).
If you're happy to bake one config in a makefile, then cmake will do very little for you.
Oh absolutely. The wireless for gaming headsets isn’t Bluetooth either. If your argument is Bluetooth isn’t suitable for real time, I’m on board - I’d even go further and say Bluetooth isn’t suitable for anything other than fire and forget.
Gaming headsets are usually 2.4GHz wireless, and pro audio stuff is ~500-800MHz and the proper stuff requires a wireless license to use.
Yes. LLMs are search engines into the (latent) space or source code. Stuff you put into the context window is the "query". I've had some good results by minimizing the conversational aspect, and thinking in terms of shaping the context: asking the LLM to analyze relevant files, nor because I want the analysis, but because I want a good reading in the context. LLMs will work hard to stay in that "landscape", even with vague prompts. Often better than with weirdly specific or conflicting instructions.
But search engines are not a good interface when you already know what you want and need to specify it exactly.
See for example the new Windows start menu compared to the old-school run dialog – if I directly run "notepad", then I get always Notepad; but if I search for "notepad" then, after quite a bit of chugging and loading and layout shifting, I might get Notepad or I might get something from Bing or something entirely different at different times.
Probably true for many. When thinking about hard problems I'm usually not thinking in language, at least not the kind we speak between us humans, so it can be incredibly distracting if I have to "translate" back and forth while both thinking and communicating.
Java also targets an abstract machine model (JVM) - such statement really doesn't mean much.
Assembly is not about corresponding to exactly which gates open when in the CPU. It's just the human writable form of whatever the CPU ingests, whereas C is an early take on a language reasonable capable of expressing higher level ideas with less low-level noise.
I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...
>I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...
With genuine respect, I believe this type of insinuation is rarely productive.
Someone might still have silly opinions, even if they have been paid to write assembly for 8-24-64 bit cisc, risc, ordered and out of order ISAs, and maybe compilers too. Peace :)
Yes but someone might also have silly opinions from having no experience how production assembly actually looks, such as underestimating just how different working with that is to working in high-level languages like C and why such languages were quite revolutionary. :)
This should not be mistaken as appeal to authority, it is merely reasonable discrimination between those speaking from experience, and those forming opinions without experience.
If one believes those with experience has poorly informed opinions, they're always free to gain experience and associated perspective. They will then either have the fundamentals to properly push their viewpoint, or end up better understanding and aligning with the common viewpoint.
Yes and no, you can use c in situations where there's no "assembly", for instance when synthesizing FPGAs. You target flow graphs directly in that case IIRC.
sure, I was thinking of large OO cores. "Correspondd to the instructions the cpu runs and their observable order" is how I'd characterize C as well, but to each their own.
I have empathy for this having written compiler passes for 10ish years of my career. But as I've studied register renaming, speculative branch prediction and trace caches I would no longer agree with your last sentence. It's fine though, totally just an opinion.
When I was in third grade, I decided I want to make computer games to get more of them. Dad got me started with GW-Basic turtle graphics and I made pictures with them - usually non-functional title screens for my games.
At some point I had made a small space ship and was able to make it turn around with the wonderful angle command [1]. However, I could not figure out how to make it move "forward" regardless of the angle.
I was also attending an after hours computer graphics club, mostly about Deluxe Paint, taught by a 20-something student (who much later went on to found a GPU company and got acquihired by ATI/AMD). He would help me occasionally, and in this case he took a tiny slip of paper and wrote down a couple of lines about sin and cos. No questions, no explanations, no gatekeeping.
Just like that I internalized this foundational piece of trig - later when it arrived in school maths it was easy and obvious for me. I had a practical application, but even more I think was because it started as a need I had, and when given to me, felt like a gift and an enabler.
Still much later I studied Seymour Papert's pedagogy and understood I had lived it. I consider myself fortunate.
While I'm not necessarily in the "LLMs are evil" camp, I find I respect this position a lot. I wish more people would do what they feel is right, even if that's going to result in a backlash from those who disagree.
When it comes to my personal projects, I realize I haven't really touched many of them in the LLM age. In a way, AI has made me uninterested in programming. This might actually be a nice demarcation line: keep my free range organic code on sourcehut and actively not use AI for my personal stuff. After all, LLMs (may) mostly help with speed (sometimes) - which was never the issue for the stuff I create "just because".