presses button; nothing happens
"Well see here! I wanted that button to do something!"
"Oh but it did! It wasted your time as well as mine!"
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Great! Software isn't bloated, convoluted, incomprehensible, fragile enough already!
How about... AI replaces government officials! A lot cheaper. Might actually get things right. And how could it fuck up any worse than what we have?
A lot. The answer is it could fuck things up a lot worse than what we have.
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Me: I need spec -- not just trust code Manager: You always make unnecessary demands, I'm replacing you AI: I would be happy to help you, if you could provide spec? Manager: god fuckin dammit
I honestly sometimes think to go into business myself just so I can write contracts that say "you will give us a fucking spec" and just keep billing while they fuck around not providing a spec
Button that does something? That’s too advanced for me, I’ll use a library
cries in left_pad
It's kind of astonishing how many people leaned on that library just to add fucking spaces to strings
It should be in the standard library anyway. Why the hell is it not?!
I mean yeah, I can write my own function to do the same thing and probably I've done it at some point in some coding exercise as a beginner, but this seems like such a common thing to use, it should be in the standard library of any sane language.
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Help, Debian has libbutton only in 1.4.3 and libdosomething is not in my repo. I compiled libdosomething from source, but now it needs libbutton >= 2.4.1 and compiling that version of libbutton fails, as my GCC and make are too old and incompatible!
I already tried it on my other PC, but that isn't based on glibc, which makes all these dependencies even worse...
Have you tried unplugging your computer, going out into the woods, and returning to monke?
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AI can't replace programmers right now, but I've said all through my software dev career that our ultimate goal is to eliminate our jobs. Software will eventually be able to understand human language and think of all the right questions to ask to turn "Customer wants a button that does something" into an actual spec that generates fully usable code. It's just a matter of time. Mocking AI based on what it currently can't do is like mocking airplanes because of what they couldn't do in the 1920s.
Or like mocking Moon colonization in 1970
I had a number of points to discuss, but they pale before this:
Software will eventually be able to understand human language
First, someone surely must have tried to code it, but I never heard of any system like that. Second and more important: anyone understands how we understand? And how the distance between understanding and communicating is covered? Someone? Anyone?
And before some smart person tries for the thousand's time this "but computers will get bettah" shit of argument: even with the whole task of putting it to code aside, we know shit about how we think, understand and speak, that's coming from me having Master's degree in linguistics
Yes, the main problem with developing AI is that we really don't understand how we think. Current AI doesn't understand anything, it just imitates human output by processing a vast amount of existing output. But we do know a lot more now about how we think, understand and speak than we did a hundred years ago, and as a linguist you know this work isn't standing still,. Compare it with genetics - 70 years ago we didn't even know about DNA, and now we can splice genes. The fact that there's still a lot of baseline work to do shouldn't cast doubt on the goal, should it?
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I just want to point out that this whole AI thing started with people not understanding how it works. I get your point although I think it's stumbling into progress rather than understanding that will be a method until we do.