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by Nathanba 457 days ago
well the only issue I have with that is that coding is already a fairly easy way to encode logic. Sure...writing Rust or C isn't easy but writing some memory managed code is so easy that I wonder whether we are helping ourselves by removing that much thinking from our lives. It's not quite the same optimization as building a machine so that we don't have to carry heavy stones ourselves. Now we are building a machine so we don't have to do heavy thinking ourselves. This isn't even specific to coding, lawyers essentially also encode logic into text form. What if lawyers in the future increasingly just don't bother understanding laws and just let an AI form the arguments?

I think there is a difference here for the future of humanity that has never happened before in our tool making history.
2 comments
alonsonic 457 days ago
> Now we are building a machine so we don't have to do heavy thinking ourselves.

There are a lot of innovations that helped us not do heavy thinking ourselves. Think calculators. We will just move to a higher level of magnitud problem to solve, software development is a means to an end, instead of thinking hard about coding we should be thinking hard about the problem being solved. That will be the future of the craft.

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Kye 457 days ago
Calculators are a good example of where letting too much knowledge slip can be an issue. So many are made by people with no grasp of order of operations or choosing data types. They could look it up, but they don't know they need to.

It's one of those problems that seems easy, but isn't. The issue seems to come out when we let an aid for process replace gaining the knowledge behind the process. You at least need to know what you don't know so you can develop an intuition for when outputs don't (or might not) make sense.

https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

(recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953)

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lupire 457 days ago
Complaining about "order of operations" is equivalent to saying Spanish speakers are ignorant because they don't know French.

It's especially silly because one thing calculators are known for is being inconsistent about order of operations between designs.

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namaria 457 days ago
Management has resented people capable of creating non trivial, novel and valuable software for several decades and trying to get LLMs to generate code for them is just the latest chapter in this power struggle.
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