Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
> if AI coded software works correctly, maybe it doesn't matter?
The problem isn't the amount of code, it's how fitting/unfitting the abstractions are. Wrong abstractions are bugs in waiting. If there's much code with wrong abstractions, future change becomes difficult.
Source: me, I've created many bad abstractions and they led to much pain...
Yeah. Its kind of strange - claude is great at some tasks, but it seems really rubbish at coming up with good abstractions a lot of the time. I've often caught it making a conceptual mistake (like "X cannot do Y") - then spending hundreds of lines working around an issue that doesn't actually exist.
Its also really bad at inventing and leaning on invariants. I make rules in my code all the time - "by the time we get to path X, we know Y and Z are true.". In aggregate, these invariants make code simpler and easier to reason about. But claude doesn't do that. It just kind of - slops through and adds bespoke "just in case" workarounds all over the place. Every time I read through code its written - without fail - I find bad design / architectural choices.
Maybe mythos will change this. But for now I've slowed way down on my claude code usage. You can't build a skyscraper on a foundation of mud.
Yeah, I have a contract project for a webapp/integration to legacy Excel tool with an API endpoint for exchanging data with Excel. Over time, I notice issues or need to add functionality in the data processing and hadn't been closely watching the code changes Claude Code made to the API as long as it worked as expected/tests passed.
When I eventually read through the current state of the upload processing code it was like an absurd tree of checks on checks on fallbacks on triple checks added in response to whatever bug I reported in a bizarrely additive way and could be massively simplified (which would also make it less brittle to edge cases that then demanded more checks and workarounds).
The other issue is that for the upload API, there is documentation but not for every little bug or edge case so each time the model "wakes up" and loads everything into context it sees that crazy web of checks and edge cases as the only source of truth for the API so is hesitant to touch anything unless 100% necessary which then leads to more conservative behavior of additive code which makes the problem worse over time.
Codex seems a bit better but I still have to guide it towards proper abstractions/refactors to avoid that piling on cruft effect.
I feel the original story contained in it the whole point of this one, and then some.
This did not add anything, just rephrased it so rather than humans viewed through the pov of aliens it's LLMs viewed through the pov of humans. Well, we are the humans, so surely we do not need to learn about this point of view?
It lets us consider the relativity of viewpoints. The point of the original isn’t just how humans might be viewed from the perspective of aliens. It’s that the apparent strangeness of something depends on the viewpoint and on expectations. The present story is not supposed to stand on its own like the original, it’s supposed to be considered in light of the original. In the original, thinking meat appears strange to the aliens because of their viewpoint and expectations. The present story thus points out by analogy that thinking LLMs might seem strange to us merely due to our viewpoint and expectations.
> reasonably assume that your experience is similar to mine
You could be the only conscious being in the universe and all of us just zombies: you have no way of knowing.
What's it like to be a monkey instead? Dog? Bat? Tree? We don't know.
No one's saying the graphics card is conscious. I could imagine the graphic cards could give rise to consciousness. But - crucially - I don't know. And neither do you.
You say you're conscious - where in you does the consciousness reside? Surely not the left pinky? What makes you you?
> If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me".
And the person reading the essay would ask their LLM for bullet points.
One wonders what the LLMs are for then, can't we just send each other bullet points directly? Must the bullet points be encoded as prose and then decoded again?
Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
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