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by gjsman-1000 54 days ago
But does it matter?

If you write a program in Python or JavaScript, you have a terrible mental model for how that code is actually executed in machine code. It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem.

Even if you don't have a great mental model, now you have AI to identify the problems and generate an explanation of the structure for you.
3 comments
4ndrewl 54 days ago
No, but you have a great mental model of the interface between your problem domain and the code, which is where you can affect change.

Outsourcing that to an AI SaaS might be ok I guess. Given past form there's going to be a rug-pull/bait-and-switch moment and dividends to start paying out.

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groundzeros2015 54 days ago
The effect of JavaScript or python code is well defined - they have an excellent model of what it will do.

The performance - how that is executed on the machine is what you were referring to. “As if” is the key to optimization

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kibwen 54 days ago
> It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem.

For the past decade people have been clawing their eyes out over how sluggish their computers have become due to everything becoming a bloated Electron app. It's extremely relevant. Meanwhile, here you are seemingly trying to suggest that not only should everything be a bloated, inefficient mess, it should also be buggy and inscrutable, even moreso than it already is. The entire experience of using a computer is about to descend into a heretofore unimaginable nightmare, but hey, at least Jensen Huang got his bag.

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bluGill 54 days ago
That is the doom side. However AI has found and fixed a lot of security issues. I have personally used AI to improve my code speed, AI can analyze complex algorithms and figure out how to make them much faster in ways I can do as a developer, but it's a lot of work that I typically wouldn't do. Even just writing various targeted benchmarks to see where the problems really are in my code is something I can do, but would be so tedious I often would not bother. I can tell AI to do it and it will write those.

Only time will tell which version of the future we end up with. It could be good or bad and we will have to see.

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flyinglizard 54 days ago
In terms of runtime performance of applications, AI is a net win. You can easily remove abstractions like Electron, React, various libraries. Just let the AI write more code. You can even do the unthinkable and write desktop native again.
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